In this episode, David walks through the full findings of NeuroHub’s Autistic Language Preference Survey 2025/26, the largest piece of community-driven research NeuroHub has run on this question to date. Fifty-six percent of respondents prefer an identity-based term such as “Autistic person”; among Autistic respondents themselves, that rises to seventy-one percent. But the real story isn’t the headline number, it’s what predicts it, and it isn’t diagnosis, age or gender. It’s whether someone is Autistic themselves, and whether they’re connected to Autistic community spaces.

The episode also covers the survey’s most uncomfortable finding: nearly forty-five percent of respondents describe Hans Asperger, the clinician whose name still labels a diagnosis and an identity for many people, in terms of Nazi collaboration, eugenics or complicity in the killing of disabled children. David explains what the data shows about who holds that understanding, and why it’s the single strongest predictor of rejecting his name.

Along the way: why a diagnosis doesn’t predict the words people keep using in later life; why professionals and Autistic people so often talk past each other on terminology; and what NeuroHub thinks services, charities and training providers should actually do differently as a result.

Content note: this episode includes factual discussion of the Aktion T4 programme and the Nazi-era killing of disabled children (around minute 32), handled briefly and without graphic detail.

The full written report, with every figure, statistical test and methodological caveat referenced in this episode, plus the anonymised dataset, will soon be available from NeuroHub Community.

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In this episode I go through what the Fonagy Review interim report really found, why it matters that it lands on the desk of a benefits review three months before eligibility rules get rewritten, and what could realistically change for five practical things: getting an assessment, PIP, EHCPs and school, work, and the question underneath all of it.

No hot takes, no reassurance I can’t back up. Just what is happening, and what to do about it.

Content note: this episode discusses benefits assessments, diagnostic waiting lists, and the experience of having your diagnosis questioned publicly.

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I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.

- Cloud Atlas By David Mitchell

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is, on its surface, a novel about six nested lives across centuries. Read through a neuroqueer lens, it becomes something else; a meditation on how selves get made, unmade, and refused by the systems around them. This is not a claim that Mitchell wrote a neuroqueer novel. It is an invitation to read one of the ways that the text's structure and its recurring concerns; interconnection, resistance to categorisation, and the constructed nature of "natural" order, map onto ideas central to neuroqueer theory.

What Neuroqueer Theory Brings To The Text

Against The Isolated, Broken Self

Neuroqueer theory, building on Nick Walker's work, rejects the pathology paradigm's image of the neurodivergent person as a broken individual to be fixed in isolation. Selfhood is relational; it is made in ecosystems of relationship, culture, and power, not manufactured in a vacuum and then judged against a fixed norm.

Cloud Atlas is built on the same premise at a structural level. Its six narrators are never fully separate; their lives bleed into each other across time (through letters, journals, films, and a shared birthmark). No character's story is self-contained. The novel's formal argument is that isolation is an illusion; every life is authored partly by the lives around it.

Sonmi-451 And The Refusal Of Manufactured Identity

The clearest neuroqueer resonance in the novel is Sonmi-451's arc. She begins as a "fabricant"; engineered, categorised, and assigned a role before she ever has the chance to define herself. Her journey is one of breaking out of an identity that was manufactured for her by a system that had no interest in who she actually was.

This is neuroqueering in miniature. Neuroqueer theory treats diagnostic and social categories not as neutral descriptions but as manufactured roles, assigned by systems (medical, educational, familial) that decide who a person should be before that person has had any say.

Sonmi's insistence on authoring her own Selfhood, against a system built to prevent exactly that, is a fitting allegory for the neuroqueer refusal to be reduced to a diagnostic label or a caste.

The "Natural Order" As Something Built, Not Given

A recurring move across the novel's six stories is the unmasking of systems that present themselves as natural or inevitable; slavery, caste, corporate control, all justified by their architects as simply how things are. The novel's closing argument, carried through Adam Ewing's journal, is that such orders hold only for as long as enough people accept them as fixed.

Neuroqueer theory makes the same move against neuronormativity; the idea that there is one natural, correct way for brains and behaviour to be organised. Like the caste systems in Cloud Atlas, neuronormativity presents itself as given rather than constructed, and both frameworks argue that what looks fixed is actually a set of choices, upheld collectively and therefore also collectively revisable.

