Anaesthetist, Mum, Autistic, ADHD & Tics. Founder @DoctorsAutistic Clinical Associate Professor @UCDMedicine #NeurodiversityInMedicine

Ireland
Joined September 2018
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
Zero. I read it three times to be sure. For five straight years, not one young woman in England has died of cervical cancer. 🧵
22
68
4
758
120,613
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
A moving and important read in Psychiatric News. Dr. Milissa L. Kaufman, a leading expert in trauma programs, shares her personal journey of diagnosis and full recovery from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) during her residency. Dr. Kaufman’s story is a vital correction to sensationalized misrepresentations. She describes DID not as a dramatic spectacle, but as a subtle, internal posttraumatic developmental disruption characterized by memory gaps, depersonalization, and derealization. By bringing her lived experience to light, she provides invaluable psychobiological context and models the kind of authenticity our field needs to dismantle stigma. High-level clinical expertise and personal courage @PsychiatricNews Full piece here: psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.… #MentalHealth #Trauma #Psychiatry #DID #DissociativeIdentityDisorder
3
20
1
63
3,463
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
My INSAR keynote recording is now available: vimeo.com/1189802746?fl=pl&f…
1
3
11
998
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
Controversial opinion here, but Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome certainly exists and is probably grossly underdiagnosed.
65
210
35
1,133
121,460
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
Viruses and Joint and Tendon Pain You had a cold two weeks ago. Nothing serious. But now your knee hurts more than it has in months. Your achilles is flaring. Your easy run felt like a half-marathon. You didn't do anything wrong. Here's what's actually happening...
99
408
59
2,494
600,734
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
Sometimes, quiet people make key points with brevity and impact. @mohanbhat101 does that in this short letter to the editor in one of the world’s premier medical journals @Nature Autism in older adults: the health system must recognize its effects nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
6
17
732
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
There’s a mom at our school drop-off. Messy bun, always three minutes late, kids usually eating dry cereal out of a Ziploc. The "Pinterest moms" always whispered about her. I honestly felt a little bad for her. Then one day at the playground, my neurodivergent son had a massive, violent sensory meltdown. I’m sitting in the dirt, crying, totally paralyzed. The "perfect" moms just stared and pulled their kids away. Suddenly, she’s there. The messy mom. She drops her giant bag, sits right in the dirt next to us, pulls a heavy sensory toy out of her purse, and calmly shields my son from the crowd. No panic. No judgment. He regulated in three minutes. I was speechless. We had coffee after. She told me her house is a disaster and she has severe ADHD, but she knows exactly what a nervous system collapse looks like. I asked her how she deals with the judgmental stares from the other moms. She took a sip of her cold coffee and said: "Perfect moms know how to bake organic muffins. Chaotic moms know how to survive the trenches." Every time I see her running late now, I just smile. Girls, be like the messy mom. Stop apologizing for your chaos.
261
3,114
106
40,513
1,357,110
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
"Is autism a disorder? Is it just a difference?" 🧐 Disability. The word you are almost certainly looking for is disability. Autism is a disability.
29
582
7
4,021
44,513
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
🗞️🗞️NEW PAPER🗞️🗞️ Congrats @auti_medic23! The experiences of autistic medical students in relation to seeking and receiving online support “It gave me a lot of courage… I felt a sense of… belonging somewhere” Read free: journals.plos.org/plosone/ar… @BSMSMedSchool #MedEd
5
10
770
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
The cover of the Lancet. It says it all.
603
9,294
326
29,224
823,990
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
Published today in the international journal of nursing “Perhaps the most significant omission in the clinical and academic discourse on BPD is the failure to acknowledge that the diagnosis itself generates tremendous harm.” onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
9
20
3
51
4,602
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
In this week’s Send for Help — my SEND agony aunt column in The Times — I argue we’re not seeing overdiagnosis, but decades of underdiagnosis finally catching up. thetimes.com/life-style/pare…
2
10
1
32
2,952
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
Replying to @AutisticDoctor
Compelling findings, illuminating! What’s the antidote to shame? Finding others who accept you, “shameful” parts and all, when you are ready to shine a light on who you really are 💡
1
1
381
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
Nora Keegan was not trying to change public health policy. She was just paying attention. In elementary school in Calgary, she noticed something adults kept dismissing. Children rushing out of public restrooms. Hands clamped over their ears. Faces tense. Complaints whispered between friends. It hurts my ears. She felt it too. After using hand dryers, her ears rang. The sound lingered. Adults brushed it off. They are just loud. That is what machines do. But Nora kept wondering why children reacted so strongly. And more importantly, why no one was measuring it. In fifth grade, she decided to find out. With the help of her parents, both physicians, she turned curiosity into research. She borrowed professional sound equipment. She designed an experiment. And then she went where the problem lived. Public bathrooms. Over two years, she visited forty four restrooms across Alberta. Libraries. Restaurants. Schools. She took eight hundred and eighty measurements. She measured at adult height. Then she crouched to measure at child height. She tested distance. Position. Airflow. Again and again. What she found was impossible to ignore. Many high speed hand dryers exceeded one hundred decibels at a child’s ear level. Some reached levels comparable to emergency sirens. Levels that medical authorities already prohibit in children’s toys because of the risk of hearing damage. Children were not imagining the pain. They were standing closer to the source. Their ears were smaller. And the sound hitting them was stronger than what adults experienced. Manufacturers claimed their machines were safe. Nora’s data showed real world conditions told a different story. And she did not stop there. Still in middle school, she began designing a noise reduction filter. A simple modification that lowered sound output by more than ten decibels. Proof that the problem was not inevitable. Then she did something most adults never do. She wrote a scientific paper. Her first submission was rejected. So she revised. She corrected. She tried again. In June 2019, Paediatrics and Child Health published her study. Its title was direct and impossible to dismiss. Children who say hand dryers hurt my ears are correct. She was thirteen years old. Health professionals paid attention. Researchers cited her work. Parents shared it. Manufacturers requested meetings. All because a child trusted her own experience enough to test it. Nora did not raise her voice. She measured. She documented. She proved. And in doing so, she reminded the world of something simple and easily forgotten. Sometimes the smallest voices are describing the biggest problems. You just have to listen.
309
5,418
300
33,663
1,732,530
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
Autistic inertia.
14
495
55
2,182
107,831
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
In communication with non-autistics, autistics "are constantly on high alert, overthinking how their words might be misinterpreted" & "try to read between the lines, which is tiring & can lead to speaking less or feeling less confident" sciencedirect.com/science/ar… mixed methods study
1
12
4
24
2,895
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
🗞️NEW PAPER🗞️ Proud of @Joyy_e_keenan! Autistic doctors transitioning into practice “I think medicine is really bad at times for insinuating that a certain sort of person is what they’re expecting to see” Read: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.… @BSMSMedSchool #MedEd #Neurodiversity
4
1
3
970
Mary Doherty 🏳️‍🌈 retweeted
Please apply for this fully funded PhD Scholarship in Autism & Addiction Research at the Autism Research Centre ⁦@ARC_Cambridge⁩ in Cambridge University. A chance to join a friendly research culture & make a real difference to autistic people’s lives cam.ac.uk/jobs/phd-studentsh…
3
62
2
107
9,851