09/17/2026
In 2000-2001 I was a Social Work intern at the LSU Student Health Center, and I spent most of that year privately certain that everyone else had been handed a manual I never received.
On Wednesday I was back in that same building, at the front of the room this time, teaching this year's counseling interns about late-diagnosed autistic women. I didn't find out I was autistic until I was 46, and none of my supervisors back then had any idea either, which isn't a criticism of them so much as the entire point of the talk.
What I wanted those interns to understand is the same thing I'd want you to know if you've spent thirty years collecting labels that never quite fit.
For many late-diagnosed autistic women, the anxiety diagnosis, the recurrent depression, the eating disorder, the bipolar diagnosis, Borderline Personality Disorder, or OCD may have been part of the explanation, or completely wrong. I’ve collected a few myself: GAD, MDD, PTSD, ADHD.
Then there's the masking, which is what keeps the full picture out of focus, or worse, invisible. You hide your sensory issues and your stims. You rehearse conversations in the car. You script the phone call before you make it, you hold yourself together for the precise fifty minutes somebody is watching, and then you go home and sleep or doom-scroll for hours, wondering why you're so exhausted when you didn't really "do" anything. You perform competence so convincingly that nobody can see what it does to you, and after a while, you may not see it either until you burn out.
So the thing I most wanted those interns to leave with is that identification isn't the prerequisite for the help. You can adapt the work you do in therapy for a woman who has no diagnosis, no label and no certainty about any of it, and you can start doing it in the next session.
Thank you to the team at LSU Mental Health Services for having me back. My 24 year-old intern self couldn't have imagined coming back as a "seasoned" professional to teach interns who were born right around the time I was on the other side of the podium in that very same room.
If you're a clinician with someone on your caseload you can't quite figure out, I'm glad to be a consult call. And if you read this and recognized yourself, I offer a free 15-minute consultation you can book online. I'm in Baton Rouge in person and I see clients by telehealth across Louisiana, Florida and Virginia. I screen for autism, I don't diagnose it, but I'm happy to refer you to some great clinicians who do.
amandamorristherapy.com
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