With support from Elizabeth Blackwell Institute and funding from Rosetrees Trust and Prudence Trust, Laura Hull, is researching masking in autistic young people. As part of her project she is developing an intervention to support neurodivergent young people who camouflage.

Laura, who based in Bristol Medical School, Population Health Sciences, explains: “The evidence base for how camouflaging impacts mental health issues for neurodivergent people is still limited, and there has been little research into camouflaging beyond autism. As a result, there are no evidence-based interventions to support neurodivergent young people who camouflage, even though young people and clinicians have expressed a need for support in this area.

Laura’s research explores predictors of mental health problems in autistic young people and ways to measure masking. It is co-produced by the ‘Masking Research Collective’, a group including autistic young people, autistic adults, parents of autistic children, educational specialists, clinicians working with autistic children, and autism researchers. 

The group has co-developed a new tool to measure masking/camouflaging in children. The ‘Children’s Masking Questionnaire’ includes questions for both parents and children themselves to answer about the child’s masking strategies across different situations. The tool is currently being evaluated in clinical and school settings to determine how useful it will be in identifying autistic children’s support needs. 

Laura has also conducted research in collaboration with researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, into suicide rates in autistic people. The findings (not yet published) show that autistic people are at substantially higher risk of dying from suicide if they have a history of self-harm, compared to non-autistic people. This suggests that identifying autistic people who have self-harmed, and offering them greater support, might reduce the disproportionately high rates of suicide amongst autistic people. 

A recent paper titled “Just Ask What Support We Need”: Autistic Adults' Feedback on Social Skills Training from Laura and colleagues at the University of Bristol explored autistic adults’ perceptions of receiving Social Skills Training (a common type of support involving teaching social skills to autistic people). Participants had recommendations for making the training as personalised and engaging as possible, and emphasised that current training isn’t always relevant to everyday life. Some participants also suggested that everyone (whether or not they are autistic) would benefit from learning more about how to communicate with other people.