A practical example of this can be found in contemporary posthumanism which challenges the held humanist assertion of human exceptionalism that positions mankind hierarchically above that of other life on earth. Human dominance is an imposed order rather than one of natural kind. Posthumanism, then, presents a queering of the humanist ideal.

Multiplicity Instead Of A Single Fixed Self

The novel's nested structure; one soul, it is implied, recurring across different bodies and eras, resists the idea of a single continuous, fixed identity. Selfhood in Cloud Atlas is both contextual and in constant becoming; it shows up differently depending on the body, the era, and the relationships it is embedded in.

This lines up with neuroqueer theory's treatment of identity as an ongoing process rather than a static trait-list. A person's neurodivergence is not a fixed essence to be diagnosed once and filed away; it is enacted, relationally and contextually, over time; much as Mitchell's recurring soul is not the "same" person from story to story, but a continuity expressed through difference.

Small Acts, Systemic Change

The novel closes on the image of a single drop as part of a larger ocean; the idea that one act of resistance means little alone, but accumulates into something that can move a system. This is a familiar rhetorical move in neurodiversity movement writing; individual acts of autistic or ADHD self-advocacy, public identification, and refusal of masking are framed not as isolated gestures but as contributions to a collective, cumulative shift in what counts as natural.

Conclusion

Read through the lens of neuroqueer theory, Cloud Atlas is less a story about reincarnation than a story about the machinery that manufactures Selves, and the recurring, cross-era work of refusing that machinery. Sonmi-451's fabricant, Adam Ewing's abolitionist turn, and the novel's insistence that no life stands alone all rehearse an argument neuroqueer theory makes explicitly; that the categories we are sorted into are built, not given, and that authoring a self against them is both an individual and a collective act.

Further to this, it lays bare the resspoonsibility we have to the world to consider the impact of our own neuroqueer practice on the ecosystem we inhabit. If no life exists in isolation, then to engage in a personal endeavour of neuroqueering is in itself a queering of the ecosystem itself. Our intentional acts of resistance and Self-becoming ripple throughout the world around us.

Therefore, it is necessary to grow an ethics of neuroqueering. Neuroqueering that liberates the individual while containing those around us is not the liberatory act intended by the theory, rather it is an act of normative violence hidden beneath a superficial Queerness.

This article refers to a child's story due to Dominics age at the time. Dominic is now an adult.

This documentary tells one child's story; but it is not, in any meaningful sense, only one child's story. It is emblematic of the danger of being a disabled young person in the special education system, and of what happens when the systems meant to protect that young person decide, repeatedly, that their word doesn't count.

Autistic children frequently experience abuse, and they are frequently disbelieved on the basis of their disability. That is not a side detail in Dominic's story, it is the mechanism that let everything else happen.

Before I go any further; independent of the emotional weight of this story, my opinion as someone who watched it is that none of the abuse Dominic experienced was sufficiently investigated, either by the school or by the police. The victim here is Dominic, and he deserves the justice needed to close this chapter of his life.

How It Starts

The documentary opens in 2010, the first time Dominic and his family visited Baston House and met Anna Kennedy. By his father Mark's account, the visit made it sound as though the school would provide everything Dominic needed. They were happy, Dominic was happy.

The opening really captures the pain that Dominic and his family have been through. The film starting with hope and trust is doing deliberate work, because everything that follows is a slow account of that trust being worn away.

Clip Of The Documentary

The Turn

Dominic describes, in his own words, what it was like when staff changed; they started to look less like people supporting him and more like sentries. That word choice does a lot of work. A sentry watches you, contains you. That is not the language of care, and Dominic knew the difference even if the adults around him didn't want to hear it.

The original deputy head was fired. The new deputy head started using restraint on Dominic almost immediately, despite there being no prior need for it. Dominic describes a restraint in which all four limbs and his head were held down. His father Mark describes frequent, unexplained bruising.

Dominic also describes being locked in a cupboard by staff, and says he is claustrophobic. The trauma of what he has been through is apparent throughout, not stated once and left behind, but visible in how he tells the rest of the story.

