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.

This is a premium podcast that requires a paid substack subscription to access, you can currently get 50% off for three months if you sign up to listen to Ecology.

Get 50% off for 3 months

You can also find more of David's work on his Insight Timer Teacher profile and on the official NeuroHub Community website.

NeuroHub Community

Insight Timer

Read more

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.

Read more

Read more

Come and join our in-person Autistic christmas party in Brighton!

Join Our Heartbeat Community

Autistic Mental Health Conference 2026

Join Our Professional Gateway

This is an email to let you know that we will be migrating everyone subscribed to New & Updates on here to our marketing mailing list that is not on substack. This is because we are trying to bring our substaack back to meaningful writing and not the marketing it has been used for recently.
If you do not wish to be subscribed to news and updates on our products and services, when you receive the first email you will have the option to unsubsribe. Otherwise, we look forward to making our substack meaningful again!

David

Join Our Heartbeat Community

Join Our Professional Gateway

Quick one today; two things we want on your radar.

1. Join our services & products mailing list

If you're only subscribed here on Substack, you could be missing out. Our mailing list is where we share up-to-date info on NeuroHub's services, courses, and shop; and when you sign up, you'll get 10% off your next purchase.

Sign Up

It takes seconds, and it's a great way to stay in the loop between newsletters.

2. Less than a month to go: 2026 Autistic Mental Health Conference

Friday 14th – Sunday 16th August is creeping up fast. Three days exploring "Ecosystemic Causes of Mental Health Issues", hybrid and online-accessible from anywhere, with an optional in-person day in Coldean, Brighton & Hove on the Saturday.

The lineup includes Dr. Nick Walker, David Gray-Hammond, Tanya Adkin, Erin Ekins, and many more Autistic and neurodivergent speakers and researchers.

A few reasons not to wait:

Free access to all recordings as a ticket holder; including a bonus on-demand library of extra talks that couldn't fit the live schedule

Certificate of attendance available for CPD; handy if you're a professional or practitioner

Prices from £50, with 33% off for NeuroHub Community members (code below the paywall on this article)

Grab Your Ticket

See you there,

The NeuroHub Team

Discount Code Below This Paywall

Subscribe now

Read more

We want this substack to go back to being a place of exploration and thought, such as it was before. With that in mind, we are creating a seperate list for people who want to hear about our services and offerings such as our peer-mentoring or The Autistic Mental Health Conference.

Click below to sign up to the new marketing list, otherwise, you’re good to go, you can leave this as it is!

Sign Up For Newsletter

Click below to sign up to the new marketing list, otherwise, you’re good to go, you can leave this as it is!

Sign Up For Services & Offerings!

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.

Join Our Heartbeat Community

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.

Purchase Conference Tickets

Click below to sign up to the new marketing list, otherwise, you’re good to go, you can leave this as it is!

Sign Up For Services & Offerings!

This event is going to be a huge highlight of the year, with Autistic people’s lived experience front and centre on it’s delivery.

If you want to get your ticket, you can do so below. There is a 33% discount for community members. See below the paywall for your discount code.

Here are the details of the event:

August 14th to August 16th 2026

August 15th is a hybrid day with the option to attend in person in Brighton, East Sussex!

Click below to purchase your ticket and find your discount code.

Purchase Tickets

Read more

“There is a particular cruelty to addiction. Not just the physical toll, not just the destruction it leaves in its wake, but the way it makes catastrophe feel ordinary. Looking back now, I can see a trail of moments that should have stopped me cold. Moments that, in another life, might have prompted me to ask for help.

Instead, I rationalised every single one.

This post is not an easy one to write. But I think it’s an important one, because if you’re in the thick of it right now, you might recognise yourself here. If you do, I want you to know; the signs were always there. You just couldn’t see them yet, I couldn’t either.”

Read More

This is the most time-sensitive thing in this newsletter, so we’re putting it first.

The 2026 Autistic Mental Health Conference takes place on 14–16 August; and that is just one month away.

Tickets are on sale now, starting from £50, and we genuinely encourage you not to leave it too long. This is a three-day hybrid event, fully accessible online, exploring the theme Ecosystemic Causes of Mental Health Issues. The speaker line-up includes Dr. Nick Walker, Dr. Nathan Keates, Erin Ekins, Ava McAuley, Lawrence Kampf, and many more; each bringing lived experience, research, and Autistic-led perspectives that you simply won’t find in mainstream mental health spaces.

The in-person day (Saturday 15th August) takes place in Coldean, Brighton & Hove, with stalls, food, and entertainment alongside the live sessions. But you can join from anywhere in the world for all three days.

