A Journey to Social Work and Instagram Activism With the Neurocurious Therapist
“...reflect on your own practices, reflect on your own biases and training, and question, and realize that sometimes we have to unlearn certain things.”
This August (2021), A.WARE Foundation’s Executive Director, Koby, and Digital Editor, Sydney, had the pleasure of speaking in conversation with Teva Johnstone. Teva is a social worker, childhood mental health consultant and children’s therapist, and autism advocate. She runs an activism account on Instagram called the @neurocurioustherapist.
Sydney: It’s so nice to meet you. Thanks for taking your time to sit down with us. Could you start just by introducing yourself, your profession, and your instagram account where you do some incredible advocacy?
Teva: Thank you. I’m Teva Johnstone. I am a social worker. I have a master’s, MSW, in social work. I’m also a child therapist, and do you want me to go right on to Instagram?
Sydney: Sure!\
Teva: I do a lot of advocacy work for N.A.S.W. My professional association: National Association of Social Workers. I’m on one of the committees for children. And, many months back, I guess early spring, I decided we should have an autism acceptance month, a campaign on our private forum.
We have a forum for 100 thousand members, all over the country, and it’s private. It’s similar to LinkedIn, but it’s just for Social Workers. We chat about social work topics.
So I got together a team and we hosted a pretty cool autism acceptance month campaign during April of this year. Then when it ended, I still felt the drive to keep it going, and I knew I couldn’t continue to bombard my colleagues with numerous posts every single day. So I thought, I might as well move this to social media.
I kind of had an allergy to social media for a while. I took many years off. But, when I felt comfortable going back, I knew it wasn’t going to be for personal use. It was going to be for professional advocacy.
The name, Neurocurious Therapist, came in the advocacy campaign that I had in April. I and some of my team were kind of thinking about how we wanted to identify our own selves on the forum, and a few of us are still exploring our own neurodivergence. So it just kind of came to me, I played with the word. I was like, I think I'm neurocurious about my own self. Then as a therapist, we really value staying curious and so I thought it was a really good fit. That’s how neurocurious came to be. Neurocurious therapist. Ya, and it just kind of exploded overnight.
Sydney: Yeah, that’s so cool.
Teva: Thank you, thank you. It’s been a lot of fun so far.
Koby: Yeah we’re such big fans of your Instagram account.
Teva: Awe, thank you!
Koby: Yeah, and we really wanted to know what led you to be involved in the mental health field and social work in general?
Teva: I was a hairdresser in my former life. Yeah, I was a hairdresser, and you probably know that clients talk to you like you’re their therapist, and I felt like a therapist. I was pretty good at listening, and people just wanted to tell me everything the minute they sat in my chair.
We had a little bit of a dip in the economy back in 2009 or so and things weren’t so fun anymore. Things really slowed down, so I decided to go to grad school, cause that’s what people do when they want to change their life. I pursued social work because my mom was a social worker.
I knew I wanted to be a therapist, and I was going to go a slightly different route to be a therapist. But I decided to go the social worker route because it gives you a few more options, in case you don’t want to end up doing therapy.
Sydney: Yeah it’s a really versatile profession. I’ve been looking at career directions for myself, and I definitely looked at that. And I was like, “Yeah that’s really cool!” even though it’s not for me personally. It's really admirable and important.
Teva: Thank you, thank you. It’s been really rewarding and I love that I can do so many different things with it.
Sydney: Alright, so, piggybacking off of that, I want to ask what began your interest in autism and neurodiversity? Did it develop concurrently with your interest in mental health, being a social worker, or was it more of a separate development?
Teva: It was definitely separate. I had no intention of working in the field of autism, we didn’t learn anything in school about autism in my M.F.W. program. The only thing I can remember learning is being advised to say “person with autism.” That was considered respectful, because you're putting the person first, and you’re not thinking about them in a pathological way. So that was the intention behind us being taught that. But that’s all I remember from school.
In one of my jobs, I was working in a school district with kids with learning differences. I had a few autistic kids on my caseload. I was doing social and emotional counselling, and I had no training whatsoever. I knew nothing about autism. I was having a really difficult time because I didn’t know that talk therapy wasn’t appropriate.
Then I took the deep dive, the online deep dive. I was just reading everything I could read about autistic girls, and I just started to get more and more interested. I stumbled on autistic self-advocacy network. And the "Thinking Person's Guide to Autism" website. That just started to just spill over into my professional work.
Sydney: That’s really cool. Well, I was drawn to your work as an autistic person, as a woman, being diagnosed pretty late.
