Reflections from the Autistic Mental Health Conference
The Power Of Community
Yesterday’s Autistic Mental Health Conference was more than a series of talks. It was an unfolding conversation, a weaving together of lives, theories, and solidarity among those who both presented at and attended the conference. When we step back and read the transcript of the online chat, a picture emerges of what happens when Autistic people come together to create our own spaces of belonging, knowledge, and resistance.
Community as Connection and Care
The most striking theme was the constant pulse of community affirmation. Messages were punctuated with small digital gestures that said, “I see you, I hear you, you’re not alone.” Participants met each other’s stories of harm with compassion and validation, creating an atmosphere where vulnerability was not met with silence, but with solidarity.
This is more than friendliness; it is survival. In a world where our suffering is so often dismissed, the ability to share and be believed is a radical act. The chat became a space where neurokin supported one another, one that held the heaviness of psychiatric trauma, misdiagnosis, and systemic violence, while also celebrating moments of joy, humour, and shared understanding.
Naming Harm, Demanding Change
Another key theme was the surfacing of ableism and harm in systems. Many participants shared harrowing experiences of CAMHS failures, medical gaslighting, parent-blaming, and misdiagnoses such as EUPD/BPD given to Autistic young women. Others described being overmedicated, denied services, or told their autism was “cured.”
These testimonies are not isolated. They illustrate systemic problems where psychiatry and education continue to enact epistemic injustice; denying the validity of Autistic knowledge and experience. In the chat, these stories were not silenced or pathologised. They were witnessed, affirmed, and situated in a broader critique of oppressive systems.
Intersectionality at the Forefront
The chat also held rich conversations about intersectionality and marginalisation. There were discussions of trans and gender diverse Autistic experiences particularly around the work of Katie Munday, as well as negativity within supposedly affirming spaces. Attendees also highlighted the compounded struggles faced by global majority Autistic people, and how violence and oppression manifest across personal and institutional contexts.
By foregrounding intersectionality, the conference modelled what Autistic-led spaces must do: centre the most marginalised voices in our communities.
The Joy of Autistic Theory
The chat showed a hunger for theorising Autistic experience in our own terms. Concepts like monotropism, meerkat mode, lilipadding, neuroqueering, and the double empathy problem circulated with excitement. These weren’t abstract academic ideas. Participants actively applied them to their own lives, to their children’s education, and to their advocacy work.
This is what epistemic justice looks like; Autistic-created concepts becoming tools for reframing suffering and reclaiming dignity. They move us away from deficit models and towards frameworks that honour our ways of being.
Knowledge as a Collective Project
Another striking theme was the sheer volume of knowledge exchange and resource sharing. Participants swapped book recommendations, journal articles, advocacy guides, and contacts for research opportunities. Links to organisations, practitioner directories, and lived experience blogs flowed through the chat.
This wasn’t a one way transfer of “expert” information. It was a rhizomatic exchange of knowledge, every participant contributing something valuable, and everyone benefiting. This is the antidote to the epistemic injustice Autistic people face in mainstream systems. Rather than being silenced or spoken over, Autistic people became both teachers and learners, co-creating a living archive of wisdom.
Survival, Resistance, and Advocacy
The chat also carried the weight of survival. People spoke of trauma; from cult abuse to exclusion from services to inappropriate pathways in substance use treatment. Yet these stories were consistently reframed as acts of resistance.
Participants asserted the importance of agency, dignity, consent, and autonomy. Phrases like “Don’t be a dick” became shorthand for a moral framework of care. Calls for protest, petitions, and collective action showed how advocacy and solidarity flow directly from shared lived experience.
Undoing Epistemic Injustice
Taken together, these themes show us what the Autistic Mental Health Conference achieved:
It validated lived experience where mainstream systems deny it.
It provided theoretical tools to reframe suffering.
It enabled collective knowledge exchange, undermining hierarchies of expertise.
It fostered solidarity and care absent in psychiatric and educational contexts.
What this teaches us is clear; Autistic people must not only be included in conversations about mental health, we must lead them. Conferences like this are not just events, they are acts of resistance against lifetimes of marginalisation. They show that when we build our own platforms, we undo injustice, replacing it with communities of care, knowledge, and action.
Final Thought
The transcript of the chat is evidence of something profound, that when Autistic people gather, we create worlds. Worlds where knowledge flows freely, where survival is honoured, where justice is imagined. These are the worlds that will shape the future of Autistic mental health; not the ones written about us, but the ones written with us and by us.
David, I have always greatly admired you as a friend and it's beautiful to see how you have grown as a writer and person. Thank you for doing such important work and tackling such important issues. I do have a question about the don't be a dick moralizing, and am wondering if you can clarify how you plan to trauma inform that moral code to make sure your social framework also covers dysregulated behaviors and traumatized people in fight or flight (who might not be able to control the stress signals in their body hijacking their amygdala, causing maladaptive reactions to their environment)? The lack of a trauma informed social contract is the main reason why exclusion takes place, and therefore is the reason why resistance is nessecary in the first place. This is basically the reverse of Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. When you are looking through a trauma informed lens at social norms it becomes evident that the Paradox of Tolerance is only applicable in the capitalist colonial framework that created it. When I think of autistic futures built on ethics of social justice, equity and inclusion it involves basic knowledge of the nervous system and how it communicates through human behavior. To avoid the groupthink caused by don't be a dick ethics, autistic spaces and future group settings must be grounded in a trauma informed basis and rooted in relational healing, otherwise it will degenerate into authoritarian suppression, mirroring the very intolerance and coercive conformity that our own group claims to be resisting. If we don't decolonize our patterns of relating, how can we hope for others to? This don't be a dick moralizing seems like a great idea in premise, which is why Christianity relied on it to become so widely accepted, but that don't be a dick foundational ethic is also how authoritarianism maintains it's grasp and why fascism continues to exist in our world today. Isn't it time to build structures that regulate non-punitively but firmly (restorative justice circles, relational accountability, economic restructuring)? I'm writing about these topics on my Substack currently and am also about to publish my first book on this topic, which summaries my first three years dealing with epistemic injustice as an autistic learner. I'd love to talk about this more with you if you're open to sharing your perspective.
I’d like to say thankyou for all your efforts David arranging the conference and to all your speakers .
As a parent of an Audhd son I felt les alone and more empowered to keep on fighting the services that fail him . Hoping he is not going to become another social murder statistic .