All licensed and/or credentialed neurodiversity-affirming therapists are eligible to join the Therapist Neurodiversity Collective if they meet membership criteria and agree to practice by the Collective’s guidelines.
(e.g. Speech-Language Pathologist, Occupational Therapist, LCSW, Mental Health Counselor, Psychologist, etc.)
A membership designed for Licensed, Credentialed Neurodiversity-Affirming Therapists:
- Receive innovative, evidence-based, and neurodiversity-focused training on your own schedule.
- Each educational webinar recording includes the accompanying handouts and an individualized, dated, and time-stamped certificate of attendance that most credentialing organizations will count as a professional development activity.
- Active vetted members may list their neurodiversity-affirming therapy practice in the Collective’s Online Directory. There is no fee to be listed in the directory. People are actively seeking out neurodiversity-affirming therapists. Help them find you!
Active Collective Members get access to
- members’ only communications from Therapist Neurodiversity Collective.
- all of the Collective’s upcoming live events when the member registers for them through the member’s portal with accompanying individualized, dated, and time-stamped certificates of attendance.
- all of the Collective’s neurodiversity-paradigm-aligned on-demand education with accompanying individualized, dated, and time-stamped certificates of attendance. This includes on-demand access to all past events. (Active members automatically receive on-demand access to newly recorded educational webinars approximately 20 days after each Live Event concludes.)
- access to a carefully curated compilation of research studies, white papers, and scholarly articles arranged by relevant topic and associated with neurodivergent-affirming practices. Access is solely for use in non-commercial research and/or private study for general education knowledge.
- opportunities to take action with us in human rights advocacy and activism campaigns.
- upon practice vetting, list your practice on the Therapist Neurodiversity Collective’s provider directory. Our mission is to supply free public access to neurodivergent-affirming therapists who agree to practice with our ethics and values.
Licensed and/or Credentialed Therapists
Annual Professional Development Membership – $149
Membership application is open to individual practicing therapists whose licenses and/or credentials can be verified online.
Individual therapists may apply to become an official Collective member if they agree to uphold our ethics and values.
Practice memberships are not available.
Evidence-Based, Neurodiversity-Affirming Therapy Practices
- Get updates from cutting-edge researchers.
- Learn about contemporary research covering topics that aren’t widely known such as interoception, alexithymia, The Double Empathy Problem, Diversity in Social Intelligence. Autistic Masking and Camouflage, Monotropism.
- Learn how to conduct respectful, empathetic, neurodiversity-affirming assessments and write strength-based reports using respectful, identity-first language.
- Learn how to write therapy goals in co-production with clients and families that
- Improve the self-determined quality of a client’s life, based on the client’s physical (sensory), emotional, and psychological well-being wants, and needs, and not on “normalization”.
- Foster autonomy and teach clients to protest effectively, and to provide or retract consent.
- Support sensory integration and processing rather than targeting tolerance and extinction.
- Foster autistic and other neurodivergent identities rather than training autistic masking through traditional social skills therapy approaches.
- Target self-advocacy, self-determination, and personal agency (and why these objectives are so important).
- Target self-determined client objectives that solve problems, meet individualized client needs, and help them achieve their personal goals.
- Develop authentic, robust communication in the mode determined by the client.
- Teach your clients how to establish and maintain their personal boundaries and respect the boundaries of those around them.
- Learn why eliminating barriers and recommending and implementing environmental supports, modifications, and accommodations are just as important as teaching skills.
- Learn why access to AAC is a human right, why AAC therapy must shift to focus on autonomy and authentic communication, and why AAC modeling is a best practice.
- Learn why training autism acceptance to family members, educators, and professional peers is vital.
- Learn how acquired neurodivergent patients have their autonomy violated by providers and why our practices must change.
