Much of how we understand distress or mental health problems, is shaped by a single, stubborn assumption; that problems live inside people.
If someone is struggling, the logic goes, something must be wrong with their brain, their chemistry, their personality, or their coping skills. Intervention then follows a familiar path:
- Diagnose
- Treat
- Manage
- Correct.
For Autistic people, this assumption has been especially damaging.
The Ecosystemic Model of Distress offers a different way of understanding what is happening. It starts from a simple but radical premise.
Distress does not arise in isolation.
It emerges from the interaction between people and the worlds they are required to survive in. Most importantly, this includes aspects of the world that we may not have direct involvement or awareness of.
This model builds directly on Dr. Luke Beardon’s formulation:
Autism + Environment = Outcome
But it goes further, asking what we really mean by environment, and what happens when multiple environments collide. Through this model, we move beyond immediate environments into a wider ecosystem of human life.
Moving Beyond Individual Pathology
Traditional medical and psychological models tend to locate distress within the individual. Even when social factors are acknowledged, they are often treated as influences acting upon an otherwise self-contained mind.
The ecosystemic model rejects this separation.
Human beings are not sealed units. We are embedded, relational, and constantly shaped by forces far beyond our conscious control. Distress, from this perspective, is not a malfunction, it is a signal that something in the wider ecosystem is out of alignment.
If we consider Clark and Chalmers concept of the extended mind, where cognition and mental states are not confined to the brain, but instead extend into the wider environment, then the ecosystemic model extends psychological distress and mental health problems into the entire human ecosystem.
For Autistic people, whose bodyminds are often more sensitive to disruption, this misalignment becomes visible more quickly and more intensely. As a minoritised identity, we are also canaries in the metaphorical coal mine with ecosystemic imbalance more likely to be harmful to us than a less marginalised group.
What Counts As An Ecosystem?
An ecosystem is not just a physical space. It is the total network of conditions that shape experience.
This includes:
- Sensory Environments
- Social Relationships
- Family Dynamics
- Education And Workplace Structures
- Healthcare Systems
- Economic Precarity
- Cultural Norms
- Political Decisions
- Histories Of Trauma And Marginalisation
Crucially, it also includes the bodymind itself, and relationships between people that we are not active participants in.
Autistic bodyminds are not neutral vessels moving through the world. They are environments in their own right, shaped by sensory processing, interoception, energy regulation, health, trauma, and stress. Internal and external ecosystem are constantly interacting.
Distress emerges where these systems clash.
Distress As Cumulative, Not Sudden
One of the failures of individualised models is their focus on crisis moments. Burnout. Breakdown. Meltdown. Shutdown.
These moments are treated as sudden failures, often prompting urgent intervention. But ecosystemic distress does not begin at crisis. It accumulates slowly, invisibly, and relationally.
Small mismatches stack up:
- Sensory overload without recovery
- Masking without relief
- Misunderstanding without repair
- Effort without accommodation
- Responsibility without power
Over time, the system becomes unsustainable. Changes and instability cascade at a faster rate than our cognitive environment can adapt to.
From this perspective, Autistic burnout is not an inexplicable collapse. It is the predictable outcome of long-term ecological imbalance.
Why “Resilience” Is The Wrong Target
In individualised models, resilience is often framed as the solution to distress. If people could just tolerate more, adapt better, cope harder, things would improve. The ecosystemic model exposes the flaw in this thinking.
Resilience does not exist in a vacuum. It is shaped by safety, predictability, autonomy, and support. Demanding resilience without changing conditions is not empowerment, it is endurance training for harm. At best you are teaching a person to ignore the injury, not reducing the damage it does. When distress is ecosystemic, solutions must be too, and positive change in the ecosystem benefits us collectively rather than individually.
Power, Systems, And Invisible Pressure
Not all parts of the ecosystem exert equal force. Institutions hold power. Policies create pressure. Economic insecurity narrows choice. Diagnostic systems decide whose distress is legible and whose is dismissed.
Autistic people often sit at the sharp end of these forces, navigating systems that were not designed with them in mind while being blamed for struggling within them. The ecosystemic model insists that we name this.
Distress is not just interpersonal. It is structural.
Shifting The Questions We Ask
Adopting an ecosystemic model changes the questions we ask about distress.
Instead of: “What is wrong with this person?”
We ask: “What is happening around them?”
“What demands are being placed on them?”
“What supports are missing?”
“What power do they have to change their conditions?”
Importantly, we also ask: “Is this distress part of a pattern impacting others in similar positions to them?”
This shift doesn’t deny biological vulnerability or neurological difference. It contextualises them. Autism matters, but so does everything autism is interacting with.
Implications For Support And Care
An ecosystemic approach reframes support as ecological work rather than personal correction.
Support becomes about:
- Reducing cumulative load
- Increasing sensory and relational safety
- Restoring autonomy and control
- Creating predictability
- Enabling authentic communication
- Strengthening community connection
Intervention is no longer something done to a person, but something built around them. It is conservation work work. It is using the same logic we use to prevent the extinction of a species applied to the human ecosystem.
This approach does not promise quick fixes. It offers something more honest; sustainability.
Why This Model Matters Now
Autistic people are burning out in record numbers. Mental health services are overwhelmed. Diagnostic labels multiply while outcomes worsen. The problem is that we keep treating ecosystemic harm as individual failure.
The Ecosystemic Model of Distress offers a way out of this loop. It invites professionals, policymakers, families, and communities to take responsibility for the conditions they create, and to recognise that wellbeing is not an internal achievement, but a collective one.
Distress is what happens when a system stops listening.
And the work ahead is not to make Autistic people fit broken environments, but to redesign the overall ecosystem so fewer people are harmed by it in the first place.