The study, published in SN Social Sciences by researchers at the University of Fortaleza, focused on seven children aged nine to eleven, all with a documented clinical diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder, enrolled in the fourth and fifth grades of elementary school. Each child had just taken part in the Young Scientists Project, a structured visit to the university’s Morphofunctional Sciences Laboratory designed specifically to accommodate the sensory, communicative, and learning profiles of students with autism. During the visit, the children handled non-toxic anatomical models of bones, muscles, and organs, explored interactive software, watched educational videos, and tried simple experiments, all under the guidance of university professors and researchers wearing white lab coats, masks, and gloves.

Crucially, the drawing task was not administered on the spot. To capture consolidated mental representations rather than immediate sensory recall, the researchers waited approximately twenty-four hours before asking the children, in a quiet and familiar classroom, to follow the standard DAST instruction: draw a scientist. No additional guidance was given, and any text that appeared in the drawings was included spontaneously by the children. The researchers then analyzed the seven images using an adapted version of the Draw-a-Scientist Test Checklist, a standardized coding framework that scores features such as lab coats, glasses, laboratory instruments, chemical formulas, computers, and gender cues.

The coding process itself was unusual. As an exploratory screening step, the team fed high-resolution digital copies of the drawings to ChatGPT-4o, a multimodal vision-language model, with a standardized prompt asking it to evaluate the images against the core DAST checklist indicators. Two human researchers then independently audited the model’s textual descriptions against the original physical drawings, correcting misclassifications and adding contextual interpretation. In line with Springer Nature’s guidelines on responsible artificial intelligence use, the AI was never treated as an autonomous codifier; all final coding decisions remained with the human researchers, who explicitly acknowledge that no formal inter-rater reliability testing, such as Cohen’s kappa, was performed in this pilot phase.

The results paint a picture of remarkable persistence. Six of the seven drawings—85.7 percent—contained male visual cues such as short hair or traditionally male clothing, while only one drawing featured a female-coded scientist, identifiable by long hair and a headband accessory. Four drawings placed the scientist in a laboratory environment, and three included specific laboratory instruments such as glassware and experimental apparatus. Just one drawing showed a lab coat. None of the children drew glasses, disheveled hair, books or papers, chemical formulas, or computer technology. Representations of scientists working in the field, using digital tools, or engaging with the broader modern scientific enterprise were entirely absent from the cohort’s output.

One drawing stood out from the conventional pattern. Rather than a laboratory, it depicted what the researchers interpreted as an office or clinical setting, complete with chairs, a desk, and a wall-mounted height measurement scale, accompanied by the spontaneously written word METICO—a phonetic misspelling of the Portuguese word for doctor. The researchers suggest this child’s representation may reflect the healthcare and morphology elements of the previous day’s laboratory experience, where anatomical models and researchers in clinical attire featured prominently. Without post-drawing interviews, however, the team is careful to frame such interpretations as contextual readings rather than conclusions about the child’s inner mental model, noting that categorizing such features strictly as conventional laboratory equipment risks oversimplifying the child’s intent.

The authors are equally careful about what the gender findings do and do not mean. The predominance of male-coded figures, they argue, should not be read as proof that these children consciously hold fixed gender stereotypes. Instead, it reflects how historically consolidated images of scientists serve as readily accessible graphical templates for young learners, a pattern documented repeatedly since Chambers first introduced the Draw-a-Scientist Test in 1983. The visual presence of male indicators and laboratory equipment is a descriptive finding about graphic tropes, not a definitive window into underlying beliefs—a distinction the study maintains rigorously throughout its analysis.

The pilot’s limitations are considerable and openly acknowledged. With only seven participants, no statistical analysis is possible, and the sample cannot represent the enormous heterogeneity of neurodivergent learners, whose cognitive and communicative profiles vary widely. There was no neurotypical control group for comparison, no categorization of participants’ granular clinical profiles, and no draw-and-tell interviews to clarify ambiguous graphic elements. The twenty-four-hour interval between the laboratory visit and the drawing task means recent experiential retention cannot be ruled out as an influence. The researchers also note that the classic prompt itself tends to elicit cultural stereotypes rather than nuanced personal views, and they recommend that future studies try alternative instructions, such as asking children to draw a scientist they admire, alongside structured verbal interviews and formal dual-coding frameworks for evaluating AI-assisted analysis.