Applicants for Collective membership agree to uphold Therapist Neurodiversity Collective’s Ethics & Values
- Members are advocates for Disability Rights and Civil Rights
- Members are advocates for equitable inclusion, and unrestricted access to supports, modifications, and accommodations
- Members use ethical billing practices in all settings
- Members adhere to ethical sales of therapy/parent materials/apps/programs
- Members provide therapeutic programs that are respectful of neurodivergence, such as autistic differences and sensory processing differences, and address the individual’s specific needs as opposed to a diagnostic label
- Members practice with a presumption of competence and respect for personal agency
- Members apply a Strength-Based Approach
- Members are unapologetic in their opposition to the use of ABA, including Positive Supports and Positive Reinforcement (PBS and PBIS)
- Members use humane and trauma-informed approaches to Feeding Therapy
- Members provide access to robust AAC with core language, aided language stimulation, and modeling with no prerequisites
- Members respect Body Autonomy
- Members do not use Seclusion and Restraint in our Practices
- Members do not act as Social Skills Trainers/Interventionists
- Members practice with cognizance of the potentially harmful effects of social skills programs that promote masking
- Members will use no application of Exposure Therapy (any form of “tolerance” or “extinction”, in Vivo and Flooding, Imaginal), that potentially induces emotional distress, trauma, and PTSD. This includes CBT with exposure or tolerance components, ERP, DPT, sensory system desensitization, or any type of operative conditioning or respondent conditioning (behavior modification through conditioning)
The Therapist Neurodiversity Collective Directory page receives thousands of organic visitors every month, and TNDC receives emails almost weekly from people in search of a truly neurodiversity-affirming therapy provider in their area.
If you are a trauma-informed, neuro-affirming therapy provider, help them find YOU by listing your practice in the Directory.
A therapy practice may be listed in the TNDC website directory at no cost if the practice owner is a member of the Collective and agrees that all therapists within the practice will uphold TNDC’s ethics and values.
The Neurodiversity Movement is a Human Rights Movement.
Commercializing neurodiversity trivializes what the neurodiversity movement is all about, limiting and silencing real activism, and distorting its message and its causes. Performative neurodiversity transforms advocacy into individualized, easily marketable products and services that shut down the real purpose of the human rights movement, turning the focus of neurodiversity onto the influencers, companies, or therapists themselves.
We choose people over profits.
Therapist Neurodiversity Collective strives to offer high-quality, low-cost neurodiversity-affirming education that impacts meaningful change in therapy practices and improves the quality of life for our clients, students, and patients.
Therapist Neurodiversity Collective membership standards uphold
- Human Rights
- Disability Rights
- Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
- CMS and World Health Organization (WHO) Patient Rights and Standards
- Medical, Hospital, Residential Patient Rights
- Student Rights
- Children’s Rights
- International AAC Rights
What's the Collective's Position on Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and PBS?
The use of ABA, behavioral-based, or compliance-focused approaches in therapeutic practices are entirely unacceptable to us, including:
- The use of ABA or behavioral/compliance-based models or techniques in therapy practices, or the use of positive reinforcement. There are better ways to address behavior and therapy.
- Therapy goals with outcomes of desensitization, tolerance, or extinction.
- Therapy goals or programs designed for neuronormative social or sensory outcomes (training autistic people to mask their sensory systems, monotropic interest systems, anxiety, etc.)
- Therapies that employ the techniques of Exposure Therapy (any form of “tolerance” or “extinction”, in Vivo and Flooding, Imaginal), including CBT with exposure or tolerance therapy components, ERP, DPT, sensory system desensitization, or any type of operative conditioning or respondent conditioning (behavior modification through conditioning)
- Neurotypical social skills training. We practice differently.
Neurodiversity-affirming therapists reject compliance-based behavioral approaches or any form of ABA and do not provide therapy services for neuronormative social skills training. Collective member applicants agree to abandon the following treatment frameworks:
- Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions (NDBIs)
- Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT; Koegel et al., 2016) – NDBI
- Early Start Denver Model (ESDM; Rogers & Dawson, 2020) – NDBI
- Joint AttentionSymbolic Play, Engagement, and Regulation (JASPER; Kasari et al., 2006) – NDBI
- Incidental Teaching (McGee, 2005) – NDBI
- Project Improving Parents as Communication Teachers (Project ImPACT; Ingersoll & Wainer, 2013). – NDBI
- PECS®
- ABA + relationship-based therapy (ABA used in conjunction with DIRFloortime, SCERTS, Hanen, or similar.)
- Verbal Behavior (VB)
- VB-MAPP
- The Lovaas Approach
- Pivot Response Treatment (PRT)
- Natural Language Paradigm (NLP)
- Discrete Trial Training (DTT)
- Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention (EIBI)
- Intensive Behavioral Intervention (IBI)
- ABA Derived Errorless Learning Therapy Models
- Intensive Behavioral Intervention (IBI)
- Positive Behavior Support (PBS)
- Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS)
- Relationship Development Intervention (RDI)
- Social Thinking®
- The PEERS® Program
- Social Skills video modeling with the intent for the Autistic person to mimic Neurotypical Social Skills, and mask Autistic characteristics
- Any neurotypical Social Skills training program that teaches Autistic masking or has goals for Neurotypical Social Skills outcomes