The Sexual Assault

Dominic was sexually assaulted by another student. He felt his experience was ignored, he ended up trying to address the assault himself, because no one else would. The details of the abuse are described as very graphic in the documentary, I'm not going to relay them here, but they are resonant of the risk faced by vulnerable young people in institutional settings where power runs almost entirely in one direction.

Mark states that he tried to talk to Anna Kennedy about the abuse, and it was ignored. Dominic has tried, and failed, three separate times to start a criminal investigation. He was told he "won't be believed because he's Autistic."

Sit with that sentence for a moment, because it is the whole argument of this documentary in ten words. Not "the evidence is unclear”, not "there are procedural barriers", he was told, plainly, that his disability was the reason his account of his own abuse would not be taken seriously. That is epistemic injustice made completely explicit, the kind that usually hides behind more careful language. Here it didn't even bother to hide.

Power, Reputation, And The Question Nobody's Answering

Mark talks about feeling trapped by two things at once; Baston House's institutional reputation, and Anna Kennedy's public profile as an autism advocate and celebrity. That combination is a pattern that recurs wherever powerful reputations sit on top of vulnerable populations; the more publicly someone is seen as an advocate, the harder it becomes for the people in their actual care to be believed when they say something has gone wrong. Reputation becomes a kind of institutional armour, and it's the young person inside the system who absorbs the cost of that armour holding.

Dominic felt there was no point talking to anyone, because he didn't believe anyone would believe him. Given everything that had already happened to him, that wasn't paranoia.

Mark also wants to know why Anna Kennedy resigned a month after he started raising complaints. The documentary doesn't hand you an answer to that, it leaves the timing sitting there, which is its own kind of statement.

Mark calls on others to come forward, even if they only have doubts rather than certainty. That's a meaningful thing to ask for, because disclosure doesn't usually arrive fully formed, it arrives as a nagging feeling that something wasn't right, and those feelings get dismissed just as easily as direct accounts do if nobody creates space for them.

What Dominic Actually Wants

Dominic wants accountability for what happened to him. Not for it to be quietly filed away or for it to be managed, or reframed, or absorbed into an institution's PR. Accountability.

Institutions are very good at producing the appearance of a response (an internal review, a statement, a departure dressed up as unrelated to the complaints that preceded it) without ever producing the thing a survivor is actually asking for, which is for what happened to be named honestly and answered for.

Why This Isn't Just Dominic's Story

I said at the start that this is emblematic, and I mean that precisely. Autistic children are disbelieved at higher rates when they disclose abuse, and that disbelief isn't incidental to their disability, it's frequently justified by it. "He won't be believed because he's Autistic" isn't a rogue comment from one bad actor. It's a sentence that could only be said out loud because the person saying it correctly predicted that the systems around Dominic (the school, and then the police, three times over) would prove them right.

That's the part worth sitting with after the credits roll. The failure here wasn't a single missed report or one bad member of staff. It was a set of institutions, educational, reputational, and legal, that each had the chance to investigate properly and each, in their own way, declined to.

Dominic is still waiting for that to change.

If this piece has raised anything difficult for you, please be gentle with yourself. You don't have to carry it alone.

The Documentary Baston House: Dominic's Story by Georgia De Gidlow will be available to the public soon.

More To This Story

This podcast situates itself amongst a body of work which David presented at the ISPS International Congress in Lausanne, Switzerland in July 2026. This podcast aims to introduce people to the ecosystemic model and how an understanding of it can help us take action to improve our wellbeing.

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The Problem With "For Us"

Autism research, service design, and policy have for decades operated on a simple, unexamined assumption; that Autistic people are the objects of study and intervention rather than the authors of their own lives. Non-autistic professionals have set the goals (eye contact, compliance, indistinguishability from peers), measured the outcomes, and declared success or failure, all without meaningfully asking Autistic people what a good life would actually look like for them.

Not a neutral gap in the evidence base; what researchers and activists have named as a form of epistemic injustice; Autistic people are treated as unreliable narrators of their own experience (see Yergeau's “demi-rhetoricity”), while non-Autistic professionals are treated as the default authority on what Autism is. The body of knowledge is built almost entirely from the outside looking in.

