Collection: Working with Neurodivergent Clients

If you hesitate to put your hand up to work with neurodivergent clients, such as those with ADHD or on the autism spectrum, you are not alone, but you don’t need to fear. This collection offers a raft of courses – both video and text – which shed light on how to work successfully with children, teens, and adults who are not neurotypical, and it even helps you to understand the core needs (often unmet) of parents who have autistic children. Unfortunately, the incidence of anxiety, depression, and trauma is much higher for neurodivergent individuals than neurotypical ones, but the different needs of those with conditions such as ADHD and autism means that special skills and strategies are crucial to success. Counselling Trauma Affected Clients with Diverse Abilities offers you best-practice strategies to work in a trauma-informed way, creating safety in part by viewing clients through a sociocultural lens. Similarly, anxiety and depression are rife for those with autism, so Autism and Depression helps you to understand the alexithymia and sense of overwhelm that create the depression.

PTSD in Autistic Adults: Understanding the Causes, Symptoms, & Support for Suicide Prevention stresses the need for cultural competence, appropriate communication skills, and coping strategies for neurodivergent adults who have trauma. The lecturers of that course also offer a course emphasising the importance of identifying contextual factors which may inadvertently cause harm to those with autism. Thus, in Autistic Patients: The Need for Providers to Embrace Different Thinking, you learn about invalidating assumptions, presumed competence, ableism, the felt need of those with autism to mask, and providers who do not clearly define expectations.

Specifically for adolescents, the video course, OnTrac: A CBT Based Manualised Group Program for Adolescents with ADHD, takes you through a manualised program session by session in which most of the chapters provide psychoeducation, help with adaptive thinking, and practical coping skills. These aspects also appear in the two text courses, Working with ADHD in Children and Adolescents and Working with ADHD in Adults. These are separate courses because the presentation of ADHD (and therefore how we should respond) differs in one age band from the other. Finally, this collection tends to your clients who are parents of a child with autism spectrum disorder, identifying eight themes of core concerns for such parents and how you can help them meet their all-too-commonly ignored needs in the course, Eight Core Themes from Parents Who Have Raised a Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder