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Advice for neurodivergent clinicians began with treating burnout as an environment problem
In short
Asked at Think Autism Sydney in 2025 what they would tell neurodivergent people entering mental health work, three practitioners spoke about burnout, saying no, schemas and lowering the bar to safe enough.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
The first piece of advice given to neurodivergent people entering mental health work was that burnout is inevitable. In the same answer, the panellist who gave it said it is not a problem with the practitioner. Closing the neurodivergent health practitioners panel at Think Autism Sydney in May 2025, Dr Naomi Malone, who led the session, asked the panel what they would tell a neurodivergent trainee or early career practitioner coming into the field, and the first answer began with the thing that panellist’s supervisees raise most.
The panellist, who said they now spend most of their time supervising other therapists, said the line they hear constantly is that people do not want to get burnt out. Their answer started by separating kinds of burnout. Work burnout, they said, is very different to autistic burnout, which is very different to ADHD burnout, which is different again to cultural burnout. Then they moved the responsibility. What they tell people, they said, is that “if you’re burning out, it means the organisation is not supporting you well enough.” The cause lies in the practitioner’s environment, they told the room.
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Sources the story draws on
- Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew: Defining Autistic Burnout (opens in a new tab), Autism in Adulthood, vol. 2(2) (Raymaker, Teo, Steckler, Lentz, Scharer, Delos Santos, Kapp, Hunter, Joyce and Nicolaidis)
- Managing psychosocial hazards at work: Code of Practice (opens in a new tab), Safe Work Australia
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