Season 2 of Autistic Identity With NeuroHub opens with ‘existential diversity’

This is NeuroHub’s own content. The second season of our podcast, Autistic Identity With NeuroHub, launched on 9 November 2026 on The Wider Existence, with an episode called Season 2 Launch | Existential Diversity.

The episode is hosted by David Gray-Hammond. According to its description, it introduces an idea he and Helen Edgar have been developing together, called existential diversity.

Two questions

The description argues that most autistic people spend their lives facing one question: what is wrong with this person? It says schools, CAMHS (children and young people’s mental health services), assessment services, wards and benefits assessors are almost all built to ask it.

The question that rarely gets asked, the description says, is a second one: what is wrong with the world around them? Asking it properly means seeing a person as more than a “sealed box” with a brain inside.

The description defines the idea like this:

“Existential diversity is the diversity of how lives connect with and impact the reality and the world around them, unconfined by the physical boundaries of the body-mind or by the limits of a mortal existence.”

What the episode covers

The episode description lists several themes:

• How the idea builds on the ecosystemic model of distress, developed with Tanya Adkin and Helen Edgar, which treats distress as information about an environment rather than a symptom of a person
• Four ways people reach beyond their skin: materially, functionally, causally and semiotically (through meaning and signs)
• Why a person’s existence begins before they arrive and continues after they have gone, framed as a source of hope
• Four things the idea offers autistic people, including moving identity out of the diagnostic box and making joy visible
• Community as an ecology rather than a container

The description also suggests a small practice for listeners: notice one thing outside your body that is part of how you think, feel safe or know who you are. For practitioners, it suggests asking an autistic person what route they took to a connection, and treating that route as meaningful.

A book to follow

The post also announces After Normal: Autistic Essays on a Broken Society and the Ecosystems We Grow Instead. It is the fifth anniversary edition of The New Normal, revised with eight new chapters, and is due out in paperback and ebook on 7 April 2027. The post invites readers to pre-order it.

The episode is public, with bonus episodes available to paid subscribers.

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