Peer Support Is Infrastructure: Why Neurodivergent Communities Can’t Wait for Clinicians
Bridgette Hamstead
The idea that healing must come from credentialed professionals is one of the most deeply entrenched myths in the Western medical model. It is a belief that has shaped not only mental health care, but also our broader understanding of legitimacy, safety, and worth. For neurodivergent people, especially those who are late-diagnosed, multiply marginalized, or survivors of institutional harm, this model has repeatedly failed to meet our needs. Waitlists stretch for months. Costs are prohibitive. Diagnostic processes are pathologizing. And far too often, clinicians are trained to control behavior, not understand it. In this context, peer support is not a supplement to clinical care, it is a parallel system. It is infrastructure. It is life-saving, identity-affirming, and politically necessary. And we cannot afford to wait for institutions to catch up.
Peer-led care is grounded in mutual recognition, shared experience, and horizontal relationships. It does not require someone to prove their distress in order to be taken seriously. It does not demand that we translate our realities into diagnostic language before we are offered support. In peer spaces, there is no performance of neutrality. There is presence, witnessing, validation, and reciprocity. There is room for the messy middle, shutdowns, spirals, questions without answers. There is deep knowledge in our bodies, our patterns, our survival strategies. And when we sit with others who share similar wiring, those truths rise to the surface, not because someone is diagnosing us, but because we are remembering together. We are pattern-matching in the best possible way: not to pathologize, but to connect.
The urgency of peer support becomes even clearer when we look at the structural gaps in access to care. Many neurodivergent people, especially Black, Indigenous, trans, low-income, or non-speaking individuals, face disproportionate barriers to diagnosis and treatment. These barriers are not accidental, they are baked into the design of systems that were never intended to serve us in the first place. When we rely exclusively on clinical models to “fix” what are actually social and political failures, we reinforce the idea that care is a scarce commodity controlled by experts. But peer support challenges that scarcity mindset. It says: we can build care with what we have. We can meet each other where we are. We can create spaces that do not require insurance, assimilation, or self-denial in order to belong.
Support pods, mutual aid groups, identity-based healing circles, and informal peer mentoring networks are all examples of this infrastructure already in motion. Neurodivergent people are already gathering, online, in living rooms, in Discord servers, in WhatsApp threads, in co-working Zoom rooms, because we have always had to find each other in the absence of formal support. These are not lesser versions of therapy. They are not a consolation prize. They are a direct challenge to the monopoly the medical-industrial complex has claimed over our care. And while peer support is not a substitute for every kind of specialized intervention, it is often the only thing standing between isolation and connection, between despair and coherence, between burnout and the will to try again.
Peer support is also where much of the most innovative thinking in neurodivergent culture and care originates. It is in these spaces that language like “unmasking,” “executive function,” “dopamine seeking,” and “autistic burnout” was developed and refined long before institutions began catching on. It is in peer spaces that people are naming hormone sensitivity, time blindness, task paralysis, sensory trauma, and medical PTSD in ways that feel embodied and usable, not abstracted into clinical detachment. This is cultural knowledge, not clinical theory. And it is knowledge that grows from the ground up, shared between people with nothing to gain except the survival and thriving of one another. It is rigorous. It is compassionate. And it is often more accurate than any diagnostic manual has ever been.
Of course, peer support is not perfect. It requires boundaries, accountability, training, and care. It is not immune to replication of harm, especially when systemic trauma and scarcity shape our nervous systems. But the solution is not to dismiss it in favor of professional gatekeeping. The solution is to resource it. To honor it. To build ethical guidelines that reflect community wisdom. To compensate peer supporters. To integrate their work into broader ecosystems of care, not as volunteers or stopgaps, but as essential practitioners in their own right. We must invest in models that center lived experience as expertise, not after the fact, but from the very beginning.
For many of us, peer support is the first time we feel seen not as problems to be solved, but as people with valid responses to an invalidating world. It is where our stories are not pathologized but contextualized. Where we learn that the ways we adapted were not brokenness but brilliance. Where we discover that someone else has felt exactly what we feel, and that survival is possible. That kind of connection cannot be outsourced. It cannot be reproduced in a ten-minute intake appointment. It cannot be prescribed. It must be built. And we are building it.
The future of neurodivergent care will not come solely from diagnostic reform or clinical expansion. It will come from the people already doing the work of tending to each other in the aftermath of institutional failure. It will come from peer mentors, crisis doulas, support pods, and community educators. It will come from those who show up, not because they were paid to, but because they remember what it felt like to have no one. And it will come from those who refuse to wait for institutions to validate what we already know: that we are experts in our own experience, and that the people best equipped to walk with us through it are often those who’ve walked it too.
Peer support is not a trend. It is not a phase. It is not a backup plan. It is infrastructure. And it is time we treated it as such.
To honor peer support as infrastructure is to shift our understanding of what care is, who provides it, and how it circulates. It means refusing to wait for a system that was never built for us to finally recognize our humanity. It means resourcing the networks that are already sustaining us, informally, creatively, and often invisibly, before burnout, before crisis, before collapse. It means understanding that infrastructure is not always made of buildings or credentials or billing codes. Sometimes it is made of group chats and Zoom rooms and Friday check-ins and voice memos that say, “You’re not broken. You’re not alone.” Neurodivergent people are already doing the work of repair. Already modeling what relational safety can look like. Already building the blueprints for a future where care is collective, not conditional. If institutions want to catch up, they are welcome. But we’re not waiting. We’re already here. And we’re already building. Not because we were invited, but because we knew we had to. Because this is how we keep each other alive and how, together, we build something worth living for.
Reflection Questions
When in your life have you experienced care that felt truly attuned to your needs? Who provided it, and what made it feel safe, accessible, or real?
How have your experiences with clinical systems shaped your beliefs about what kind of support you are “allowed” to receive? What messages did you internalize about needing to be diagnosed, compliant, or “sick enough”?
In what ways have you already participated in peer support, even if you didn’t call it that? What forms has it taken in your life or work?
Have you ever felt like you had to wait for institutional permission (or professional validation) to create the kind of care you actually needed? What would it mean to stop waiting?
What are the limitations of peer support as you’ve experienced it? Where has it fallen short, and what kinds of community accountability or resourcing might strengthen it?
How do systems of whiteness, capitalism, and ableism influence whose peer support is considered “legitimate” or “professional”? Who gets funded? Who gets dismissed?
What would change in your organization, classroom, or care practice if peer support was seen not as extra, but essential? How would resourcing, structure, and leadership shift?
Who do you turn to when you’re dysregulated, overwhelmed, or spiraling, and what does that tell you about how care moves in your life?
How does your relationship to receiving help differ from your relationship to giving it? What does reciprocity look like in your community?
What might it mean to treat peer support not just as a model of care, but as a form of cultural leadership and systemic resistance?