Surviving the System: Addiction, Autism, and the Road to Recovery A lived experience presentation by David Gray-Hammond, Founder of NeuroHub Community Ltd. Addiction in Autistic people is not a moral failing and it is not a mystery. It is what happens when a nervous system that was never designed for this world runs out of other options, and it is what happens when the systems that exist to help consistently refuse to hold the full complexity of a person’s experience. In this presentation, David Gray-Hammond draws on his own lived experience of addiction, misdiagnosis, and recovery to explore what it actually means to be Autistic and substance-dependent in a healthcare landscape that was not built for either reality simultaneously. He will speak to the structural Catch-22 of mental health and substance use services that each refused to engage until the other had intervened first, to the years spent under a Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis that compounded every layer of stigma he was already carrying, and to the consistent institutional denial of his Autistic experience by the professionals he encountered. David will also speak honestly about twelve-step programmes — about why a model that works for many people failed to work for him, and about why his wellbeing actively improved when he stopped attending and began connecting with other Autistic people instead. Because what ultimately made recovery possible was not a programme, a protocol, or a professional. It was community. It was finding people who already understood what it meant to be him, and who did not ask him to be anything else. This session will draw on the ecosystemic model to frame Autistic distress and addiction as products of a mismatch between the Autistic Bodymind and the environments it is asked to inhabit, rather than as deficits located within the individual, and will close with a direct examination of what services, commissioners, and professionals need to change if Autistic people are to have genuine access to recovery. The presentation runs for 45 minutes and is followed by 20 minutes of open discussion. This event is suitable for: health and social care professionals, substance use practitioners, mental health workers, commissioners, and anyone with lived experience of addiction or Autistic identity who wants to hear this story told without euphemism. Content note: This presentation includes personal disclosure around substance use, mental health crisis, misdiagnosis, and institutional harm . You're currently a free subscriber to NeuroHub Community Journal | Newsletter | Announcements. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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genderequalitygoals
genderequalitygoals
Saturday, 20 June 2026
Surviving The System: Autism, Addiction, And The Road To Recovery
Friday, 19 June 2026
Trump and his crazy offsiders in the Anglosphere
By 2022 all three were gone
By 2026 we are in danger of being swamped by another tragic trio
What comes next?
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© 2026 Mark Buckley |
The Well-Funded Vision and the Silent Landlord
The Well-Funded Vision and the Silent LandlordA capable nonprofit has done the work. The public corporation that controls the land has offered no position.
RIOC’s Real Estate Development Advisory Committee met last night. The Renwick Ruin was not on the agenda. A nonprofit that has spent eight years developing detailed plans for the site, raised more than a million dollars, and assembled a board with serious finance and legal credentials continues its work. The public corporation that controls the land has still not stated, in any clear public forum, whether it intends to support, permit, or eventually shift responsibility for that vision. In a place where real decisions about land and money are often shaped before the community sees them, that silence is doing work. The Nonprofit and the People Behind It Friends of the Ruin Inc was established in 2018. Its stated purpose is to permanently stabilize the Smallpox Hospital ruins and turn the surrounding grounds into a public “Garden Among Ruins” - a landscaped public health memorial. By early 2022 the organization reported having raised roughly $1.2 million through private donations and some public support. It has commissioned multi-phase studies from Walter B. Melvin Architects, produced renderings, supported a short film, and worked with students from the Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design. Stephen Martin, an architect who previously served as Director of Design and Planning for the Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, is the founder and president. The rest of the board includes professionals with backgrounds in institutional investments, private equity, corporate law at a major firm, academic architecture programs, and medicine. This is not an amateur preservation society. It is an organized effort with access to networks that matter when money is required.
The organization has moved well beyond advocacy. It has produced stabilization studies, architectural renderings, and educational partnerships, but none of that work can proceed without RIOC’s decision on whether the site will be made available for the project. It has produced concrete technical work and sustained momentum for nearly a decade. That record deserves to be taken seriously. The Absent Landlord The ruins sit inside Southpoint Park, which RIOC controls. Immediately to the south lies Four Freedoms Park, run by a separate state entity. Two different governing structures sit side by side, and the ruin falls between them. RIOC has offered no public position on the nonprofit’s decade-long plan. Nor has it disclosed when it first became aware of the conditions now being treated as an “emergency” at the steam plant. If the same pattern of silence followed by sudden speed is applied to the ruin, the outcome is predictable. Heritage, resident access, nature, and animal welfare would be addressed only after the fact, if at all. The ruin remains in institutional limbo because RIOC has neither accepted nor rejected the existing proposal. That silence is no longer neutral. What Happened at REDAC Last Night The Real Estate Development Advisory Committee is chaired by Howard Polivy, whose long tenure and consistent alignment with management on real-estate matters has been documented across multiple administrations. His cousin Lance A. Polivy now serves as RIOC’s Vice President and General Counsel. RIOC has described the relationship as “distant.” On an island this small, the question is whether the corporation’s general counsel, better known as the “distant” cousin of REDAC chair Howard Polivy, is briefing the chair in private on issues that affect the chair’s own apartment building. No record of ordinary conflict safeguards - disclosure, recusal, or independent review - has been provided. Last night’s meeting did not address the Renwick Ruin. That is not surprising. These issues rarely appear on the public portion of the agenda until the important work has already been done elsewhere. What REDAC Is Supposed To Do A nonprofit, no matter how well organized or well funded, should not be left to shape the future of a public site on its own. That is precisely what the Real Estate Development Advisory Committee exists for. REDAC is meant to give residents and stakeholders a structured way to discuss vision, weigh trade-offs, and advise RIOC on what should and should not happen with island land. Instead, the committee has said nothing publicly about the ruin. No timeline has been set for public discussion. No criteria have been released for how RIOC will evaluate the proposal. The result is a multi-year, million-dollar effort advancing in the absence of any advisory process. If REDAC is not being used to advise on a site like this, then its purpose is unclear - and the public is left to wonder what it is actually advising on. Share this with neighbors who still believe a committee recommendation should mean something. Subscribe for free to receive updates on new posts and support our work.
© 2026 Theo Gobblevelt |
Surviving The System: Autism, Addiction, And The Road To Recovery
Donation based/Free webinar ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏...
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Dear Reader, To read this week's post, click here: https://teachingtenets.wordpress.com/2025/07/02/aphorism-24-take-care-of-your-teach...
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CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: AOM 2025 PDW ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ...