Why does this small study matter beyond its sample size? Because neurodivergent individuals may be among the most under-tapped talent pools in science. Research cited by the authors indicates that people with autism often display above-average abilities in pattern recognition, memorization, and mathematics, and that neurodiverse thinkers frequently perceive problems and solutions in ways that drive innovation. Yet these same individuals face systemic barriers to science engagement and identity formation, and they often lack equitable access to STEM learning opportunities. If the figure of the scientist that children carry in their minds shapes their motivation and their sense of who belongs in science, then understanding how neurodivergent children visualize that figure is a first step toward building pedagogical strategies that help them see themselves in it.

The study’s working hypotheses point toward concrete educational experiments. Science curricula, the authors suggest, could move beyond the traditional chemistry laboratory to showcase field research, computational modeling, and healthcare innovation. Exposure to diverse role models—including neurodivergent researchers, women, and other underrepresented groups—could help students build personal identification with STEM roles. Multimodal, sensory-adapted learning tools such as interactive anatomical models, visual schedules, and accessible digital platforms offer a promising route for engaging neurodivergent learners on their own terms. The experience of Drawing 3, with its clinical setting and phonetically spelled doctor, hints that even a single sensory-rich laboratory visit can begin to broaden a child’s mental model of scientific practice beyond media-driven stereotypes. Whether that broadening can be sustained, generalized, and translated into lasting scientific identity among neurodivergent children is precisely the question this modest but methodologically inventive pilot study was designed to raise—and future research with larger cohorts, longitudinal designs, and direct measures of student engagement will now have to answer it.

Subject of Research: How neurodivergent children with autism represent scientists through drawings, assessed with the Draw-a-Scientist Test and AI-assisted visual coding

Article Title: The image of scientists among neurodivergent children: a pilot study

Article References: da Silva, A. M. A., Eloy, Y. R. G., do Carmo e Sá, H. L., & Campos, A. R. (2026). The image of scientists among neurodivergent children: a pilot study. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 539. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01842-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01842-6

Keywords: Draw-a-Scientist Test, neurodivergence, autism spectrum disorder, scientist stereotypes, STEM education, inclusive education, science identity, ChatGPT-4o, multimodal AI, elementary school, Brazil, pilot study

The study took a mixed-methods approach, pairing quantitative questionnaires with open-ended questions that invited participants to describe their experiences in their own words. Each student completed the WHOQOL-BREF-ID, a brief quality-of-life instrument adapted for people with intellectual disabilities, and the WHOQOL-DIS, a module developed by the World Health Organization specifically to assess quality of life in people with disabilities. These instruments capture domains such as physical health, psychological well-being, social relationships, and the environment, along with disability-specific dimensions like autonomy, social inclusion, and discrimination. The researchers then analyzed the quantitative data using nonparametric statistics, a choice appropriate for the skewed distributions and modest sample sizes typical of this kind of research, while the written responses underwent reflexive thematic analysis, a qualitative technique in which researchers systematically identify recurring patterns of meaning while remaining aware of how their own perspectives shape interpretation.

One of the most striking quantitative findings concerned students with co-occurring autism spectrum disorder and ADHD. These students reported significantly poorer psychological well-being than students with autism alone, and lower social inclusion than students with ADHD alone. The finding matters clinically because autism and ADHD frequently co-occur, and research has repeatedly suggested that the combination can amplify executive-function demands, sensory challenges, and social difficulties beyond what either condition produces on its own. The Brazilian results, though the authors describe them as preliminary, hint that this doubly neurodivergent subgroup may be slipping through the cracks of support systems organized around single diagnostic categories. A university that offers autism-specific services and separate ADHD accommodations may not be equipped to serve students who need both at once, in an integrated and individualized way.

Socioeconomic status emerged as a second powerful predictor of how students fared. Using the classification system of the Brazilian Association of Research Companies, the team found that students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds reported better environmental quality of life, greater social inclusion, and higher disability-related quality of life. In practical terms, money appears to buffer the barriers that universities and cities impose: access to private psychological care, quieter housing, reliable transportation, assistive technology, and the freedom to reduce course loads without financial catastrophe. In a country with steep educational inequality, the finding suggests that neurodivergent students from poorer families face a double disadvantage, contending simultaneously with the structural obstacles of their institutions and the material constraints of their households.

