When Distress Is Misread: Autistic Credibility and the Politics of Interpretation

Misinformation about autism is often understood as a problem of inaccurate facts, stereotypes or public misunderstanding. This essay argues that misinformation also operates through dominant interpretive frameworks that shape how autistic experiences are recognised, understood and believed. Drawing on participatory narrative research with autistic women, the essay examines how institutions frequently reinterpret experiences of harm as personality dysfunction, emotional instability or individual deficit rather than recognising them as relational and socially produced. Autistic forms of communication and storytelling are often treated as signs of unreliability, shaping whose accounts are considered credible within clinical and institutional contexts. By reframing these patterns of misinterpretation as structural misinformation, the essay shows how credibility becomes unevenly distributed while also highlighting how autistic women resist these distortions by reclaiming authority over their own experiences.