A 19-year-old girl on TikTok using the platform for spreading awareness about autism.
Paige Layle who has autism is receiving praises after she went viral on TikTok for explaining the disorder in women.
She posted a four-part video series on TikTok, explaining how autism affects females after she became frustrated that so many made fun of the disorder.
“I decided to start making videos because of an audio that was going all over TikTok that was making fun of autistic people. I hated it. I feel like many people don’t understand how many people are autistic,” she said.
Layle spoke about how girls are diagnosed with autism a lot later than boys usually are because they’re better at “masking” their traits. “I get a lot that because I’m good looking, nothing can be wrong with me so I want to show that mental illness is diverse,” Layle told BuzzFeed.
“I was 15 when I got diagnosed, and that’s considered early for a girl,” she said in the video. “I have a guy friend who’s autistic and he was 2 when he got diagnosed.”
“I was an urgent case to talk to a special child psychiatrist who diagnosed me at the time with anxiety, depression, OCD, and autism,” she said.
“The diagnosis has changed my life for the better. I can understand myself so much better, which is so beneficial for social situations, school/work life, and most importantly being alone. I can now function alone and understand my emotions better.”
“It’s also very common for girls with autism to have other mental disabilities or mental disorders as well. I have seven. I am overly social, I give way too much eye contact, I’m really good in social situations,” Layle explained, noting that many girls with autism present these traits too.”
“All of these mental illnesses stem from having autism, but OCD, anxiety, and depression are very, very common, especially in girls,” she explained.
In one of her videos, she concerned about the terms of high functioning and low functioning. “Get high functioning and low functioning out of your vocabulary,” she said. “High functioning is basically a label that you can use to be like, ‘Oh, your autism doesn’t affect me that much.”
“When doctors were studying autism, they only studied males,” she explained in the clip. “This makes it harder for anyone else to be diagnosed because everything is based off the male brain.”
Since posting the four TikTok videos, her post has garnered millions of views and she also uploaded two other videos on her page, one discussing OCD while the other is titled “autism diaries.”
“I find the videos help me a lot and it seems to be helping even just a few people out there and I love that,” she wrote on Instagram in November. “Thanks guys. It’s overwhelming to think of who cares about me when I thought no one did.”
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