Understanding and Affirming Autistic Clients: Book Launch

On October 29th, 2025, we held a launch event for Understanding and Affirming Autistic Clients at the University of Lethbridge. Below is a transcript of the speech I gave to introduce the book alongside a recording.

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Good afternoon everyone and thank you for choosing to spend your lunch with me to celebrate the launch of our book, Understanding and Affirming Autistic Clients: A Primer for Mental Health Professionals.

Photo by Danica Ferris

Not every book is “launched” in this way, but I felt compelled to do so – with the support of the Bookstore and the Faculty of Education – because this book is community and action-focused and unique in its scope and development. Because of that, I want to spend a little bit of time discussing how this book came about. I recognize that this is in the middle of the workday, so I’m going to give a timing play-by-play. I’m going to talk at you for around 18 minutes. After, I’ve set aside about 10 minutes for any questions that you might have. Finally, we’ll mingle around informally for as long as you want until 1pm. Sound like a plan?

Much of the following story, and the previous rigid social directions, will make more sense if I preface with a fact about myself: I am autistic. To put it in the verbiage of my medical assessment: I have a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, level 1, without co-occurring intellectual disability. My primary disability support needs are sensory, cognitive, and social – in that order. Most of you have probably never heard an autistic person discuss their autistic support needs before, and I’ve never talked about mine publicly, so I’m going to take this opportunity to force us all to be a little uncomfortable for a bit for the sake of learning.

My first group of support needs are sensory. Due to differences in the way my brain processes sensory information, I can have a hard time filtering out sensory input – sounds are often too loud, smells are often too strong, and lights are often too bright. So if you see me wearing sunglasses inside, I promise I’m not hungover. Although, if you’re familiar with that hangover queasiness and sensitivity to lights and sounds, this is how I experience my surroundings most of the time. This is called sensory hypersensivity. The flip of hypersensitivity is hyposensitivity – reduced sensory input. I experience hyposensitivity with a sense called interoception, which is your internal body cues and sensations – things like thirst, hunger, bathroom needs, nausea. This means that I sometimes forget to eat or drink for hours on end. Or sometimes I don’t realize that I need to pee until I REALLY need to pee.

Next are cognitive support needs. Cognition is thinking. For example, my thought processes are very systematic; linear and step-by-step. I’m usually not thinking in terms of the whole – I’m thinking in terms of the steps to get there. When steps are missed or ignored, this can cause me a lot of confusion and distress. This makes routine very important for me: what I eat for breakfast, where my shoes go, my writing process, and how to plan out social interaction. Additionally, I process thoughts internally, not externally, and making the internal external takes a lot of effort. This can make teaching difficult sometimes, because while I know that sharing a thinking process can be helpful, sometimes I just can’t get the information out in a way that’s helpful to the learner.

Last, but not least, are social support needs. Imagine that you were born with a guidebook for social interactions – how to start a conversation, when to make eye-contact, how much eye-contact to make, when to interrupt so you can talk, how long to speak during your turn, what facial expressions to make when someone is speaking, what facial expressions to make when you are speaking, what topics to talk about, how to end a conversation. Many of these unwritten rules come naturally to non-autistic people, but not to autistic people. I can sometimes have a really difficult time understanding how conversations are meant to go, what topics are polite, and when to stop or start talking. Because of this, I (like many autistics) have developed scripts to enact during different social situations. Sometimes these scripts go well, allowing me to blend-in amongst the normies. For example, at a recent new faculty meet-and-great, I had my scripts locked and loaded – weather, work, where are you from, how long have you lived in Lethbridge, do you like Lethbridge, what do you like about the University of Lethbridge, etc. Afterwards, my wife commented – “no one else noticed this, but I could tell that you were running out of things in your rolodex to say.” Uh-oh, I was almost found out. Other times, I have no scripts for a situation and, therefore, I am at a loss for words. Picture me, at DisneyWorld, trying to talk with a human dressed as, and pretending to be, a mermaid…who could only speak in character. What she wanted to talk about was her friends Flounder and Sebastian, and I couldn’t do anything but keep myself from asking how hard it was for her to get her tail on.

