Facebook Live Q&A with Sonny Hallett and Colin Kerr

Autistic people are more likely than non-autistic people to suffer from mental health difficulties, but they are also likely to encounter problems when trying to access counselling to help with their mental health. We used a survey to collect the experiences of autistic adults who have accessed counselling. We asked respondents what their counselling experience was like; what worked well, what didn’t work well, and what changes they’d like to see in counselling approaches for autistic people. We also interviewed some counsellors about their experiences of working with autistic clients to add extra background to our findings.
 
The results suggest that there are specific accommodations and approaches that could be really helpful for a lot of autistic people in counselling, and also that there are consistent problems that come up for a lot of autistic people when counselling doesn’t go so well. Our report looks into what these helpful approaches and challenges might be, and proposes a series of recommendations for practitioners and services.
 

This research and report is entirely led by autistic people with relevant knowledge and expertise, and informed overwhelmingly by autistic contributors and editors, with the support of AMASE (Autistic Mutual Aid Society Edinburgh).

View the report here

About Sonny

Sonny Hallett is an autistic trainer, advocate, and co-founder of AMASE (Autistic Mutual Aid Society Edinburgh). They are lead author of a 2018 report investigating the barriers affecting autistic people in accessing mental health support in Scotland, and involved in research around autistic identity, culture and belonging, and cross-neurotype communication. 

They are particularly interested in how counselling can be adapted to better suit autistic needs, how counsellors can be trained to better understand neurodivergent (and other minority) perspectives, and how being autistic intersects with other identities, including gender, sexuality and ethnicity. 

They are currently training to become a qualified counsellor.

Sonny can be found on Twitter and Medium.

About Colin

Colin Kerr is an integrative mental health counsellor predominantly working with adults who have experienced interpersonal trauma growing up and who struggle with a range of psychological, physiological and emotional distress. He has an interest in the overlap of autistic experience and distress.

As well as seeing a small number of clients privately, Colin works as a voluntary counsellor with a community health project, co-facilitates psychoeducational groups for mental health issues and has been working for the last year with Sonny Hallett researching and developing resources for counsellors and autistic adults.

Colin is a Practitioner Member with COSCA – the professional body for counselling and psychotherapy in Scotland.

He is also currently exploring his own autistic identity.

You can view Colin’s website. He can also be found on Twitter.