Camouflaging and the CAT-Q (Quick Read)

Full version: What Camouflaging Actually Is, and What Your CAT-Q Score Can and Cannot Tell You

Camouflaging comes in three kinds, and they cost different things.

Compensation is active production: scripts, rehearsal, borrowed phrases, studied expressions. Masking is suppression: forced eye contact and sat-on stims. Assimilation is the felt cost of doing either: the performing-not-participating feeling and the exhaustion that does not match the event.

The CAT-Q measures how much you camouflage and nothing else.

Twenty-five items, three subscales, published by Laura Hull and colleagues in 2019 and built from autistic adults' own accounts. It has good psychometrics, but it was not designed as an autism screener and the authors did not present it as one.

The cutoff of 100 is not in the paper.

It circulates widely anyway. What the validation paper reports is group means (roughly 124 for autistic adults and 97 for non-autistic adults) from two overlapping distributions. A line drawn through overlapping curves only sorts scores.

Non-autistic people score high for ordinary reasons.

Social anxiety. A childhood where reading the room was a safety requirement. Being visibly different somewhere that punishes it. A job where managing your presentation is part of the work.

The subscale profile is the useful part.

Where your cost is concentrated tells you what would help, which a total score cannot.

A high compensation score explains why assessment missed you.

If you have been told you seem too socially capable to be autistic, that score is an account of the work that produced the impression.

You can take the CAT-Q here.

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