The qualitative half of the study gave those numbers a human voice. Across the open-ended responses, four major challenges recurred: insufficient institutional support, overwhelming academic demands, stigma, and barriers to social participation. Students described support offices that existed on paper but delivered little in practice, professors who were unaware of or skeptical toward accommodations, and assessment formats that penalized the very cognitive differences, such as difficulties with timed written exams or multi-step instructions, that defined their neurodivergence. Socially, many reported feeling invisible or misunderstood on campus, excluded from study groups and informal networks that are often crucial to academic persistence. These accounts align with a growing international literature showing that the transition to higher education is a period of heightened vulnerability for neurodivergent students, who frequently arrive without the scaffolding that schools and families provided earlier in their lives.

Importantly, the researchers did not frame their participants solely as a population of deficits. The qualitative analysis also surfaced students’ strengths and their concrete recommendations for change. Participants described capacities such as intense focus on topics of interest, creative problem-solving, and distinctive perspectives that enriched their coursework. Their proposals for more accessible universities included clearer and earlier communication about accommodations, training for faculty, sensory-friendly physical spaces, flexible assessment options, and mentoring programs that connect neurodivergent students with one another. The study’s framing reflects a neurodiversity-affirming lens, which treats neurological variation as a natural feature of the human population rather than a defect to be corrected, and which asks institutions to adapt to students rather than requiring students to mask their differences to survive.

The authors are candid about the limits of their perspective. In an unusual positionality statement, they note that they are speech-language pathology and educational psychology researchers and clinicians based in Brazil, that none of them identify as neurodivergent, and that this may have influenced their interpretation of participants’ lived experiences. To mitigate that risk, they engaged in reflexive analysis throughout the project, checked for alignment between the quantitative and qualitative findings, and drew on existing scholarship produced by and with neurodivergent people. They also acknowledge that their status as university-based researchers may have shaped how openly students disclosed their experiences. This kind of transparency is increasingly expected in high-quality qualitative research, and it gives readers a framework for weighing the findings rather than accepting them uncritically.

Methodologically, the study has the constraints typical of cross-sectional designs. With 80 participants recruited at a single point in time, it can describe associations but cannot establish causation; the link between socioeconomic status and quality of life, for example, could run through many unmeasured pathways. The sample, drawn from Brazilian higher education institutions, may not represent neurodivergent students who never reached university, a group likely facing even greater barriers. The WHOQOL instruments, while validated, were not designed specifically for neurodivergent populations without intellectual disability, and self-report measures in any population are subject to mood and recall effects. The authors present the co-occurring ASD-ADHD findings as preliminary and call for larger, longitudinal studies that could track how quality of life changes across the university trajectory and identify which interventions actually help.

Even with those caveats, the implications are substantial. The study argues that the barriers neurodivergent students face extend well beyond the academic accommodations that most inclusion policies address, reaching into institutional culture, social life, and the physical and informational accessibility of the campus itself. In Brazil, where federal legislation guarantees educational inclusion but implementation varies widely between institutions, the findings offer an evidence base for comprehensive, neurodiversity-affirming strategies rather than piecemeal fixes. For universities everywhere, the message is uncomfortable but clear: admitting neurodivergent students is not the same as including them, and the students who struggle most may be those whose needs do not fit neatly into a single diagnostic box. As neurodivergent enrollment continues to grow, the institutions that thrive will be those that listen to students’ own accounts of what helps, and that treat accessibility as a property of the whole environment rather than a service delivered to a few.

Subject of Research: Quality of life and academic experiences of neurodivergent university students in Brazilian higher education

Article Title: Quality of life and university experiences of neurodivergent students in Brazilian higher education

Article References: Tsalamatas, I. S., Ferreira, H. A., Nosari Santos, M. E., Cardilli-Dias, D., & Molini-Avejonas, D. R. (2026). Quality of life and university experiences of neurodivergent students in Brazilian higher education. BMC Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-026-08622-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12888-026-08622-9

Keywords: neurodivergence, autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, quality of life, higher education, Brazil, WHOQOL, social inclusion, stigma, institutional support, mixed methods, neurodiversity

The clinical stakes are considerable. Shared decision-making is the backbone of contemporary serious illness care: clinicians lay out medically reasonable options, elicit patient values, and together arrive at a plan that reflects what matters most to the person in the chair. To do this, medicine has built an arsenal of validated instruments—structured conversation guides, advance care planning tools, and decision aids tested in diverse populations. Yet as the Emory team emphasizes, not one of these tools has been validated in neurodivergent populations. The frameworks assume a particular style of cognition: comfort with abstraction, tolerance for open-ended hypotheticals, and fluency in the ambiguous language of goals and values. For many autistic patients, those assumptions simply do not hold.

