UCLA Tarjan Center forum tackles disability services, misinformation and mental health

When people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families encounter barriers in the very systems designed to support them, the gap between raising a concern and seeing real change can feel insurmountable. That tension between advocacy and institutional action sits at the heart of the UCLA Tarjan Center’s 2026 Forum in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities, a free, virtual event scheduled for Friday, Oct. 23, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Pacific time. The daylong gathering will bring together state leaders, researchers, clinicians, advocates, family members and people with lived experience to examine some of the most pressing questions facing the developmental disability community, from how government agencies translate community input into policy, to how families navigate conflicting information, to how mental health and educational systems can better serve neurodivergent people across the lifespan.

The forum opens with a conversation between Pete Cervinka, Director of the California Department of Developmental Services, and Dr. Jasper Estabillo, Director of Training at the UCLA Tarjan Center, in a session titled “From Advocacy to Action: Building Better Disability Services.” The discussion arrives at a moment of significant transition in California’s developmental services system, and it is framed by a newly launched three-year partnership between UCLA and the state department focused on employment, leadership development and access to disability information. That initiative combines advocacy training, UCLA’s PEERS for Careers employment readiness program, individualized coaching and paid internship opportunities at UCLA or the Department of Developmental Services, while also expanding community training and accessible resources statewide.

Cervinka has argued that improving systems can begin with something deceptively simple: giving people direct access to their own information. In a pre-forum interview with Tarjan Center Disability Rights Advocate Holly Oliver, he drew an analogy to everyday financial life, noting that very few people would accept a bank that did not allow them to log in from their own computer and retrieve their own records. The comparison underscores a broader structural critique, that the data and documentation generated about people with developmental disabilities often remain locked within agency systems rather than being available to the individuals themselves, limiting their ability to self-advocate, verify services and participate as equal partners in their own care.

The opening session will examine the mechanics of that transformation in detail. Cervinka and Estabillo plan to explore how the Department of Developmental Services incorporates community priorities into its planning, how it uses data to identify disparities in service delivery across regions and populations, how it measures whether services are actually working, and how it creates accountability for following through on commitments. For advocates, these questions get at the perennial frustration of public comment processes that collect testimony without producing visible results. The forum’s framing suggests a deliberate attempt to move beyond symbolic inclusion toward mechanisms that can be audited, measured and improved over time.

Dr. Yasamin Bolourian, Director of Outreach and Dissemination at the UCLA Tarjan Center, articulated the intellectual stakes of the event. She observed that it is easy to say institutions value lived experience, while the harder question is what they do differently after hearing it. Her stated goal is to place self-advocates and family members in the same rooms, virtual or otherwise, as the people who make policy, provide care and conduct research, so that accountability questions are asked directly rather than filtered through intermediaries. That design principle, pairing professional expertise with lived experience throughout the program, recurs in nearly every session on the agenda.

Bolourian will also moderate a panel titled “Who Do You Trust? Navigating Mistrust and Misinformation in Disability Spaces,” which addresses a problem that has grown more acute in the social media era. People with disabilities and their families now receive information from an unprecedented range of sources, including peer-reviewed research, service providers, government agencies, advocacy organizations, online communities and personal networks, and these sources frequently contradict one another. The panel will examine how individuals weigh conflicting claims and decide whom to believe. Panelists include UCLA researcher Dr. Rujuta Wilson, Disability Rights California Executive Director Andy Imparato, Special Needs Network founder Areva Martin, and self-advocates Wesley Witherspoon and Kathleen Barajas, ensuring that the discussion of trust includes the perspectives of those most affected by misinformation.

Mental health constitutes the second major pillar of the forum. Clinical psychologist Dr. Tony Attwood, internationally known for his work on autism, will present on mental health and neurodevelopmental disabilities in a session moderated by Dr. Elizabeth Laugeson, Director of the UCLA Tarjan Center. Laugeson emphasized that many young people with neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism and ADHD, experience anxiety, depression and loneliness, and that understanding these concerns requires looking beyond a diagnosis to consider what is happening in a young person’s everyday life at school, at home and in the community. This ecological framing reflects a growing consensus in developmental science that psychiatric symptoms in neurodivergent youth cannot be treated as inevitable consequences of diagnosis, but must be understood in relation to environmental stressors, social exclusion and the fit between individual needs and surrounding supports.

Attwood’s presentation will be followed by a panel moderated by UCLA psychiatrist Dr. Brandon Ito, featuring Dr. Kashia Rosenau from UC-LEND, Dr. Laurie Stephens from The Help Group, self-advocates Kecia Weller and Olivia Raskin, and parent advocate Sarah Fetter. The panel will examine how mental health support can better reflect the experiences and priorities of people with developmental disabilities, a population that historically has been underserved by mainstream psychiatric services. Research consistently shows elevated rates of anxiety, depression and social isolation among people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, alongside well-documented barriers to accessing care, including diagnostic overshadowing, communication barriers and clinicians’ limited training in neurodevelopmental conditions. By placing clinicians and self-advocates on the same panel, the forum aims to identify concrete adjustments to service design rather than abstract calls for awareness.

The forum will conclude with a turn to education, tracing neurodiversity-affirming approaches from elementary school through higher education. Dr. Jan Blacher, a Distinguished Researcher at UC Riverside and UCLA, will discuss how educational practices can move beyond deficit-oriented models toward approaches that recognize and build on neurodivergent students’ strengths across K-12 and postsecondary settings. Crystal Lam, a neurodivergent community health worker and advocate, will respond as a community discussant, and Dr. Christine Moody, Postsecondary Education and Employment Specialist at the UCLA Tarjan Center, will moderate. The session reflects a broader shift in the field, as universities expand supported education programs and school districts grapple with how to prepare neurodivergent students not merely for graduation but for meaningful employment and adult community life, themes that connect directly to the employment partnership announced between UCLA and the state.

The Tarjan Center, a federally designated University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities, serves as a bridge between UCLA and community organizations, government agencies, policymakers, people with disabilities and their families, with a mission to advance self-determination, inclusion and quality of life. In keeping with that mission, the forum is designed for maximal accessibility: registration is free and open to the public, audience members may submit questions during sessions, and live interpretation will be available in American Sign Language, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Korean and Tagalog, with Zoom captioning in 35 languages. Recordings and related plain-language conversations will be shared after the event, extending its reach to audiences who cannot attend live. For a field in which research, policy and lived experience too often travel on separate tracks, the forum represents an attempt to convene all three in a single conversation, and to insist that the measure of success is not what is said on the day, but what changes afterward.

Subject of Research: A virtual forum on neurodevelopmental disabilities addressing disability services, misinformation, mental health and education

Article Title: UCLA forum explores pressing issues in disability services, misinformation, mental health and education

Article References: UCLA forum explores pressing issues in disability services, misinformation, mental health and education. (n.d.). Original publication

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Keywords: UCLA Tarjan Center, developmental disabilities, California DDS, self-advocacy, misinformation, mental health, autism, ADHD, neurodiversity, education, employment, accessibility