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Pride?

In something I spent years trying to hide?

For most of my life, autism wasn’t something i embraced- it was something I apologised for.

I didn’t know i was autistic growing up. I just knew I seemed to get life wrong.

I didn’t understand why everyone else seemed to have a handbook that I hadn’t been

given. Conversations felt like a game where everyone else already knew the rules.

Friendships were confusing. Eye contact felt uncomfortable. Loud places were exhausting. Changes in plans could leave me overwhelmed for days, and I spent so much energy wondering why things that looked effortless for everyone else felt impossible for me.

So I did what many autistic people do without even realising it.

I watched.

I copied.

I studied the people around me as though they were characters in a film I had to learn by heart.

I’d mirror accents. I’d laugh because everyone else laughed, I’d pretend I understood joked when I didn’t. I’d force myself to make eye contact even when it made me want to look away. I’d rehearse conversations over and over before speaking and replay them for hours afterwards, convinced I’d said something wrong.

I became an expert at looking like I was coping.

The problem was that I wasn’t.

Masking helped me fit in, but it came at a cost.

When you’ve spent years becoming whoever other people need you to be, you eventually lose sight of who you are underneath it all.

Receiving my autism diagnosis didn’t suddenly make life easier.

Supermarkets didn’t become quieter.

Unexpected changes didn’t become less overwhelming.

Sensory overload didn’t disappear.

I didn’t magically understand social rules.

But something did change.

For the first time, I stopped asking “what’s wrong with me?”

Instead, I started asking “what do I need?”

That one question changed everything.

Instead of forcing myself into environments that drained me, I learned to adapt them.

Instead of feeling embarrassed by the things that bring me comfort, I embraced them.

My jellycats aren’t childish.

They’re comforting.

My ear defenders aren’t antisocial.

They’re accessibility.

My routines aren’t me being “difficult”.

They’re how my brain creates safety in a world that often feels unpredictable.

I’ve realised that autism isn’t just the struggles.

It’s the way I notice tiny details other people overlook.

It’s the passion I pour into the things I love.

It’s my honesty, my loyalty, my deep empathy, and the way I care so fiercely about the

people around me.

It’s why I create art that means something to me.

It’s why i can spend hours learning about something that fascinates me.

It’s why joy feels so big when I find it.

For years, I thought I had to become less autistic to be accepted.

Now I realise the people who truly love me never wanted that.

They just wanted me.

Disability pride month isn’t about pretending autism is easy.

There are still days when the world feels too loud.

When socialising is exhausting.

When I misunderstand things because I take words literally.

When change feels impossible.

When I need more rest than people understand.

Those challenges are real.

But so is this:

• I don’t need to apologise for the way my brain works.

• I don’t need to earn acceptance by masking until I’m exhausted.

• I don’t need to explain why I need accommodations or comfort items or extra time to process things.

Being autistic doesn’t make me broken.

It makes me different.

And different was never something I needed to hide.

So, this disability pride month, I’m celebrating something I never thought I would.

Not because autism is easy.

Not because every day is positive.

But because after years of believing I was “too much”, “too sensitive”, “too awkward”, or “too different”, I’m finally learning that I was never the problem.

I was simply trying to survive in a world that wasn’t designed with minds like mine in mind.

Today, I choose something different.

I choose authenticity over masking.

Self-compassion over self-criticism.

Acceptance over shame.

Because autism isn’t something I have to overcome to deserve a good life,

It’s part of who I am.

And for the first time, I can honestly say...

I’m proud to be autistic.

The War We Are Trained To Fight Inside Ourselves

Disabled people are handed a battlefield and told it’s the only one that exists; our own bodyminds. From the moment a diagnosis lands, we are enrolled in a project of self-management; manage your symptoms, manage your behaviour, manage your access needs so quietly that nobody has to notice you needed anything at all. The medical model doesn’t just describe disability as located in the individual, it insists that the individual is also where the solution has to be found. You are the problem and you are the fix.