Autism spectrum disorder, classified among neurodevelopmental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is defined by differences in social communication and interaction alongside restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior and interest. Research reviewed by the authors points to specific cognitive profiles that matter in the clinic: difficulties with conceptual reasoning and problem solving in some autistic adults, documented challenges in decision-making that people with autism themselves report, and structural language differences that can make figurative or indirect phrasing hard to parse. A question like “what would quality of life mean to you?”—a staple of palliative conversations—asks the patient to navigate abstraction, hypothetical futures, and social convention simultaneously. The authors argue that such questions can obscure rather than reveal a neurodivergent patient’s true preferences.

The Emory case illustrates how these abstract difficulties become concrete at the bedside. The patient, a man with autism spectrum disorder and multiple comorbid neuropsychiatric conditions, faced a genuinely consequential choice about deferring treatment for progressive prostate cancer. His care team was asked to assess whether he possessed decision-making capacity—a legal and clinical determination that hinges on whether a patient can understand relevant information, appreciate its application to their own situation, reason through the options, and communicate a consistent choice. Capacity assessments are already among the most nuanced evaluations in medicine; layered with autism and co-occurring psychiatric conditions, the authors write, they demand careful thought and innovative communication strategies rather than a checklist.

From this single case, the team distilled a set of practical strategies that function almost as a protocol for neurodivergence-informed serious illness conversations. First, use visual aids: converting verbal abstractions into concrete, visual representations of options, timelines, and trade-offs grounds the discussion in information the patient can directly examine. Second, avoid abstractions: instead of asking about values in the abstract, clinicians should anchor questions in specific, concrete scenarios—what a particular treatment would involve day to day, what a given side effect would actually feel like. Third, maintain a low-stimulation sensory environment: fluorescent lighting, noise, and crowded rooms are not trivial irritants for autistic patients but genuine barriers that can degrade attention, processing, and ultimately the quality of the decision itself.

The fourth strategy involves people. The authors highlight engaging key stakeholders—family members and caregivers—as partners in the decision-making process. This is not a retreat from patient autonomy but a recognition of supported decision-making, an approach increasingly endorsed in policy for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Rather than defaulting to guardianship or substituted judgment, supported decision-making keeps the patient at the center while allowing trusted people to help interpret information, frame options, and communicate preferences. In this case, the patient’s mother was intimately involved in his care and, the authors note, agreed to share the story so that other clinicians and families could learn from it.

The timing of this report is not incidental. The authors point to a rising public health concern: as adults living with autism spectrum disorder age, the population confronting cancer diagnoses, complex treatment choices, and end-of-life planning is growing rapidly. Studies cited in the report document persistent health disparities for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and surveys of autistic adults in the United Kingdom have found that healthcare adjustments—simple accommodations that improve access—are often important but frequently unavailable. Physician knowledge and experience with autistic adults remains uneven; a large integrated healthcare system study found substantial gaps in how prepared physicians felt to care for this population. The convergence of an aging neurodivergent cohort with an unadapted healthcare system is, the authors suggest, a problem medicine has not yet confronted at scale.

The report also situates the case within a broader landscape of serious illness communication tools. Structured approaches such as the Serious Illness Conversation Guide, community-based advance care planning programs like PREPARE and Project Talk, and initiatives such as The Conversation Project and Stanford’s Letter Project have all improved communication for many patients and their surrogates. Frameworks like Autistic SPACE, developed to meet the needs of autistic people in healthcare settings, address environmental and communication adjustments more broadly. But the Emory authors stress that none of the patient-facing serious illness tools has been tested specifically for neurodivergent users, leaving clinicians to improvise—case by case, conversation by conversation—without evidence-based guidance.

