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Neurodivergent practitioners on the village that got them through
In short
At Think Autism Sydney in 2025, a panel of neurodivergent practitioners described the partners, parents, housemates and lecturers who got them through, and what neurodivergent clinicians need from each other.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
One panellist forgot their second point, asked the audience if anyone remembered it, and came back to it several minutes later to laughter in the room. It became the thread for the next part of the conversation. “I think it also takes a village to sustain an adult in today’s world,” the trauma therapist told the neurodivergent health practitioners panel at Think Autism Sydney in May 2025, adapting the saying about raising a child. People have kind of forgotten that, they said.
By then the panel had moved on to how each speaker came to this work, a question the therapist had put to the other two after answering Dr Naomi Malone, the psychologist leading the session, on the power of lived experience. Their own answer was that they had not got there alone. “I don’t do anything by myself,” they said. They described a wife who makes them cups of tea and packs their snacks, because otherwise they will simply not eat, and who has had to ask them whether they understand how the human body works. They said they can call someone when they have had a bad day and call someone when they have had a good one, and that this connection is often what got them through.
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Sources the story draws on
- Loneliness in adults on the autism spectrum (opens in a new tab), Autism in Adulthood, vol. 1(3), pp. 182 to 193 (Ee, Hwang, Reppermund, Srasuebkul, Trollor, Foley and Arnold)
- Demographic and psychological predictors of alcohol use and misuse in autistic adults (opens in a new tab), Autism, vol. 25(5), pp. 1469 to 1480 (Bowri, Hull, Allison, Smith, Baron-Cohen, Lai and Mandy)
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