Exploring Autistic adults’ experiences of Self-Compassion

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Abstract

Evidence consistently shows that autistic people experience poor mental health more often than their neurotypical counterparts (Hedley et al., 2019; Lai et al., 2019). Addressing this will likely require an appreciation of mental health in its broader sense, encompassing both positive (i.e., positive feelings, flourishing) and negative (i.e., symptoms of mental distress) aspects of mental health. Thus, the term ‘mental health outcomes’ will be used with both the positive and negative aspects in mind, and which is being referred to specifically will be stated as such where necessary. Self-compassion is a construct associated with mental health (Chio et al., 2021). Neff (2003) defines self-compassion as being open to one's own suffering, then responding with kindness and acknowledging one’s experience as common to the larger human experience. Importantly, self-compassion is ‘a bipolar continuum’ (Neff, 2023) of two distinct constructs: compassionate self-responding (CSR) and uncompassionate self-responding (USR), which align with positive and negative mental health, respectively. In the general population, research using the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS; Neff 2003) finds higher scores of self-compassion are related to lower levels of negative mental health and increased overall well-being (Inwood & Ferrari, 2018; Neff, 2003; Zessin et al., 2015).

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