I-RAP
Improving Recognition and Understanding of Autism and Personality Disorder
Why This Study Matters
We realised there was no research looking in-depth at people’s lived experience of their journey from a personality disorder diagnosis to realising they were autistic.
We wanted to find out, in people’s own words:
What barriers they had encountered to realising they were autistic and to having their autism recognised by mental health services
What had helped them along the way
How their diagnostic journey had impacted them
We also wanted to critically evaluate commonly used screening measures for autism and personality disorder and uncover any flaws in how useful they are for distinguishing one diagnosis from another.
Finally, we realised there was very little research looking in-depth at similarities and differences in emotions, behaviour, cognition, identity and interpersonal interactions amongst autistic people and people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and we wanted to investigate this further.
Throughout the research, we focused on the experiences of women and people assigned female at birth as we knew that this group are more likely to be given a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, alongside experiencing challenges in accurate diagnosis of autism. We hoped that the information we gathered would help to increase accurate recognition of autism and prevent misdiagnosis of autism as personality disorder.
You can find out more detailed information about "What did we do", here.
- I-RAP Team
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