If you would like to have a stall at the in-person day, they cost £15, email admin@neurohubcommunity.org to arrange this.

Crucially: all talks will be recorded and made available to ticket holders. If you can’t attend every session live, you won’t miss out; you’ll have access to the full recordings to revisit in your own time.

NeuroHub Community members receive a 33% discount on all ticket types. View the paywall at the bottom of this newsletter to get access to the code or join the NeuroHub Community by clicking here.

Get your tickets here

Please share this with anyone you think would benefit. The more neurodivergent voices in the room, the better.

A Note From David

As we approach July it feels like a moment to pause and take stock of everything we’ve been building together.

Since launching NeuroHub Community earlier this year, we’ve been working on so many fronts simultaneously; community spaces, courses, new services, blog content, podcasts, research, and now the conference. It can be easy to miss what’s happening across the whole organisation, so this newsletter is a chance to bring it all together and share it with you.

There’s a lot to tell you about. Let’s get into it.

David at The ADHD Experience Part 8: Suzi Payton in Brighton

Before we dive into NeuroHub news, here’s something a little different. David recently performed at The ADHD Experience Part 8, organised by Suzi Payton in Brighton — a wonderful event celebrating neurodivergent voices, stories, and community.

If you’ve not come across Suzi Payton’s events before, they are well worth checking out, check out there substack -

New: Family Support Service

We’re really pleased to announce the launch of our Family Support Service; something we’ve been developing in response to what families have been telling us they need.

Neurodivergent life doesn’t happen in isolation. When one family member is Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, the whole family unit is shaped by that experience. Our Family Support Service works holistically with the entire family, helping you understand one another more deeply, identify where things feel hard, and build on the strengths and interests already present in your family to move forward together.

Our work is grounded in the Six-Point Framework and takes a strengths-based, non-deficit approach. We charge on a sliding scale; from £150 to £400 per month, and you decide what you can afford. We believe you. We have further flexibility depending on personal circumstances.

This service is for any family that includes one or more neurodivergent members. You do not need a formal diagnosis to access support.

Find out more and sign up here

Upcoming Webinar: Surviving the System: Autism, Addiction, and the Road to Recovery

Friday 31st July, 1:30pm–4:00pm (online via Zoom)

David Gray-Hammond will be presenting a lived experience talk with Q+A exploring what it actually means to be Autistic and substance-dependent in a healthcare system that wasn’t built to hold both realities at once. This includes an honest account of misdiagnosis, twelve-step programmes, and why community (not a programme or a protocol) was what ultimately made recovery possible.

The presentation will draw on the Ecosystemic Model of Distress, framing Autistic addiction not as individual failing but as an outcome of systemic mismatch. It is followed by open Q+A.

This event is accessible on a pay-what-you-can-afford basis, with the option to attend for free. It is suitable for health and social care professionals, substance use practitioners, mental health workers, commissioners, and anyone with lived experience of addiction or Autistic identity.

Content note: This presentation includes personal disclosure around substance use, mental health crisis, misdiagnosis, and institutional harm.

Register here — including the free option

Building Something New: The Practitioner Web App

We’re also approaching the final stages of building and testing a practitioner web app designed specifically for client-facing professionals working with neurodivergent people.

The app brings together a suite of practical tools built on our Six-Point Framework; giving professionals a single, coherent resource they can draw on in their day-to-day work with Autistic and neurodivergent clients. We’re currently in the building and testing phase and look forward to sharing more details with you soon.

If you’re a professional interested in hearing more when the time comes, make sure you’re subscribed to the Professional Gateway for immediate access when it launches.

Join The Professional Gateway Here (Starts At £25 A Month)

Everything NeuroHub Does; In One Place

If you’re new here (or if you’ve been meaning to properly explore what NeuroHub offers), we recently published a complete overview of our core services and offerings. Here’s a quick summary of what’s available:

For individuals: one-to-one consultancy and mentoring, our peer support community, mindfulness meditations designed for neurodivergent nervous systems, the Family Support Service, the Mindfully Divergent Programme, and our course library.

Courses: The Supporting Autistic People course introduces the Six-Point Framework. The Re-Storying Autism video course and workbook helps learners set aside deficit-based narratives and build something more honest in their place — currently available at a permanently reduced price of £39.99.

For professionals: the Professional Gateway subscription (£25/month or £230/year) gives unlimited access to our full library of neurodivergent-affirming toolkits, all grounded in the Six-Point Framework, plus a dedicated Discord community for practitioners.

For everyone: the NeuroHub Community Space, where neurodivergent people come together to share, learn, and be seen — built on solidarity, not pity.