Teva: Were you? It’s so common, isn’t it?
Sydney: It was rough. People who belong to certain marginalized groups that might not be referred to developmental assessments, or might not have access to that and are more likely to only be referred to a mental health professional, there is more knowledge about autism and sort of neurodevelopmental psychology in the mental health field and it really benefits everyone.
Teva: Definitely. We have a ways to go. But I think we are moving in the right direction. I mean there are many of us that are advocating, and sharing the information with our colleagues and professional organizations. I think we’re slowly moving in the right direction, but we have some work to do.
Koby: Yeah, and definitely on that note, the way autism is talked about in mainstream fields of medical, mental, and behavioural health is often hyperpathologized and it’s filled with ableism. You kind of touched on this earlier but what are the issues king of the principles that you adhere to now and that you champion. That you would have wished or talked about in your MSW program that would help others.
Teva: Actually the principles of my MSW program align very well with diversity. I’m thankful for that because it’s a natural fit for that. It’s a natural fit for me. I just look at my own code of ethics.
The ones that stand out are self-determination. We place a very high value on self-determination. We know that autistic individuals are denied that value oftentimes. Autistic children in their therapies are absolutely denied that in most of the most common therapies. So self-determination is a huge one for me. I really believe that we can give kids a say in what happens to their own bodies. I mean that’s so basic.
Another one from my profession is social justice. Social workers are big on social justice, so it aligns perfectly with disability rights, autistic rights, and just working for the inclusion of marginalized people. So that’s one from our profession.
Cultural competence is a big one for us. It's impossible to know everything about everyone's culture, but we try to keep a humility that we don’t know everything. We’re trying to value more of people’s lived experience rather than just scientific scholarly published research. We just updated our code of ethics to include that in our cultural competence piece. We put in lived experience. I think this is so great because autistic adults have been talking about this for years, and now we have it in our own code of ethics, so that’s pretty cool.
We always strive to uphold the dignity and worth of our clients. Neurodiversity-affirming practices uphold the dignity and worth of autistic people. So that for me, was like, oh hello, I’m where I’m supposed to be.
Sydney: Yeah.
Teva: Yeah, but in my grad school program we just didn’t talk about autism.
Sydney: Yeah, it gives me a lot of hope hearing you say that about how they’re pushing these principles in the training for therapists and professionals and really the only connection that wasn't made was explicitly naming autism and applying that to developmental disabilities, neurodevelopmental disabilities. Which I think would be a pretty simple expansion to make.
Teva: Yeah, I think so too. There's actually...I don’t know if you guys have heard of them. The neurodiversity collective? Have you guys heard of them? The neurodiversity therapist collective?
Sydney: Yes!
Teva: I took a class from them. They’re a group of therapists. Interestingly enough, many of them are BCBAs from BCA. It’s an interesting pivot that they’re doing, but they are teaching courses on how to be a more nerudoviersty affirming therapist.
Sydney: Oh that’s really cool!
Teva: Yeah, they’re doing really great things. It’s interesting because as mental health therapists we can come from many different disciplines. We can come from psychology, social work, counselling, and so we all have different codes of ethics.
BCBAs have a different code of ethics, and they just updated theirs as well. I feel like they borrowed a couple of things from our code of ethics because they were getting such pushback on their ethics. Their ethics said nothing on the ethics of the clientele being. Nothing.
Anyways, we all have a different code of ethics. I think the social work code of ethics is the most aligned with a neurodiversity-affirming perspective. But, my field is also very much married to a medical model of mental health. That can put us in a difficult position, especially if we’re dealing with insurance because everything is so behavioural. They want us to measure behaviours and symptom reductions and it’s just so easy for a therapist to fall into more behavioural practices, particularly with kids.
Sydney: My next question is, in your Instagram bio you have a credential that’s called certified autism informed professional. Was that basically the course that was called High-Functioning Autism that you took?
Teva: No, the Certified Autism Informed Professional was equivalent to approximately 20 hours of courses through a company called PESI. They're a distributor for continuing mental health education that we have to take.
They hosted this two-day certification program. And then over the period of a couple more days, we had to watch courses in our own time. But there were around ten different instructions, and it was good.
I thought it could have been more neurodiversity-affirming, and I gave them some feedback on that. They had one autistic instructor out of over ten, who happened to be a social worker. Temple Grandin did the opening talk. The other presenters were from many disciplines so OT, speech, psychology, trauma, and mental health.
