Baron-Cohen, Happé and others caution, however, that in some cases, women may have learned to cope enough that they don’t actually need a diagnosis.

“If they’re coping, do they want to think of themselves or for others to think about them in that way?” asks Happé. “Then it becomes a big ethical issue, doesn’t it?”

* * *

In Maya’s case, learning she is on the spectrum took some getting used to. But she says she’s very glad to have an explanation now for all of the difficulties she thought were unrelated to one another.

After she came out of her coma, Maya spent a week in intensive care and nine weeks in a terrifying psychiatric unit with severely ill patients. One threw a boiling cup of tea at a nurse, and another head-butted a nurse so hard that her teeth went through her lip. In the early days, Maya deliberately burned her arm with the hot water available for making tea, and threatened to try to kill herself again as soon as she got home.

But as the weeks passed, she started to feel better. She was given an antidepressant that seemed to work for her, and she lost the weight she had gained when taking quetiapine. She met a young woman who has since become her best friend. Then, several months after she left the hospital, she got the autism diagnosis.

After her disastrous encounter with the psychiatrist who decided she has paranoid personality disorder, a doctor who had been kind to her while in the hospital offered to take Maya back as a patient. It was only when Maya began complaining about the ridiculousness of offices being closed on “bank holiday” Mondays (“Weekdays are for work!”) and how overwhelming it was for her to walk down a noisy street that the psychiatrist added up the signs to arrive at the correct diagnosis.

A full 18 months after Maya came home from the hospital, she went back to Cambridge for her final year and switched her focus from genetics to psychology and cognitive neuroscience. She burst into Baron-Cohen’s office at Cambridge one day while he was in a meeting, announced that she has Asperger syndrome, and asked if he would supervise her dissertation on mirror neurons and autism. He agreed. She still has bouts of depression, but her stay in the hospital taught her how and when to ask for help. “When I came out of hospital, I basically lived along the lines of ‘if it’s stressful, don’t bother doing it,’” she says. “Nothing is worth getting that depressed.”

The university accommodated her diagnosis, allowing her to take her exams alone and with breaks in between, and in June 2014, despite some ongoing depression, Maya graduated from Cambridge. “If you can go in two-and-a-half years from being locked in a psych unit to graduating from Cambridge, you can do anything, really,” Maya says.

After graduation, Maya worked for a year at a local primary school, supporting boys with autism in the class. She didn’t tell the school she has autism, and successfully held down the job all year. She enjoyed it so much, in fact, that last month she began training to be a primary-school teacher, specializing in mathematics, and plans to either teach mathematics or work with special-needs children. And this time, Maya revealed on the application form that she has autism. “She agonized about it a lot; she didn’t want people to prejudge her,” says Jennifer.