Sensory, cognitive, and social – my major autistic support needs. Unlike my medical diagnosis suggests, I don’t like to think of myself as “having” autism – as though my autism is a backpack that I am carrying around. This perspective assumes I can take my autism off and set it down after a long day of hauling it from place to place. I can’t do that. My autism is me, and I am my autism – they are one in the same and all of my needs inform my world, including the creation of this book.

As an autistic psychologist, I have borne witness to a lot of anti-autistic sentiment in the mental health fields. I see this anti-autistic flavor in how we talk about autistic clients – as though they are other, as though they lack empathy, and, harkening back to how psychiatrist Leo Kanner described autistic children 82 years ago: as though they live “in a shell.” I see the anti-autistic sentiment in how we treat autistic people – forcing them to behave in ways unnatural to them and punishing them for being themselves – sometimes with restraints, seclusion, and electric shock, as is still practiced to this day in the Judge Rotenburg Center in Canton, Massachusetts. We have systemically dehumanized autistic people to the point of second-class citizenship, and this manifests in how we practice and interact with autistic people. Unsupportive and dehumanizing work environments pushed me out of a few jobs in my life and almost pushed me out of my own psychology training…twice.

Therefore, this book fills a need that I saw in the helping fields – a need for more accessible information about what autism is, who autistic people are, and how we can best support them. A book to rehumanize autistic people, and our treatment of them. To the teachers, educational assistants, and clinicians in the room: at the end of the day, you aren’t intervening with a person’s autism, you’re working with an autistic person.  

Photo by Danica Ferris

Now you know some of the contexts that this book was borne out of. I began writing this book with the intent to release it online for free, as is common with a lot of disability community work, with the help my previous institution, Valparaiso University, and in partnership with an autistic nonprofit called Autistics Unmasked. However, as we got into the writing process, we couldn’t stop. My co-author and I, another autistic psychologist without whom this book would not exist, began feverishly pouring all of our experience working with autistic clients into our Google Doc. The book took on a life of its own beyond what we expected.

My cognitive needs towards systemization helped with writing: I could take it step-by-step, rather than being overwhelmed by the whole. This was a benefit to me in this process – not a weakness. The book reflects this cognitive style – each chapter can be consumed in isolation of the others. Even my differences with connections to my internal bodily cues were advantageous in some ways: being able to write for 8 hours on end without taking time to eat, drink, or use the bathroom is not the healthiest approach to work but it is a capitalist’s dream. This allowed me to co-write our book in record time.

When I approached my previous academic librarian with the chapters we had drafted, he looked directly into my eyes – which I didn’t particularly care for – and asked: “have you considered submitting this to traditional academic publishers?”  

It hadn’t occurred to me that this could be a teaching text, particularly one that people would be willing to pay money for. But, I took my librarian’s advice seriously – as you always should. I spent hours learning how to write a book proposal – another feature of my own autistic cognitive style, which permits me to focus very deeply on individual topics for long periods of time – and I sent proposals to eight academic book publishers. After a couple of offers, we settled with Bloomsbury and their imprint Bloomsbury Academic – which publishes some pretty cool academic works, including the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Bloomsbury also publishes a couple series of small indie fiction books, like one called A Court of Thorns and Roses and another called Harry Potter. I hope the popularity of our book doesn’t overshadow those.

Our publication came out quickly – about a year after submission – because we had already written most of the content and sourced much of the art. Because we truly believe in the autistic community mantra – that there should be ‘nothing about us without us’ – our book is completely created by neurodivergent people, mostly autistic. My autistic colleague, Dr. Audrey Scaer, and I edited the book and wrote seven of the eight chapters. Chapter 3, an invited submission, was written by a pediatric speech-language pathologist who works with autistic kids and lives with ADHD (she also happens to be my wife, which is by far the least interesting thing about her). Another neurodivergent speech-language pathologist served as an early reader for that chapter. Our cover art and the art in chapter 1 were created by two different autistic graphic designers. We wanted this to be a community endeavor, and our publisher fully supported that, even giving us a lot of leeway with the cover design – often a feature of books left to an internal design team. Even many of the early reviewers of the work were neurodivergent and disabled professionals – that’s right, there are more autistic and ADHD medical professionals than you might think. There is this pervasive sentiment in our helping and education fields that the disabled are the ones who need the help; not that they are themselves the helpers. I’m here as living proof that this is a myth.

