Post by Eating Disorders Neurodiversity Australia

Our board members Laurence and Kai collaborated with a team of neurodivergent scholars on a paper entitled Towards Neurodiversity-Affirming, Co-Produced Competence Frameworks in Psychotherapy: An Autistic-Led Call to Action. Many psychotherapy guidelines are written as though they apply broadly to everyone. But when autistic people and other people with lived experience are not meaningfully involved in developing these frameworks, important issues around safety, accessibility, and real-world usefulness can be missed. In this paper, we argue that psychotherapy competence frameworks need to be neurodiversity-affirming, co-produced, and grounded in harm prevention. For autistic clients, therapy can become harmful when it relies on neurotypical assumptions about communication, trust, distress, progress, or recovery. We call for therapy frameworks to place greater emphasis on relational safety, collaborative pacing, client-defined goals, and shared interpretation of change. Standardised measures can be useful, but they should be supplemented with accessible, narrative, and context-sensitive ways of understanding what therapy is actually doing for the person. Link: https://lnkd.in/eNdN45hm