Hidden hurt:

It takes hours to see glimpses of the pain Maya has endured over the years. She makes eye contact, pokes fun at herself and takes turns in conversation — things people with autism are generally known to have trouble doing. On a warm June day in London, dressed casually in a T-shirt and shorts, she looks like any other British 20-something. “You can see by meeting with me that I’m quite chatty and that people wouldn’t guess that I have Asperger’s,” she says.

Maya is proud of her accomplishments — and rightfully so. She excelled at school: She could read fluently by age 5 and began reading four or five books a week. She was lead violinist at her school, performing at the Barbican Centre in London, and can also play piano and viola. She taught herself to play the clarinet, and after 9 months of lessons, performed a Mozart concerto at her school.

But as the conversation turns more intimate, she and her mother reveal the agony that has formed the backdrop to her achievements. At 4, Maya had severe separation anxiety and screamed every time strangers entered her nursery school. Later, at her all-girls school, she sat by herself at playtime, and read everywhere, even on stage at a cousin’s raucous wedding. She struggled with small talk, regularly made social faux pas — blurting out the denouement of a mystery, or reciting divorce statistics at an engagement party — and rambled on about her interests so long that her mother devised a secret gesture, a tap on the watch, to signal her to stop.

Any small disruption in her routine — dinner on the table 10 minutes later than promised, a late appointment, her little brother sitting in her favorite chair — could ruin her week. (“It’s not something I like about myself,” Maya says. “I can’t help having this need for wanting everything to be the same — but I do.”) She rarely got a good night’s sleep and had debilitating nightmares. She turned down invitations to ‘aimless’ social activities such as shopping, and called other girls out when they flouted the school’s rules, turning would-be friends into enemies.

By the time she was 8, she was bullied so much at school that she became sick with anxiety every Sunday night. At 11, her parents finally switched schools, but she was bullied there as well — even on the 45-minute bus ride each way.

Looking for the common factor, Maya’s logical mind pinned the blame on herself rather than on the cruel social games of girlhood. “I thought: ‘Everything’s different — the school’s different, the people are different, yet the bullying is the same,’” she recalls. “Therefore, the only thing it can be is that something’s wrong with me.”

The bullying got violent and more vicious as she got older. She recalls one set of girls telling her that the world would be a better place if she weren’t in it, and that they felt really sorry for her parents. Ever honest herself, Maya believed them: “I won’t say things unless they’re true, so I thought, why would they?”

When she was about 12, Maya began secretly cutting herself. Like many girls with autism at this age, Maya was keenly aware of all the ways in which she was being excluded by her peers. She became intensely depressed, launching her long and dysfunctional relationship with the psychiatric establishment.

At 15, to keep herself occupied during the unstructured summer holidays, Maya began volunteering with boys who have autism — at first only because the organization was around the corner. She never made the connection that she might have something in common with them. She brought one of the young boys home to visit once, and still neither her father, a physician, nor her mother, a clinical virologist, picked up on any similarities.

“My picture of autistic was what this little boy was like — and that’s not what Maya’s like. He was nonverbal, disruptive,” her mother, Jennifer, says. “I would not have made the connection with all the unhappiness she experiences.”

The bullying stopped at 16 when Maya was moved into a new class at the school. But soon after, she became obsessed with controlling her weight. Like many other adolescent girls with autism, she developed an eating disorder. The way she sees it now, that preoccupation was an outgrowth of another aspect of her autism — her love of numbers. “I was obsessed with decreasing the number of calories I ingested, and the numbers on the scale going down,” she says. Anorexia also resonated with her perfectionistic streak. “It’s fine if it’s something like learning musical instruments,” she says. “It’s not so fine if you decide to starve yourself, because I wanted to do that to perfection as well.”

Over the next two years, Maya became “a master of disguise,” hiding her food and exercising in secret, even on a family safari in Kenya in July 2009. “You know what I remember about that trip? I remember that I gained 400 grams in two weeks; that’s what I remember,” Maya says.

Each accomplished target led to the next until at one point Maya, who is 5 feet 6.5 inches, weighed just under 44 kilos (about 97 pounds). “The anorexia has been, from my perspective, possibly the most difficult thing to cope with, out of all the things we have gone through,” says her mother Jennifer.

In August 2009, relenting to her parents’ pleas, Maya went back to her first psychiatrist. She emerged with six diagnoses, including anorexia, generalized anxiety, bipolar disorder and agoraphobia.

In October of that year, despite the ongoing anorexia, Maya’s parents drove her to Cambridge University, her life’s dream until that point, crying all the way home because they were so worried about her. At first, Maya seemed to thrive — she enjoyed her classes, and made friends who were “quirky” like her, her mother says. But soon, she stopped talking about her new friends, and when her friends would knock on her door, she simply wouldn’t answer. The depression that had come and gone since she was 11 resurfaced. “I didn’t want to socialize, I didn’t want to see anyone, it was too difficult,” Maya says. She also began taking overdoses of her meds, enough to get her on the radar of the local mental health team.

Maya’s second year was the same. She continued to struggle with anorexia: “It clocked that my goal was to weigh nothing.” Then one day, her counselor at Cambridge pointed out that even if she had no fat or muscle, she would still carry the weight of her bones. “Therefore, I could never weigh nothing, even if I was dead,” Maya recalls thinking. As is the case for many people with autism, facts hold great power for Maya. The logic of the counselor’s statement got through to her like no amount of pleading from her parents had. “I realized that what I was doing was completely pointless. I was never going to get where I wanted to.”

The relief from the decision to stop controlling her weight carried Maya through her second year. The family once again went on an exotic holiday, this time to the Galapagos, and Maya seemed at peace. She swam with the dolphins — and she ate.

But back at Cambridge for her final year, she again sank into a deep depression. Her mother, who had rented an apartment in town and slept on Maya’s floor one or two nights a week, urged her to leave university so she could focus on feeling better. Quitting went completely against the grain for Maya. “I don’t give up on things,” she says. “I hate it when plans change. My plan was to finish school, go to university, graduate. My plan was not to get so depressed that I had to leave university.” But four weeks into the term, after getting no help from a university psychiatrist (the one who allotted her seven minutes), she made the difficult decision to leave.

Far from making her feel better, however, leaving Cambridge made her feel as if she had no future. Overweight and sluggish, she slept through her days at her parents’ house. On the 29th of December, after going out to lunch (which Maya finds stressful), cooking her family dinner (which she loves to do), and a pleasant and unremarkable night of watching television with them, Maya took more than 30 tablets of paracetamol (acetaminophen), about 15 codeine pills and all the quetiapine she could lay her hands on.

“Nothing was getting better,” she says. “I just gave up; I’d had enough of life.”

A short while after taking the pills, Maya panicked that she was still awake, and that she might begin to vomit, something she dreads. She woke her parents and, within a half hour of arriving at the emergency room, fell into a coma.