We talk a lot about autism and ADHD in childhood. We talk a bit about adulthood. But we almost never talk about aging. And that silence matters—because the first large generations of autistic and ADHD adults are already reaching midlife and older adulthood.
That’s why I wrote this paper,
🔗 https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ypbzm_v1
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This paper asks a simple but overdue question: What actually changes as autistic and ADHD people age—and what doesn’t?
3/20/26: Proof Positive - Everyone Deserves Happiness Summit, a livestream event on the International Day of Happiness highlighting wellbeing and flourishing in the autism community. Talk Title: The Shape of Meaning. Awe and Autistic well being
3/21/26 IDCL International Council on Development and Learning International DIR® Conference. Talk Title: Rethinking Autism Through the Body: A Sensory–Motor Architecture of Autistic Experience
Dear Hari,
We are pleased to announce that you have been named an inaugural 2025 Elite Rising Scholar Peer Reviewer for Rehabilitation Psychology. We initiated this award for 2025 to specifically recognize the incredible contributions of peer reviewers who are at the graduate student or postdoctoral fellow level...
This award is particularly impressive given that you are outstanding in comparison to all reviewers – including editorial board members. Your commitment and service to the journal is remarkable and even among our best reviewers, you have stood out this past year.
We have included a certificate of appreciation to congratulate you on this distinctive recognition. We are very grateful for your service and contributions to our overarching mission to advance rehabilitation psychology research. We look forward to working with you in the coming years.
With sincere gratitude,
Anna Kratz, PhD & Paul Perrin, PhD
Editors-in-Chief
Rehabilitation Psychology
Loneliness is usually imagined as being alone. But many autistic people describe something different—and harder to explain: being surrounded by people and still feeling profoundly lonely. That paradox is what my paper tries to make sense of
Preprint Link: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rjeus_v1
I recently wrote a Psychology Today piece [Why Perception is Not Just What We Sense] about a simple idea: perception isn’t something we receive. It’s something the brain builds. I used a few familiar illusions—the McGurk effect, the stream–bounce illusion, the sound-induced flash illusion, and the parchment-skin illusion—to show what happens when the building process becomes visible.
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What I couldn’t fit into that article is the part I think about most: illusions aren’t one category of party trick. They’re a toolkit. Different illusions probe different “decisions” the brain has to make—about timing, about cause, about whether signals belong together, about what counts as part of the body, and about how much certainty is “enough.”
We tell students this story early and often: If you work hard enough, you can get there.
That message—usually called growth mindset—has helped a lot of people. It pulls us away from “I’m just not good at this” and toward “I can learn.”
But there’s a quieter question that doesn’t get asked nearly enough: What if I am trying—and the system still doesn’t move? That question is what my new paper is trying to take seriously
Preprint link: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/x7jru_v1
Why growth mindset sometimes falls short
Thanks, NIEPID for hosting and to everyone who joined the conversation today. Lovely to see so many MPhil students joining from all over India. Recording at. https://youtu.be/q0ctpgproS4
Thanks, Chico State for hosting and to everyone who joined the conversation on nuance in autism. Recording at https://youtu.be/h70I6msB7rA
A few weeks ago, there was a lot of social media posts on something that was being widely celebrated online: a new Barbie meant to represent autism.
It had noise-canceling headphones. It had an AAC device. It had flexible hands for stimming.
And I felt… conflicted.
That moment is what eventually became my new Psychology Today .
