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

A lived experience presentation by David Gray-Hammond, Founder of NeuroHub Community Ltd.

Addiction in Autistic people is not a moral failing and it is not a mystery. It is what happens when a nervous system that was never designed for this world runs out of other options, and it is what happens when the systems that exist to help consistently refuse to hold the full complexity of a person's experience.

In this presentation, David Gray-Hammond draws on his own lived experience of addiction, misdiagnosis, and recovery to explore what it actually means to be Autistic and substance-dependent in a healthcare landscape that was not built for either reality simultaneously. He will speak to the structural Catch-22 of mental health and substance use services that each refused to engage until the other had intervened first, to the years spent under a Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis that compounded every layer of stigma he was already carrying, and to the consistent institutional denial of his Autistic experience by the professionals he encountered.

David will also speak honestly about twelve-step programmes — about why a model that works for many people failed to work for him, and about why his wellbeing actively improved when he stopped attending and began connecting with other Autistic people instead. Because what ultimately made recovery possible was not a programme, a protocol, or a professional. It was community. It was finding people who already understood what it meant to be him, and who did not ask him to be anything else.

This session will draw on the ecosystemic model to frame Autistic distress and addiction as products of a mismatch between the Autistic Bodymind and the environments it is asked to inhabit, rather than as deficits located within the individual, and will close with a direct examination of what services, commissioners, and professionals need to change if Autistic people are to have genuine access to recovery.

The presentation runs for 45 minutes and is followed by 20 minutes of open discussion.

This event 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 who wants to hear this story told without euphemism.

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

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