Category: Announcements

Support Autism Rights Group Highland (ARGH) – Walking the West Highland Way (July 2025)

A fundraising event from one of our citizens for a worthy cause. Further press coverage available from the Inverness Courier.

Text from ARGH below. 

This year, Joseph Redford is taking on an incredible challenge—walking the iconic West Highland Way to raise funds for Autism Rights Group Highland (ARGH).

Joseph will travel 96 miles, journeying through some of Scotland’s most breathtaking landscapes. As an added challenge, he’ll also stop at every train station between Glasgow and Arisaig, either by getting on or off a train, or both! His adventure begins on 16th July and will conclude by 30th July.

ARGH is a vital, autistic-led organisation, working tirelessly to support and advocate for autistic individuals across the Highland region and beyond. Their efforts make a real difference in promoting understanding, equality, and empowerment within the autistic community.

How You Can Help: Joseph is aiming to raise £750 to support ARGH’s important work. Every donation, no matter the size, will help ensure ARGH can continue providing crucial resources, campaigns, and support services.

If you’d like to contribute, please visit www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/support-argh.

Let’s support Joseph as he takes on this challenge, and together, we can stand in solidarity with autistic individuals and their families.

Podcast Co-Host Wanted

Audible Autism is a podcast that aims to give voice to autistic people from our own internal perspective. It is made for autistic people, by autistic people. We’re looking to talk about autism, and things that would be interesting to autistic people. We’re not trying to explain ourselves to Neurotypical people to ask them for acceptance into their world. Other people do that. This is for us.

In the last 5 years, we have released 34 episodes of Audible Autism, covering a huge variety of topics. We have released interviews with autistic therapists, dancers and civil servants, held discussions on autistic parenting, autistic pride and autistic art, hosted talks on autistic stories and lives, and produced guides to self-organisation and black history month. We aim to showcase autistic life across a wide spectrum (ahem) of experiences and interests.

Our episodes are released via Anchor which has now been acquired by Spotify. The majority of our listenership find our episodes via Spotify’s algorithm, although we would like to increase our marketing.

Our team turns over but currently involved are Odai, as co-host and producer, Luke, as co-host, and Simon, as our sound editor. Episodes are produced on a schedule that suits the current team – formerly fortnightly, they are now released as and when our team has time and availability, or for special occasions.

Due to health reasons, Odai is stepping back from his role as a co-host to focus on his role as a producer. We are therefore looking for a new co-host who can contribute to the team. The current team has talked about what new skills they would like in a new member of the team and we are particularly looking for a co-host who can demonstrate interviewing skills, who can attentively listen to our guests and ask insightful, relevant follow-up questions.

In addition to working on pre and post production, co-hosts can work with other co-hosts or by themselves to produce episodes that suit their interests. You might be asked to interview a particular guest on a subject the producer has identified as important or timely, or you might want to produce your own audioessay on a subject that is meaningful to you. We will accommodate whatever you are interested in.

Audible Autism is an autonomous project hosted within and supported by the Autistic Empire. Please read our five principles and our values to ensure you are aligned with our perspective of autism. Audible Autism team members are strongly encouraged to enrol as citizens but this is not a requirement. However, you must identify as autistic – self-identity is valid.

The team organises via Whatsapp, Basecamp and an FTP server where the audio files are stored. Episodes are recorded on Zencastr, and edited in Logic Pro.

We are not necessarily looking for long-term commitments but we would expect anyone who is interested to be with us for at least a year.

If this interests you or you have further questions, please email team@audibleautism.com. For qualified applicants, we have prepared a follow-up test on preparing a sample interview to display your skills.

Are you a young adult with ADHD?

Dear Neurodiversity in/And Creative Research Community,

My name is Leann, and I am a neurodivergent MSc student studying Clinical Mental Health Sciences at the Division of Psychiatry University College London.

I am reaching out to share a participation opportunity with members of this community. This study is part of my MSc dissertation exploring the strengths and positive experiences of young adults with ADHD (UCL Ethics ID: 2025-0842-579).

Participation offers an opportunity to reflect on and celebrate the unique strengths associated with ADHD, which many find to be an empowering experience. Your insights can help challenge negative stereotypes, contributing to a more nuanced and affirming understanding of ADHD. Through this work, we aim to help shift the broader narrative and support young people in embracing all aspects of their neurodiversity ☆

Please find more details through the link below
Thank you!
Best wishes,
Leann Ialamov (she/her)

MSc Clinical Mental Health Sciences UCL

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Sensory Profile now available in The Vault

Along with our Autism test and our ADHD test, we have now made the Sensory Profile available as an online tool.