Explore everything at NeuroHub

Get Involved: Community Journal, Livestreams, and Peer Support

There are several ways you can participate more actively in the NeuroHub community right now:

Submit a post to our Community Journal: we welcome writing from neurodivergent people on their experiences, insights, and perspectives. This is your space.
Submit here

Sign up to be a guest on our livestreams: we’re building a programme of new and upcoming livestreams and would love to feature community voices. If you’d like to be considered as a guest, let us know.
Sign up here

Join our peer support service: peer support with and by neurodivergent people. No gatekeeping, no diagnosis required.
Sign up here

Recent Blogs, Podcasts, and Substack Articles

Here’s a roundup of what we’ve been publishing across the NeuroHub blog and Substack this past month.

On the blog:

Not a Psychopath (Part 1): How Autism, Alexithymia and Trauma Get Misread: David Gray-Hammond and Helen Edgar of Autistic Realms examine why certain combinations of Autistic traits can be misread as psychopathy, and why that misreading causes real harm. A rigorous, accessible, and important piece. Part 2 is coming soon.

The Mycelial Mind Ep. 3 — Is Neuroaffirming Enough?: David and Adele Murray (with community member Holly dropping in) dig into what “neuroaffirming” actually means in practice, whether it can be done badly, and what genuine neurodivergent competence would look like beyond the buzzword.

What Is Epistemic Injustice in Autism? Why Lived Experience Must Lead the Conversation on Autistic Mental Health: The blog post that explains why we hold the Autistic Mental Health Conference, and what epistemic injustice has to do with it.

Embracing Our Autistic Selves: Knowing the Autistic Bodymind: Drawn from Session 4 of the Embracing Our Autistic Selves course, this piece explores the inseparability of Autistic body and mind, sensory knowledge, interoception, and burnout.

On Substack:

The Autistic Mental Health Conference As An Act Of Resistance: Why the conference exists, what makes it politically different, and why accessibility is not a logistical detail but a commitment.

A Six-Point Framework For Neurodivergent-Affirming Care: A full walkthrough of the Six-Point Framework and how it sits at the heart of everything we do.

An Ecology of Experience For Autistic People: A podcast episode on the Ecosystemic Model of Distress, the Autistic rhizome, and mycelial community.

The Ecosystemic Model: Understanding Neurodivergent Experience as an Ecology: A longer read laying out the theoretical and philosophical foundations of the Ecosystemic Model in full.

How Community Gave Me Strength to Find Recovery: David shares a personal piece on sober living and recovery from his personal blog. Well worth a read, and a subscribe.

Support NeuroHub

Everything we do (the community space, the free content, the accessible webinars, the peer support) depends on the support of people who believe in what we’re building.

There are a few ways you can help, and none of them require spending money you don’t have:

easyfundraising: if you shop online, you can raise free donations for NeuroHub simply by registering and shopping through the easyfundraising platform. It costs you nothing extra, and every purchase raises a small amount for us.

Sign up to support us via easyfundraising

Donate directly: if you’re in a position to contribute financially to our work, you can do so here. Every donation makes a genuine difference to what we’re able to offer.

Donate to NeuroHub Community

Thank you, as always, for being part of this community. It genuinely means everything.

David and the NeuroHub Team

Know someone who would benefit from this newsletter? Please share it with them. The more neurodivergent people who find their way here, the better.

Paywall below to access discount code

Read more

That is not a conference; that is a performance of inclusion.

What We Mean When We Say “Resistance”

Resistance is not a dramatic word. It does not require barricades or manifestos, sometimes, resistance is simply the refusal to accept the terms you’ve been handed. The terms we have been handed are these:

• Autistic mental health is a clinical problem, to be solved by clinical experts, through clinical interventions, evaluated against clinical outcomes.

• Lived experience is welcome at the table; as a case study, as an anecdote, as a humanising detail in an otherwise technical presentation.

We have refused those terms.

The NeuroHub Community Autistic Mental Health Conference is rooted in the core belief that neurodivergent voices should lead the conversation about neurodivergent lives. That sentence is doing more work than it appears to; “Lead” is not the same as “contribute”. “Should” is not tentative; it is a statement of principle. “Neurodivergent voices” encompasses not just the articulate, the credentialled, or the already-platformed, but the full breadth of people who have been pushed to the margins of a conversation about their own existence. That is a political position; it always has been.

Purchase Tickets

Epistemic Injustice And The Conference Format

There is a concept I return to repeatedly in my work; epistemic injustice. The idea, developed by philosopher Miranda Fricker, describes the harm done when someone is wrongfully excluded as a knower; when their testimony is dismissed, when they lack the conceptual tools to make sense of their own experience, when the structures of knowledge production systematically delegitimise what they have to say.