Photo by Danica Ferris

Disability is one of the largest minority classes in the world, with estimates indicating that upwards of 25% of people are disabled – including physical, psychological, and cognitive disabilities. This past July, the federal government established the Canada Disability Benefit (CDB) to provide direct federal support to people with disabilities between the ages of 18 and 64 who are low-income – the maximum benefit is $200/month. Like other provinces, Alberta maintains its own financial support program for disabled people, called Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH). After the federal government announced the Canada Disability Benefit, Alberta announced that they will be deducting Canada Disability Benefit payments dollar-for-dollar from AISH payments. That means, unlike in every other province, disabled Albertans will not see an increase in their monthly financial support. In fact, because Alberta has decided to treat the Canada Disability Benefit as income, disabled peoples’ access to other provincial benefits can be in jeopardy – even though they will not see an increase in their monthly financial support. We are, once again, treating disabled people as second-class citizens.

I don’t receive AISH or CDB. I am extraordinarily lucky and privileged to have a disability that allows me to be seen as useful by our capitalistic system, to have found a job that accommodates my disability and allows me to work, and to have a wife who accepts my need for interdependence – many disabled people don’t have these life circumstances and rely on disability benefits to survive. For disabled community members here in Canada who do rely on these benefits, they are devastated. The Awareness Leader for the Canadian Down Syndrome Society, Paul Sawka, wrote an open letter to Danielle Smith and Jason Nixon, Minister of Assisted Living and Social Services, about this provincial decision. I would like to read that letter to you:

Dear Danielle Smith and Jason Nixon,

My name is Paul Sawka. I am the Awareness Leader for the Canadian Down Syndrome Society. I am also part of the Down Syndrome community here in Calgary. I am proud to live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

I am writing to you because I am unhappy, sad, and hurt. You have decided to claw back my AISH because of the Canada Disability Benefit. It should never be clawed back. Not at all.

This decision is going to damage people. It is going to damage the way that I get my AISH. It will change the way I get my income.

Here in our country, here in Canada and in Calgary, I have parents who are trying to protect me. I don’t want my parents to have to worry about me. I want to keep living independently and not have to go live with my parents. I want my mom and dad to be able to enjoy being retired and travel around the world.

I am saying this, not just for myself, but on behalf of many people. People who I know in the Down syndrome community and through Special Olympics and everyone who gets AISH like me. Many people have a low income and we need money to really have a home to live in and to have friends and go to school and work. You don’t want us to get the top up from the CDB. How does that make you feel?

It is unfair because no other province is doing this. I don’t understand why you would want to take help away from people like me, especially when it is so expensive to live. It is so very wrong and this is making us very unhappy. You really, truly just can’t be doing this. Why can’t the government help people instead of hurting them?

Please don’t take away this benefit. Don’t hurt us like this. We need your support to live good, independent lives.

I hear the pain in Paul’s words. Unlike him, and most of you, I can’t vote against this type of policy, because I am not a citizen of Canada. My voice is less powerful than yours in that way. But what I can do, instead, is use this platform to encourage you to make use of your voices and your votes. Call and speak to your MLA about this AISH decision. Make your voice heard or support organizations who are involved in collective action. An organization on the front-line of this fight is Inclusion Lethbridge, a local disability non-profit. All of my author proceeds from today’s sales will be donated to Inclusion Lethbridge, to help them help local families struggling with these benefit claw backs and to support the other great programs and events they run.

I hope this isn’t too unpopular of a decision, but I’m going to show my geographic roots and end with a quote from a U.S. Vice President. In 1977, Hubert Humphrey said that the morality of a government is tied to how it treats three groups of people: “those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.” My hope with this book is that it does a small part in re-humanizing autistic people, in shedding light on the shadows they’ve been forced to live in for so long.

Thank you.