What emerges from the report is less a formula than a philosophy: treat communication as a clinical intervention in its own right, one that must be engineered for the individual patient. The complex impact of multiple comorbid neuropsychiatric conditions, the authors note, compounds the challenge, because capacity, communication style, and preferences can shift with psychiatric symptoms, sensory state, and context. A decision that seems settled in a quiet clinic room may need to be revisited in a hospital corridor. The strategies they propose—visual supports, concrete language, sensory regulation, and stakeholder involvement—are presented not as accommodations bolted onto standard care but as the core mechanism by which genuine shared decision-making becomes possible for neurodivergent patients.

For a medical culture increasingly attuned to neurodiversity, the case is a pointed reminder that equity in serious illness care is not only about access to treatments but access to the conversation itself. The authors thank their patient and his mother for allowing the story to be told, and their closing implication is clear: as this population ages, the field will need validated tools, trained clinicians, and systems designed from the ground up to support autistic and otherwise neurodivergent patients through the hardest decisions medicine asks anyone to make. Until then, the Emory team’s blueprint—concrete, visual, sensory-aware, and collaborative—offers clinicians a place to start.

Subject of Research: Shared decision-making and decision-making capacity in serious illness care for patients with autism spectrum disorder and neurodivergence

Article Title: Supporting Patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Neurodivergence in Serious Illness Decision-Making

Article References: Lehenaff, R., Rutledge, R. C., Kim, P., & Pinto Taylor, E. (2026). Supporting Patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Neurodivergence in Serious Illness Decision-Making. Journal of General Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10915-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11606-026-10915-4

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder, neurodivergence, shared decision-making, palliative care, prostate cancer, decision-making capacity, health communication, advance care planning, supported decision-making, health disparities, developmental disabilities, serious illness conversations

The research, led by occupational therapist Kim Tang of Curtin University together with colleagues in Australia, the United Kingdom and South Africa, used a constructivist grounded theory approach, a qualitative methodology designed to build understanding from the ground up, rooted in the perspectives of people with lived experience rather than pre-existing hypotheses. The team recruited 23 participants: 12 neurodivergent young people aged between 19 and 28, all formally diagnosed with autism or ADHD and with a co-occurring mental health condition; six parents, all mothers, two of whom disclosed their own ADHD diagnoses; and five health professionals, one of whom was also autistic. Semi-structured interviews lasting between 25 and 72 minutes formed the primary data source, followed by feedback workshops in which participants reviewed and refined the research team’s initial interpretations.

The stakes of this transition are considerable. Mental health difficulties are now the leading cause of disability among people aged 12 to 25 worldwide, and neurodivergent young people are up to three times more likely than their neurotypical peers to develop a co-occurring mental health condition. They are also more likely to need continued care into adulthood, yet paradoxically less likely to make a successful move from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, known as CAMHS, to Adult Mental Health Services, or AMHS. In most Australian jurisdictions, as in the United Kingdom, that handover occurs at the upper age boundary of 18, a threshold that participants described as arbitrary and developmentally mismatched.

The numbers within the study itself are telling. Although 11 of the 12 young participants, more than 91 per cent, had technically completed their transition to adult services, only four, roughly a third, felt they had been prepared for it. That gap between procedural completion and genuine readiness sits at the heart of the study’s findings. Young people who transition successfully to adult services tend to have better mental health outcomes than those who fall out of care, and the transition period is widely recognised as a moment of heightened risk of disengagement. For neurodivergent young people, the risk is amplified by services that often lack training in how mental health difficulties actually present in autistic people and those with ADHD.

From the analysis, three overarching categories emerged. The first concerns the provision of what participants across all three groups called neuro-affirming care, meaning care that recognises and accommodates sensory, cognitive and communication differences rather than treating them as problems to be managed away. Participants identified transparent communication about why the transition was needed and what it would involve, shared decision-making about which adult provider to see, and choice over what information was passed on in handover summaries as critical features. When clinicians understood neurodivergence, young people could spend their sessions preparing for the future rather than educating their own therapist about what autism means. As one young participant named Cameron put it, describing a therapist he had now seen for two years: “I felt heard, especially with autism. The new therapist that I’ve been seeing for two years now, understood autism.”

