In this episode, we chat to autistic health professional and researcher, Dr Mary Doherty. Mary has driven research to support autistic patients and healthcare workers. We find out about her work and her experience as an autistic autism researcher.
In this episode, we chat to autistic health professional and researcher, Dr Mary Doherty. Mary has driven research to support autistic patients and healthcare workers. We find out about her work and her experience as an autistic autism researcher.
Welcome to the Middletown Podcast. I'm Kat Hughes, I'm a researcher at Middletown and I'm also autistic. In this episode I chat to the powerhouse of autism research, that is, dr Mary Doherty. Mary is an anesthesiologist who was diagnosed as autistic in adulthood. Since then, she's thrown herself into the world of autism research, focusing on healthcare. She's built a community of autistic health professionals and is making change for autistic people working in healthcare and for patients.
Speaker 1:
I should say that we do talk about mental health challenges and difficulties within the healthcare system, which can be hard to hear about. So check how you're feeling before you listen. I should also say that this was a cursed recording the internet. Gods were not smiling on us and we had to keep restarting our conversation. It might sound a little disjointed because of that, but I know I still enjoyed our chat and I hope you do too. So, mary, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Um, you're an experienced anesthetist and you've also become a very experienced and very respected researcher, so I'm wondering what led you to make that leap into research.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so this all started for me with the, as I Am, clannachilty Autism Friendly Town project and I was asked to do some training for the local health care providers.
Speaker 2:
I'd never done this before, so I wanted to just make sure that the training I would give would be based on the just based on the experiences of autistic people, so not just my own experience and not just my own, my own knowledge or experience.
Speaker 2:
And so I started doing some investigation and I did some focus group work and I did some surveys and realized that so many of the health care issues that were common to so many autistic people things that I had experienced myself, that I didn't realize were related to being autistic, and things like not being able to use the phone or just avoiding making making appointments because it meant using the phone, and things like that not being able to follow up on um appointments, not managing to change appointments and you know, um, things like that the sort of thing that I had been conscious of and indeed conscious of quite a degree of shame around, really, um, because I just didn't understand that this was a part of this is associated with being autistic.
Speaker 2:
Um, and then I realized that the outcomes for autistic people in terms of health care were, you know, really not good um, and I could just see those links and I think, as, as an autistic doctor, just being in that sort of unique position where I could straddle both communities, both um and uh, maybe just be in a position to, to make a difference, to help and particularly in terms of knowledge and training, uh, with our colleagues. So that's what started the process, um, and yeah, as I look back, I wish, I wish I'd got into it an awful lot sooner, I wish I had, you know, done, done this way earlier in my career. But you know, it's never too late.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and goodness knows you've made up for lost time. You're a very busy woman.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that is true. But you know an autistic person with a special interest. Hey, this is what you get.
Speaker 1:
Exactly. It's fantastic and then. So you've been very public about the fact that you are autistic and you're a doctor and you've sort of discussed your own experience, alongside the research that you've done and the experiences of your participants. Were you nervous to talk publicly about your own autistic identity?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, oh gosh, yeah, initially, absolutely, and mostly, I think, because I was specifically advised by several consultants, several medical consultants in various specialties you know that I really should not do this, I shouldn't talk about it. And you know, even now, even with the impact that we've had not just myself but colleagues, you know, in Autistic Doctors International, even with that, I know that quite a few colleagues would feel that, you know, maybe I really should not be talking about this and it's bizarre, it's almost like it's bringing the profession into disrepute. It's ridiculous. But there is that, that idea out there that you can't be autistic and be a doctor. Um, at least you know, yeah, you know, that that is that is still, unfortunately, very pervasive in health care. Um, and while we are working hard to challenge that, um, it it still is there.
Speaker 2:
But the way I looked at it, I mean, being open about being autistic was undoubtedly beneficial for me because it meant that I spent less energy masking. And also, you know, my diagnosis came about after my son was identified. And you know, I mean I have two neurodivergent kids and they're amazing. I'm so proud of them. I'm certainly not, you know, like, not ashamed of them. You know being neurodivergent, why should I be about myself? Um, I'll be honest, there was a bit of a journey to get to that point, you know, because there's so much negativity and you know there's so much stigma around autism. Um, that, and you know, initially it was quite difficult, but, you know, no, it was absolutely the right thing to do. And then, particularly when I saw members, members that joined us in Autistic Doctors International, in significant difficulty because of not being understood, not being able to get the accommodations that they needed, and then just realizing that, well, you know, I can't let people needlessly lose careers when you know I can potentially help, and that's really what drove me towards talking about this publicly.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, and you mentioned Autistic Doctors International, which is sort of a community that you've built up and brought lots of other people to build it up with you now because it's gotten so big of autistic medical professionals, and what was your hope when you were initially sort of putting together the idea for that?
Speaker 2:
Prior to setting up the organisation, I'd been involved in the autistic community for a good number of years and, interestingly, I didn't tell many people that I was a doctor for quite some time. I saw the need for a peer support group for autistic doctors. There were at that time a couple of organizations for neurodivergent healthcare professionals and I just found that even within that space we you know, the numbers of doctors who are identifying as autistic even in that space is quite low at the time and I just felt that we needed our own space, but also as well as peer support, I had. I always wanted ADI to be more than just peer support. I saw the potential for being able to harness our collective knowledge around autism in healthcare and just use that for the benefit of the autistic community.
Speaker 2:
I was really conscious of how little knowledge of autism so many of my medical colleagues had. I mean, I had no training. You know, I remember absolutely nothing about autism, certainly not outside of pediatrics. Even in anesthesia we talk about autism in the context of, you know, premedication or intellectual disabilities. So there's very, there was very little awareness, very little training and so much of the knowledge is just simply wrong. It's completely wrong. It is, you know, yeah, it's just completely wrong and I wanted a way to to challenge that, that really, and to change that. But equally, I was very conscious that just the fact that we were autistic, it's this epistemic injustice idea, that just the very fact of being autistic, we don't have the same sort of credibility amongst our peers that non-autistic medical, you know medical colleagues would have, and I was very conscious of that from the beginning. So I was very keen to um build up a, you know, a credible organization, um, that would be taken seriously really, and the the way to do that was through, um research and, you know, publications in the medical literature and because that's the only way things change in health care is data and, you know, peer-reviewed publications, and so I really wanted us to go down that road, um, and then there was the advocacy side as well.
Speaker 2:
There was, you know, so many of our colleagues, and we're running into difficulties that were really easily solved if you were able to just put, you know, look at a situation through an autistic or a neurodivergent lens, you know, and we did some work around around that area as well, um, so it was all of that right from the beginning. It was always much more than just a peer support group, but the peer support aspect has been it's just been amazing, it's. It's so wonderful, it's so validating, it's been life changing, you know, and indeed life saving for some of our members. You know, it's been really, really important. And then we published about our experiences last year and we had a paper in Frontiers in Psychiatry which is open access, so anybody listening can can look it up and have a listen, or can look it up and have a read. Anybody listening can can can look it up and have a listen, or can look it up and have a read.
Speaker 2:
Um, we it's the experiences of autistic doctors, um, and we found some really interesting, interesting things which you might talk about in a bit, um, but yeah, it was always. It was always more than more than peer support.
Speaker 1:
And do you know how many members there are now?
Speaker 2:
Um, at this stage we've about I think it's probably probably it's bit fluid, but I think probably about 900 in the doctor's group. We also have and that's international we also have an associated group for autistic medical students and there's over 200 in that and we're just getting so many membership requests daily. We've had to expand the membership team. So there's a few people working on, but we do have a bit of a backlog at the moment.
