The mindset behind Brainspark

Mind the Gap

Every brain deserves care that fits, knowledge that sees it, and people who stay curious.

Mind the Gap is an announcement you're bound to run into on the British transit system. It's meant to draw attention to the dangerous gap between the train and the platform. That awareness alone makes a world of difference in safety, and lets people step out of their carriage with a bit more care.

I like to apply that same idea as a motto for what the neurodivergent landscape needs. There, too, are gaps: in knowledge, in quality of care, and in mutual understanding, and if we understand better how to build bridges over them, I believe we can help make a world of difference.

Just as important: the challenges to be overcome are these gaps themselves. It's often the case that two people end up standing across from each other, with one or both bearing the consequences of these gaps. I see, in everyone involved, a wish to close them. If everyone does their best and we work together, regardless of which side of the gap we stand on, we'll keep getting better at pushing back the deeply human, unconscious tendency to assume, to judge, to oversimplify, and to put people in boxes.

The Three Gaps

The Knowledge Gap

This gap has three layers: what academics don't yet know, what clinicians don't yet know, and the full blind spots that nobody yet knows about: not the researchers, not the care providers, not people with lived experience. Much of what science hasn't yet captured is already long visible in messy clinical practice and lived experience. You close this gap with research that starts from practice, with the honesty to say what we don't yet know, and by continuing to learn, again and again.

The Quality of Care Gap

Care rarely fits the whole person. Comorbidity, personality and context stay out of view; safety and attachment get too little room within support and treatment trajectories; and the many ways people speak about themselves reach far beyond "autistic versus neurotypical." On top of that, there's a gap in integrated knowledge between VAPH (disability support) and mental healthcare/psychiatry, and the quality of coaching varies widely, with no regulation or quality standards keeping watch over it. You close this gap with care that starts from the person, and with care providers who have the knowledge and the map in hand to do so.

The Double Empathy Gap

Two brains misread each other, autistic or not, in both directions, by nature. We assume, because we're human; we can never fully know the what, how and why of another person without curiosity, compassion and withholding judgment first.

This gap runs deeper than misunderstanding alone. It includes testimonial injustice (accounts from neurodivergent people being believed less) and hermeneutical injustice (the lack of shared concepts to put one's own experiences into words), alongside ableism, stigma and shame. And it's baked into the contrast between current structures in society (which function unconsciously and unintentionally in a neuronormative way) and the marginalising effect that has on neurodivergent people. This is the largest of the three gaps, and at the same time the only one that everyone, starting today, can help build a bridge over.