It was a two to three day event of in-depth courses. Afterwards, we had to take an exam and send our licensing information. Then they sent us the certificate.
It’s new and I knew that I didn’t need it. I will say that I didn't learn a whole lot that I didn't already know. But I wanted it as a credential to market myself, so people could see that it’s something I offer.
Sydney: Even though they’re very medicalized and pathologizing stuff out there about autism, and even if it’s not great, I can completely understand how you would just want to do that to have it as a way to give yourself credibility.
Teva: Exactly. Give yourself credibility and allow yourself to be found, online or by parents. I only see kids in my practise for psychotherapy, so parents are the ones buying from me. I wanted to be able to be found by parents, and have that extra credibility. The course outline looked really interesting.
Have you guys heard of the researcher Stephen Porges? He’s really big in the field of trauma, and self-regulation. Which we all know is huge in autism. Self-regulation is a big piece. Steve Forges was one of the instructors. He has a really interesting intervention that I want to learn more about. It’s called Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP), and it’s like an auditory program that helps your brain improve at self-regulation. It draws from lots of different disciplines.
But I would say that my go-to person who I learn from in the mental health field on autism topics is Judy Endow. She’s an amazing one. She’s autistic licensed social worker. She’s also a therapist, a consultant, and an author. Her website is a library of information for parents, clinicians, and anyone interested in autism. She’s starting to teach courses and that’s what I’m super excited about. I've taken one of her courses and she’s in the process of opening another certification program.
Sydney: That's awesome.
Teva: Yeah, I want to take that. She’s autistic so and she has a neurodiversity-affirming framework.
Koby: And that kind of leads us into our next question. Do you personally know or work with other mental health professionals that are explicitly neurodiversity affirming and if not, what challenges have you faced in regards to that?
Teva: Unfortunately I don’t know or work with many neurodiversity-affirming clinicians or other professionals. I have one social work colleague with whom I have a friendly relationship with but he's in a different Californian city and currently works as a consultant. So we sometimes consult with each other, and then I’ve met a few on Instagram, but sadly that is all.
It's been kind of lonely because as a professional we come across some challenging material, challenging concepts and it’s good to have peers that we can call and consult with that have a similar framework because they're gonna give you advice based on their own philosophy.
Instagram has been awesome because I’ve been meeting other clinicians and mental health and speech therapists and OTs. But I just haven’t nourished the relationships yet, though I know that they're out there. So that feels good.
Sydney: Yeah, socially it’s just really powerful in that regard. That got me thinking about the Therapist Neurodiverse Collective. They launched a directory but I believe it’s just speech, OT, and physical therapy. I was wondering what if you include professionals?
Teva: I think they are opening up to mental health professionals. I think that they are.
The Therapist Neurodiverse Collective, I believe is opening up to mental health professionals because I have it on my to-do list that I want to list with them.
Then there's another directory called Inclusive Therapists, and it’s for all types of marginalized communities. They explicitly name neurodiversity. The parents can go on, check that box, and clients can find us.
Sydney: Awesome. As a general wrap-up to this, what do you think the future holds for neurodiversity-affirming mental health care and what positive changes have you seen in the mental health field in regards to autism acceptance?
Teva: I think that some things are promising. I think that what the future holds is that we are going to start identifying and diagnosing more girls and women, which is really exciting. I think that it’ll probably start with more girls, children. We’re not going to only see these little girls as gifted because they often get identified as gifted, “she’s that way because she’s gifted.” That’s common. It’ll be, “she’s that way because she’s anxious, she has anxiety, she has selective mutism, or she has oppositional defiant disorder.” We’re going to start identifying more girls.
I think we're going to start identifying more children of colour. I know that there is a big push for children of colour to get more autism services, but what I've noticed so far is those services are very limited to just one type of behavioural therapy. That's a tough one, which advocacy needs to be done about getting the government and insurance companies to pay for other types of therapy. I think the future also holds that.
That we will have coverage for services other than ABA or the modality. I’m certified in DIR floortime, we in California, are going to try and get our Californian legislators to cover floor time. They wanna see all kinds of evidence, research because it has to be evidence-based. The mental health field loves that phrase “evidence-based,” so thankfully floor time does have evidence that it’s beneficial.
But I think it’s just good that people are starting to just know what neurodiversity means, and learning what it means to be affirming. There are therapists all over Instagram talking about it from different disciplines. My worry though is that the term is going to be co-opted and that it's going to end up meaning nothing.
Sydney: Yeah, I've seen on Instagram and on the internet that, I'm not trying to generalize all of ABA or like BCBA, BCBAs use the language of neurodiversity and I'm thinking, really?