Autistic people experience epistemic injustice at every level of the mental health system. We are told our self-knowledge is unreliable, our distress is reinterpreted as symptom, our frameworks for understanding ourselves (monotropism, double empathy, the Ecosystemic Model) are treated as informal hypotheses rather than paradigm-challenging theory. The conferences that claim to address Autistic mental health reproduce that injustice in their very architecture: here are the experts, there is the audience, this is what is known.

A conference that centres lived experience is not just a different kind of event. It is a direct challenge to that epistemic structure.

The Theme Is Not Incidental

This year’s conference explores ecosystemic causes of mental health issues. The Ecosystemic Model of Distress and Wellbeing, which has developed over several years of research and practice, holds a foundational position; distress is not located inside the individual. It is not a malfunction of the Autistic nervous system, it is an ecosystemic consequence; produced at the interface between a person and an environment that was not designed for them, within systems that actively work against their wellbeing.

When Tanya and I present at this conference (speaking on ‘The Ecosystemic Model of Distress: An ecological approach to Autistic and monotropic wellbeing’) we are not offering a clinical update. We are making an argument, the argument is that you cannot address Autistic mental health by treating Autistic people, you have to address the ecosystem.

Book Your Place

That reframe (from individual pathology to systemic consequence) is itself a political act. It shifts responsibility, demands accountability from schools, employers, mental health services, and the broader neuronormative infrastructure of modern life. It does so from a platform built by Autistic people, for Autistic people, grounded in the theory and research of those who know this from the inside.

Accessibility as Politics

I want to say something about the format of the conference that often gets treated as a logistical detail rather than what it actually is; a political commitment.

The 2026 Autistic Mental Health Conference is fully hybrid. Online access is available for all three days, so attendees can join from anywhere in the world. All talks will be recorded and made available to ticket holders, so sessions can be revisited or caught up in your own time.

For many Autistic people, access to knowledge has historically been gatekept by geography, energy, sensory environment, economic means, and the demand to perform neurotypical presence in order to participate. A hybrid, recorded, accessible conference with a price point starting at £50 (with a 33% discount for community members - Se below the paywall on this article for your code) is not just convenient, it is a statement about who this event is for.

Neurodivergent individuals, whether diagnosed, self-identified, or still unsure, are welcome. Not as curiosities, nor as subjects of study; as participants in a conversation about their own lives.

Register For Conference

Why Now?

We are living through a moment of profound political hostility to the kinds of frameworks this conference embodies. Rights-based approaches to disability are under pressure, the neurodiversity paradigm is being contested; not by better evidence, but by those who find it politically inconvenient. Lived experience is routinely weaponised; presented when it validates existing narratives, suppressed when it challenges them.

The Autistic Mental Health Conference does not exist outside that context. It exists inside it, deliberately. Every time we build a platform that centres neurodivergent voices, we are doing two things simultaneously.

1. We are providing something of immediate practical value to the people who attend; knowledge, community, recognition, tools for living.

2. We are staking a claim about what knowledge looks like, who produces it, and whose experience counts as evidence.

Those two things are inseparable.

An Invitation

If you are Autistic, this conference was built with you in mind. Not your diagnosis, not your challenges, your deficits, or your burden on the system. You; your insight, your experience, your right to a conversation about your own life conducted in your own terms.

If you are a professional who works with Autistic people, this conference offers something you will not find in most CPD environments; the chance to encounter Autistic knowledge on its own terms, without the translation and softening that usually mediates it.

If you are simply someone who believes that the people most affected by a problem should lead its solution, then you already understand why this matters.

The 2026 Autistic Mental Health Conference runs from Friday 14th to Sunday 16th August. The in-person day is in Brighton and Hove (but can still be accessed online) everything can be reached from wherever you are.

Tickets start from £50. NeuroHub Community members receive a 33% discount (Code below the paywall).

Read more

At NeuroHub Community, we are very assertive about the importance of community connection and the power that comes from learning alongside neurokin. For that reason, we are aiming to hold a free livestream on social media once a fortnight to do just this.

In order to make this work, we need some people who are willing to donate 45-90 minutes to come and be our guests om the livestreams, so if you’re interested, expecially if you have a topic in mind, click the button below to apply to join us and I will get in touch!

Become A Guest

Also, while you’re here, we have another free/”pay what you can afford” event coming up on July 31st at 6.30pm. It is all about surviving the mental health and substance use systems when I was trying to access recovery. You can click below to attend for free or a donation.

Register For Event