This is political, even when it’s dressed up as clinical. When distress, exhaustion, or crisis is filtered entirely through an individual diagnostic lens, every hard day becomes a personal failure of coping rather than evidence of a hostile environment. We internalise it, i know I did. I spent years treating my own nervous system like enemy territory, like something to be subdued rather than understood, because I had never once been offered a framework that let me look outward.

That’s what I mean by turning the body into a warzone, our health becomes contested ground, our sociopolitical status becomes contested ground, and both wars get fought on the same terrain. Inside us, as though the rest of the world is simply the weather, an unchangeable backdrop to our private struggle.

What The Ecosystemic Model Actually Offers

This is why the Ecosystemic Model Of Distress And Wellbeing, I developed over years of existing in hostile terrain, exists in direct opposition to that framing. The model doesn’t treat distress as a fault located in an individual nervous system, rather, it treats distress as an ecosystemic consequence; something produced at the intersection of a person and the environments, relationships, institutions, and power structures they are forced to move through.

Think of an ecosystem in the literal sense. If a plant is dying, you don’t only interrogate the plant, you look at the soil, the light, the water table, what’s been sprayed on the field next door. Disabled distress works the same way, when we are anxious, burnt out, in crisis, or simply exhausted by existing, that is data about the ecosystem we are embedded in. The inaccessible workplace, the underfunded support system, the hostile welfare assessment, the constant low hum of being made to justify your own existence.

The Ecosystemic Model doesn’t erase embodied experience. Pain is still pain, exhaustion is still exhaustion, but it refuses to let that embodied experience be the endpoint of the analysis. It insists we keep tracing the line outward, past the skin, into the structures that produced the conditions for that exhaustion in the first place.

The Real Fight Is Outside The Body

This is the part I need Disability Pride Month to actually reckon with; if distress is ecosystemic, then the fight for our wellbeing cannot be won inside our bodyminds. It was never a fair fight to begin with, because the terrain was rigged before we arrived on it.

The real fight lives in inaccessible built environments that were designed as though disabled people are an edge case rather than a constant of human existence. It lives in employment structures that treat rest as moral weakness, and benefits systems that require disabled people to perform suffering convincingly enough to be believed, while punishing us the moment we look too capable. It lives in healthcare systems that pathologise distress instead of asking what produced it or in language itself; in who gets to narrate disabled experience, and whose account of that experience is treated as credible.

Even the way we’re permitted to talk about our own lives is structured by all of this. Disabled people are so often only granted a public voice when we perform resilience, or when we perform tragedy convincing enough to justify charity. Both are extraction, both keep the conversation contained inside individual stories rather than allowing it to indict the systems producing those stories in the first place. Epistemic injustice doesn’t just decide what happens to us, it decides how we’re allowed to describe what happened.

That’s the redirection this month needs. Not away from our bodies (our embodied experience is real and it matters) but past them, toward the actual site of the war.

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Building Forward, Not Retrofitting Backward

So what does it mean to step toward the future from here?

It means refusing a future that is simply the present with slightly better ramps. Accessibility retrofits matter, but they are not liberation, they are damage control on a structure that was never built with us in mind, acts of ecological conservation work. The future worth stepping toward is one where disabled existence is a design principle from the ground up, not an accommodation bolted on afterward. Where community, education, healthcare, and economic systems are built around the actual diversity of human bodyminds rather than an imagined neuronormative, able-bodied default.

That’s a structural project, it has to be, because the problem was always structural. And it’s slow, non-linear work; which is exactly why I keep coming back to Tanya Adkin’s concept of lilipadding as a way of thinking about it. We don’t leap from a hostile ecosystem to a liberated one in a single bound. We move in small, sustainable steps across unstable ground, testing what holds, building community wherever we land. Lilipadding was never just a personal recovery framework. It’s also a model for collective, structural change, because neither individual healing nor systemic transformation happens in one clean, linear motion.

Disability Pride, done properly, isn’t a celebration of endurance. Endurance is what a hostile ecosystem demands of us in the meantime., pride is the refusal to accept that the meantime is permanent. It’s the insistence that the fight was never ours to win alone, inside our own skin, it belongs out there, in the structures we are building, dismantling, and rebuilding together.

The war was never in our bodies. It was always in the world that put us there.

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