Teva: I agree. When I first saw it, it didn’t land well with me. Because we know that traditionally their practices are not affirming in that kind of way. Now I don’t know, I'm not observing everyone’s sessions, and I know that there is a branch, a small moment that I think is gaining momentum with BCBAs where they are trying to be more affirming and change some things about their practices, I mean they updated their code of ethics. There's someone on Instagram called the bilingual BCBA. I just started following her so I don’t know much, but I know that she's starting a movement called reformed ABA. She’s literally putting an “R” before “ABA,” and she identifies as neurodivergent.
So we’re seeing small fractions. But I do worry about the terms being co-opted and them meaning nothing. Being used as just a marketing strategy.
Sydney: Definitely. I could talk all day about ABA and the overall ABA industry. It’s really dubious and of course, there are some people who are probably great and who are affirming and don’t push hyper-pathologization, but it just has the stain of the legacy of the industry.
Teva: Agreed. For some people when they see the three letters together in that order, it can be triggering. You can reform all you want, but what about your legacy? At the same time, I want to give people modalities and organizations space to grow and evolve. Because my profession, social work, does not have the best history either. We don’t have the best legacy. We’ve done some harmful things in the past, but we are always growing and looking in the mirror and revising our practices and things like that. It’s tough, but another thing I want to say about ABA is that I understand parents having zero other options.
Sydney: It’s what they call a hard problem. On the one hand, there's basically universal insurance coverage for ABA and a lot of things that are called ABA aren’t really on the ground level really using ABA principal that intensely. I've seen parents on social media and other people talk about how a lot of people use their insurance funded forty hours a week of ABA as child care for their very young children if there's no preschool or daycare suitable for their child. It's a huge issue. It’s really complicated.
Teva: It's really complicated. That’s another reason why I am very grateful for my profession and code of ethics because we put a big emphasis on a person in their environment. We recognize people are part of numerous systems that guide their behaviour.
If you look at something from a purely psychological system you could think why doesn't the parent make the right choice for their child? But then when we start to look at the broader systems, the system of healthcare, the system of childcare, their family system, and we start to see the different factors that influence their choice to use ABA. The choice is really enclosed because it’s so complicated.
I do have training in maternal mental health, and I know what it’s like to be a mom of an autistic child. They need support. I can see the appeal in having someone come into your house for forty hours a week if that person is truly nice and playing with your child and not engaged in problematic behavioural practices. When a parent has someone entertaining their child, they get to rest. That can be the difference between severe depression and being okay.
One positive thing that I thought of is that ABA practitioners are starting to plan more play therapy techniques. But I don’t really like the way they use it. They’re using it so play is a reward, whereas, in the kind of therapy I do, play is therapy. Baby steps, I guess.
Sydney: As our final question, what advice would you give to other therapists who want to involve neurodiversity affirming principles in their practice. I know you talked a lot about resources that you use, but maybe speak to a place to start?
Teva: I would start on Judy Endow’s website. Her website is full of resources and she has them perfectly categorized: mental health, self-regulation, social skills. I would start there as a therapist.
I would take the course, if they offer it again, from the Therapist Neurodiversity Collective. They specifically provided resources in the course on how to make your practices more affirming. Everything from what to have and what to not have in the waiting room to how to conduct your session.
Then I would read the accounts that are plentiful online from autistic adults. Read about their experiences. Let those stories sit with you for a while, and reflect on your own practices, reflect on your own biases and training, and question, and realize that sometimes we have to unlearn certain things. Be open to unlearning, and not only hearing the perspectives of other professionals.
Sydney: This has been really great talking with you. We got into some really potent topics in regards to advocacy and trying to get neurodiversity principles into the medical system, providing choice for different modalities of therapy. These are areas I'm personally interested in so it was great to hear your perspective. Thanks for sitting down with us.
Teva: My pleasure, thank you guys for reaching out to me on Instagram, I’m honoured and it’s been great sitting down with you too. I feel like I'm really eager to know more about each of you but maybe another time. Yeah, and you know where to find me if you ever want to chat again. Thank you so much.
The A.WARE Foundation would like to thank Teva Johnstone for her insights on being a neurodiversity-affirming social worker, and online activism. If you would like to learn more about Teva’s work you can follow her Instagram account @neurocurioustherapist. You can also find free resources, consultations, and more information about neurodiversity parenting on her website www.neurodiversityparenting.com. (Image above from her resources page.) We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to speak with her.
