Dear Professor Baron-Cohen,

I’m wondering if you gave any thought to the emails where I was describing my diagnostician’s, methods. I think, being a researcher, you should find it interesting and worth investigating.

There’s another story for you (if you think certain autistics don’t need any support). When I was working for the company called Home Group, that is paid by government to provide support for people with mental health problems, I was being badly bullied by a colleague. That was around the time I realised I’m autistic, and being autistic, I naively thought that diagnosis will protect me so I went to GP and asked for referral. Later on I asked the diagnostic centre to bring my diagnosis forward due to work situation and they said yes!
Again, for me it was like saying that diagnosis will protect me because otherwise why would they let me jump the queue?

However, the bulling only intensified so I finally handed in my notice and took them to employment tribunal. Home Group claimed in their response that my diagnosis was private and they paid for it, through AXA occupational health.
And only AXA doesn’t even have my name on their records (please find attached).

When I realised it means that there were fabricated documents on my file that were being used against me every time I tried to access support from higher management, I couldn’t cope and finally started hallucinating. I spent 4 months at the time in psychiatric hospital, developed PTSD, was unable to work for around 9 months and had a suicide attempt.

I could have won, as Home Group provided me with evidence against themselves, and yet I was unable to do anything with it and had to drop my claim to focus on recovery. I was scared of them, and still I’m scared now. But I know, if I don’t reveal their name at some point people would think that my story is made up.

And I always wanted to use it to be heard and make people understand that no matter how high functioning we are, we do need support. So I will publish this email on my blog now under Status quo category. Happy reading for both of you.

And I’d like to remind Mr Henderson here that his ticket to contact me directly expired on 13th of July. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up with yet another psychotic episode as a result of sending this but at least I’ll be true to myself.

I suppose Mr Henderson can visit me in psychiatric hospital, as long as the visit is fully supervised.

Kind regards,

Magda Regula