Where that understanding was absent, the consequences were concrete. Young people described therapeutic alliances that collapsed under the weight of preconceived ideas about how a neurodivergent person should present. “The way psychiatrists view neurodivergence and the way I present is often at odds with what they think I should be like,” said Felix, another participant. In some cases the mismatch was severe enough that young people took extended breaks from adult services altogether, precisely the disengagement that the transition literature identifies as dangerous. Others described care that felt fundamentally mismatched to their needs. “The help that was given to me wasn’t for me,” Cameron reflected. Participants also flagged the fragmentation of services into separate mental health and neurodiversity camps, with one health professional, Vivienne, observing that “knowledge is sitting in two camps, and people are very much like it’s mental health or it’s autism and ADHD, and it’s actually both.”

The second category concerned the accessibility of the mental health system itself, and here the participants’ accounts were blunt about structural failure. Access varied sharply by state and by geography, with rural young people facing fewer options than those in metropolitan areas. More strikingly, several participants reported that a formal autism or ADHD diagnosis functioned, in practice, as a barrier to referral. “It almost seemed that in WA, autism and having that diagnosis was almost an exclusion criteria for children accessing CAMHS in WA, whereas that was less so in Queensland,” one health professional, Ursula, recalled. Others described referrals that were rejected outright because of a neurodivergent diagnosis, or that simply never got completed, leaving young people feeling they had “fallen through the gap.” One participant, Ian, described being “constantly being handballed between services.”

The rigidity of the age boundary itself drew sustained criticism. Participants and parents argued for flexible or overlapping age ranges, with one parent, Olivia, suggesting “an 18 to 25 or 16 to 25 area, just for those sort of young adults, as opposed to children and adults being so separate.” Without that flexibility, some young people described feeling “kicked out of services” the moment they aged out of CAMHS, underprepared for a system that expects adults to take full agency over their care and often limits caregiver involvement, an expectation that sits awkwardly with the needs of many neurodivergent young adults who still rely on parental advocacy.

That reliance points to the study’s third and perhaps most poignant category: the informal supports, overwhelmingly parents and peers, that bridge the gap the formal system leaves open. Caregivers described providing administrative support such as completing documentation and liaising with services, practical support such as transport to appointments, informational support such as researching options, and emotional support throughout. This work reduced the cognitive load that the system otherwise dumps on young people at 18, an age at which they are legally adults but, as participants emphasised, may not feel developmentally ready to navigate complex referral pathways alone. Blake, a young participant, described his mother as “super helpful with all of that, and that took a significant weight off the struggle to access those services, because I had a parent who would advocate for me.” Peer support mattered too: Blake credited a classmate’s recommendation to a peer navigation program with making his transition “reasonably smooth.”

The study’s authors argue that these findings demand action at two levels simultaneously. At the provider level, clinicians need training in neurodivergence and in how mental health conditions present in this population, alongside the communication practices and shared decision-making that define neuro-affirming care. At the system level, they call for greater flexibility in age boundaries, clearer guidelines delineating each stakeholder’s responsibilities, and eligibility criteria that do not reject referrals on the basis of a neurodivergent diagnosis alone. They also recommend formally integrating informal supports, including peer navigators with lived experience of the transition, into transition guidelines, particularly for young people without family support. The study, co-designed with an advisory group of three neurodivergent young people who had themselves experienced the transition, acknowledges its limitations: the findings are specific to the Australian context, the sample may over-represent professionals already committed to neuro-affirming practice, and cultural and linguistic diversity was not explicitly explored. Yet the central message is hard to dispute. When formal systems constrain the care clinicians can deliver, the burden shifts silently onto young people and their families, and a system designed to support them instead depends on their unpaid resilience.

Subject of Research: The transition of neurodivergent young people from child to adult mental health services

Article Title: The Transition to Mental Health Services From the Perspectives of Neurodivergent Young People, Caregivers and Mental Health Professionals: A Constructivist Grounded Theory Approach

Article References: Tang, K., Wells, R., Thompson, C., Hill, E., Pellicano, E., & Myers, B. (2026). The Transition to Mental Health Services From the Perspectives of Neurodivergent Young People, Caregivers and Mental Health Professionals: A Constructivist Grounded Theory Approach. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07504-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07504-z

Keywords: neurodivergence, autism, ADHD, mental health services, service transition, CAMHS, AMHS, neuro-affirming care, grounded theory, caregivers, peer support, Australia