Masking is the word that changed the conversation, and Devon Price did more than most to put it there. An American social psychologist with a doctorate from Loyola University Chicago, Price has taught at that university’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies since 2012 and writes from inside the subject, being autistic and identified as such only in adulthood, after years of doing exactly what the books go on to describe.
The writing began online, on Medium and in Psychology Today, where an essay arguing that laziness does not exist found an enormous readership and became a book of that title in 2021. Unmasking Autism followed in 2022, then Unlearning Shame in 2024 and Unmasking for Life in 2025.
The through line across all of them is a refusal of the deficit model. Price treats autistic traits, exhaustion and shame as reasonable responses to environments built for other people, and points the argument outwards, at workplaces and social scripts, rather than at the reader.
9 hours and 51 minutes
