Welcome to the Autistic Therapist Directory! A directory containing only actually autistic therapists.

We thought it would be good, as our website goes live, to tell you something about the history of the Autistic Counsellors and Psychotherapists collective and what it was created to achieve. 

There are so many stereotypes about autistic people, some true, some partially true, and some dangerous nonsense. In the last category is the opinion that autistic people lack empathy and theory of mind (the capacity to grasp that other people see things differently from oneself). If either of those things were true, then clearly autistic people would not be suited to being therapists. 

When I realised I was autistic (almost exactly ten years ago now) I was already practising as a counsellor / psychotherapist, in private practice and at a university counselling service. My experience was very unusual: I realised I was autistic at a time when my life was going particularly well, I was doing my dream job and I was planning to leave the big city and return home to the Scottish Borders. And almost everything I knew about autism came from my autistic friends whom I had met through a political group. It was an entirely positive experience. 

And then I started looking outside that group of friends and what I found was shocking; we may think things are bad now (they are), but ten years ago they were incomparably worse. 

Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) was still a mainstream approach to working with autistic children. The Sunflower Lanyard (with all its faults, it is still invaluable) did not exist; nor was the concept of invisible disabilities generally known. Almost all autism organisations, charities, university courses were run or taught by non-autistic people. Oh...hang on, that is probably still the case, though things are improving. 

The go-to people for information and / or training were Tony Attwood (not autistic) and, well, yes...Simon Baron-Cohen. He of the mindblindness theory of autism. Of the extreme male brain theory of autism. Of the empathising-systemising theory. Also not autistic.

Almost the only voice crying in what really was a wilderness was that of Murray, Lesser and Lawson: “Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism” was published in 2005, mostly to deafening silence.

Damian Milton’s epoch-making paper “On the ontological status of autism: the double empathy problem” was only two years old and unknown outside academia and the world of curious autistic researchers. “A mismatch of salience” would not appear for over two years and Luke Beardon had barely started publishing. 

All those YouTube creators such as Samantha Stein (Yo Samdy Sam), Purple Ella, Jess (“How to ADHD” – there is a huge crossover between autism and ADHD), Aucademy, NeuroClastic...hadn’t even begun. 

And then <drum roll>

Paul Micallef (Autism from the Inside – originally Aspergers from the Inside) posted his first video in March 2015.

Chris Bonnello started Autistic Not Weird in April 2015.

PARC (Participatory Autism Reseach Collective) was founded in April 2015.

Sarah Hendrickx’s first book, Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder (the second edition is called Women and Girls on the Autism Spectrum, which is a bit better!) came out in May 2015. 

I self-diagnosed in June 2015. Is there a term for jumping on a bandwagon one doesn’t even know exists, or was it simply synchronicity, a scarab moment?

For me, self-diagnosis was enough until I had my first openly autistic client. The client (who had seen many therapists) said they had never felt seen or heard before. The connection was so instant, the empathy so flawless, the “autistic click” so unmistakable, that I realised that there was something going on here. And it was something that – somehow – I had to harness. Instead of keeping my autism to myself, to be mentioned only if I needed help or “reasonable adjustments”, I needed to be out, loud and proud, and inviting autistic clients. So in May 2019 I got my diagnosis (and yes, I had to go private, because the NHS waiting list, especially for so-called “high-functioning” adults with no mental health issues, is impossibly long). And I changed my profile in the directory, and waited. 

I live in a rural area and so at first there were only a couple more autistic clients. The real difference came in the following year when, due to the COVID pandemic, therapy went online almost overnight. Instead of being confined to therapists from the local area people could access therapists from anywhere in the UK and beyond. Through an autistic friend the charity SWAN (Scottish Women’s Autism Network) contacted me, and since then my client base has been, I’d say, 90% autistic. And for the first time I found myself turning clients away for lack of space. And knew no other autistic therapists to refer on to. 

What with that, and the fact that being a therapist can be a lonely business especially when the world is locked down due to a pandemic, I thought I’d start a Facebook group for autistic therapists. Autistic Counsellors and Psychotherapists started in January 2021 with three members: myself, one trainee, and one qualified therapist. Four and a half years down the line we number over 1700 from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, India and at least five European countries. We have published a collaborative book, arranged our first in-person mini-conference, and created this website. The website, at this stage, is mostly for the directory but who knows where it will go!

The ACP Collective exists for three main reasons: to make autistic therapists available to autistic clients (we all welcome non-autists as well!); to provide peer support for each other; and for training, information, and campaigning. The group has spawned several podcasts, a training organisation, and of course the book, “On Being An Autistic Therapist”. The echo of Carl Rogers “On Becoming a Person” is intentional. 

Here’s a link to the book; as you’ll notice, we have used its cover as a theme for this website. The artwork is by one of us, Fiona Villarreal, and is called Riding the Storm. 

At the moment (June / July 2025) all the therapists in this directory are from the ACP Facebook group but we look forward to welcoming other autistic therapists. We’d love to welcome them to the Facebook group as well. You can find it here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/219116049856887.