Karista’s founder said the mothers seeking help were often undiagnosed themselves

The founder and chief executive of Karista gave the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne a picture of who asks for help when a child is identified as autistic. Karista is a technology company that connects people with disability to service providers, and its founder said it had taken over 70,000 requests, close to 80,000, from autistic people and mainly their parents. Mostly, the founder said, it is mums who come to Karista, for children diagnosed fairly early, and the children are generally about six, seven or eight when they come in. And “usually something’s happened at school”.

The finding the founder offered later in the session was about the mothers themselves. Asked how Karista brings lived experience into its design, the founder said the team talks to every person who submits a request. What the company discovered early, the founder said, was that while it is usually the mother making the request, those mothers are usually undiagnosed neurodivergent people. Karista had to work through that carefully, and the way it did so was to record new feedback in every conversation and to sit down as a team, in the office, to talk it through.