What is the Sensory Profile?

The Sensory Profile is a widely used assessment tool originally developed by occupational therapist Dr Winnie Dunn. It is designed to help understand how individuals respond to sensory experiences in everyday environments — including sounds, textures, lights, movement and social situations.

The tool identifies patterns in the ways someone may seek out, tolerate, or avoid different sensory inputs. This can be especially valuable for autistic adults, as sensory processing differences are a core part of many autistic experiences and can influence well-being, stress levels and daily functioning.

The Sensory Profile is typically used by occupational therapists as part of a broader assessment process. It helps inform practical recommendations for adapting environments and activities to better suit an individual’s sensory needs.

We’ve made the questionnaire available here for reference, as many people find it helpful to explore their own sensory patterns. However, we should note that the tool is not especially useful when used alone. The most meaningful results come from discussing it with a therapist, who can provide guidance on interpretation and suggest practical next steps.

Due to copyright concerns, this is not publicly available and can be accessed only by citizens of the Autistic Empire in The Vault.

ADHD Test Now Available on the website

We launched the Autistic Empire website with the first online version of the AQ and EQ test, a standardised screening tool for autism. It has its issues but for people who want to consider their autistic identity against the diagnostic criteria, it will work and be understood by any clinicians you speak to.

We have now added the ASRS test for ADHD to the top bar menu as well. This is the standard questionnaire for ADHD used by clinicials as part of their assessment. A new feature that we will get round to adding to the Autism test at some point is there is a download button that will put your answers in a printable format to take to a doctor if you would like to do so.

Why do I need Maths? Guest Post at Employment Autism

Citizen Odai Quaye has published another guest post at Employment Autism, looking at the requirement of many British employers to have a maths qualification for most roles.

I’ve done all that is requested in order to show that I have a life outside of education: I have work and volunteering experience. I have undertaken a work programme through the NAS and completed an online course in understanding autism and reached out to other services. These days it feels like they benefit me only in the sense that if somebody asks me “have you tried ‘x’ ” I can say “I’ve done that”, which doesn’t amount to much.

You know what Adele, Simon Cowell and Richard Branson all have in common? None of them have a maths qualification – one’s a world conquering singer, one’s a respected record executive and TV personality, the other is one half of the duo that founded the Virgin Group. I only feel uneasy about the last example because businesspeople like to downplay how they became successful and make it seem as if they made it without any help, which is far from the truth.

Read more at Employment Autism: https://employmentautism.org.uk/why-do-i-need-maths/

Cast down your bucket: Guest Post on Employment Autism

Citizen Odai Quaye has been published speaking on his experiences being black, autistic and unemployed as a guest post on Employment Autism. This article builds on Odai’s earlier talk he gave in October 2023.

Even in this barren desert of disappointment, I’ve managed to find an oasis or two of positive things to talk about. Perhaps the most important of them being the process of learning that I don’t need to fit into anything and to embrace the grey area I fall in – the grey area that is of being a Black British (African Caribbean) person with more than one invisible mental condition and also not having a public social niche (goths, punks, ravers etc) of my own as well. The chagrin from those attempts at integration is what led to me distancing myself from others, more as a benefit to prevent me getting more bitter, and affecting relationships, but also even though it led to me being more isolated – as an only child I had already learned to appreciate my own company.

There’s real strength from that, but it doesn’t get talked about a lot, so I try to advocate to others who find that they can’t integrate or totally separate themselves. I’ve finally managed to obtain something resembling a safety network – it’s not fully formed but compared to what I had in the past it is a large improvement and I’m deeply grateful for all the people involved who’ve been in my corner so I can at least feel to some degree that I don’t have to carry everything by myself any more.

Read more at Employment Autism: https://employmentautism.org.uk/cast-down-your-bucket/

National Autistic Society’s Mental Health Professional’s Conference

This is a talk that Sarah McCulloch gave to the National Autistic Society’s Mental Health Professional’s Conference in 2022.

From Sarah: “I gave this talk from my perspective as an NHS professional but posting it to the Empire YouTube for reference. Unfortunately, this was during the pandemic and I discovered when my talk started, the webinar platform didn’t show me anyone else and I was giving the talk to myself in an empty room, which I do not respond well to, became nervous and “ummed” a lot. I do not blame them for not inviting me back! I couldn’t publish it as was because it was very pronounced so I’ve spent 18 months trying to get it edited to remove this, which has been successful but the level of edit required means that the video jumps a lot, it’s not you.”