Community research · November 2026
I posted a short, unplanned video: most autistic people who are unemployed, and who can’t get disability, are unemployed because workplaces are not psychologically safe, and there are no repercussions for psychological injury at work. It went viral on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Every comment and reply was coded for what people described, proposed, and disagreed with. This is what you said.
614 Facebook · 312 Instagram · 562 TikTok · comments and replies · every comment paraphrased, no names · how this was handled
Before you read. This page talks about bullying, losing work and housing, burnout, and not being believed. Take it at whatever pace you need.
If you’re struggling right now, you don’t have to hold it alone. Many of us have good reasons to worry about police showing up, so these are grouped by what each service says it does when it thinks your life is at risk.
Will not call emergency services unless you ask
May contact emergency services without your consent
Each says this is rare and a last resort, used only when they believe a life is in immediate danger.
Directories
These are listed so you can reach them, not as endorsements. Policies change, so check a service’s own website if this matters to you. You can also ask about their policy before you share your name or location. More on the accessibility page.
The short version
Two-thirds of everything posted agreed with the video. Counting only people who took a side, it was 85% agreement, 10% disagreement, and 5% in between. Nearly 500 comments, about one in three, were stories about what happened at work.
People said they can do the job. What they can’t survive is the bullying, the politics, and the punishment for being honest.
Pointing out a problem, asking for an accommodation, or reporting harassment was often what started the end.
Start strong, mask hard, get targeted, burn out or get pushed out, start again. Some described dozens of jobs.
HR, the ADA, complaints, and lawyers were described as out of reach, too slow, or too exhausting to use.
Years out of work, panic at the thought of going back, lost housing, and no disability support to fall back on.
What I meant by no repercussions
A handful of commenters, mostly in Australia, pointed out that laws against psychosocial harm at work do exist. I wasn’t saying there isn’t a single law anywhere. I was asking why, when autistic people keep getting hurt at work and keep saying so, workplaces don’t change. One Australian commenter made the point for me: their state made psychologically unsafe workplaces illegal, and they had never heard of a single prosecution, while they could name plenty of unsafe workplaces.
In 2022, Dr. Vivek Murthy’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health & Well-Being named “Protection from Harm” as its first essential, starting with “prioritize workplace physical and psychological safety.”
“When workers feel psychologically safe, they speak up without the risk of being punished, retaliated against or humiliated, and without fear of these risks.” Read the next section with that sentence in mind.
The framework lists “psychological harm such as bias, discrimination, emotional hostility, bullying, and harassment.” Those are the first three themes below.
Lived experience
Percentages are the share of all 1,488 comments and replies that touch each theme. One comment can touch several.
Not “conflict.” Bullying, harassment, being scapegoated.
about 196 comments · 13%
Honesty, directness, and noticing problems, treated as the problem.
about 175 comments · 12%
Fired, managed out, never hired.
about 171 comments · 11%
Getting hired by pretending, then burning out from it.
about 137 comments · 9%
Breakdowns, panic, and fear of going back.
about 128 comments · 9%
HR, the ADA, complaints, and lawyers, out of reach.
about 116 comments · 8%
Too disabled to work, not disabled enough for support.
about 132 comments · 9%
Ways out
Where people described a way out, it was mostly leaving conventional workplaces. Where they proposed fixes, they wanted rules with teeth.
Self-employment, working alone, night shifts, driving, gardening, photography, remote work, and teams of other neurodivergent people. Several said it is a privilege not everyone has, because it takes money, admin skills, and health.
A workplace psychological safety law covering everyone, ADA penalties that go beyond back pay, enforcement and audits, consistent clear instructions, and enough staff to do the work. A few named employers who got it right.
Many said these workplaces aren’t safe for anyone, and autistic people are the canary in the coal mine. Others can hide their suffering better; we can’t.
Who was speaking
Where people named their work, retail came up most often, then food service and restaurants, teaching and education, healthcare, and tech. Where people named a country, most were in the US, then Australia, the UK, and Canada.
Big-box stores, pharmacies, grocery, and customer service.
Restaurants, fast food, coffee shops, and hospitality.
Teachers and special education staff, including one person fired again and again for how they looked after children.
A few managers and employers, and a couple of neurotypical family members, mostly backing the claim.
Disagreement
About one in ten people who took a side disagreed. Most of it came on Facebook, often in long reply threads, and other commenters usually answered it.
It’s a you problem. Everyone hates work. A business can’t change the rules for one person. Some of these commenters said they are autistic themselves and adapted, so others should too.
Some asked what psychological injury means, or what a psychologically safe restaurant or building site would look like. Others said “most” was too strong, or that the real cause is interviews, executive function, or anxiety.
A handful pointed to psychosocial safety laws in Australia and standards in Canada. As one commenter added, a law that is never enforced is still no repercussions.
Staying with the question
None of this surprised me. I have been bullied and pushed out of workplaces, I spent most of my working life in working-class jobs, and my last job sent me into a two-year autistic burnout. I tried to fight it, and I tried to get disability. I got nothing.
I do have one small answer: an actual system for feedback. Most of our systems send you in loops. In December 2025 I sent a 69-page systems analysis of vocational rehabilitation’s self-employment program to the State Rehabilitation Council, the body whose job is to advise and review it. Months of silence. Then I was told to send it to complaints. It wasn’t a complaint; it was feedback. And when I looked into complaints, they pointed back to the council. I call this feedback without metabolism: the system collects input but can’t take it in and change. Autistic people notice what’s broken, and these comments show what happens when we say so. We need one door where “here’s what isn’t working” actually lands, and someone whose job is to act on it. We also need policy change with teeth. What I can do is build something that supports autistic people, and keep listening to the people this is happening to. You told me. Thank you. Read the full essay, We’re Not Unemployable. Your Workplace Is Unsafe., on Substack.
Ethics and method
This is community inquiry, not clinical research. It wasn’t reviewed by an ethics board, and it doesn’t diagnose anyone. These are the commitments it was held to.
Your comments were public, but you didn’t sign up to be studied. So nothing here is quoted word for word, no one is named, and details that could identify a person (family circumstances, locations, specific events) have been left out or generalized. The most personal disclosures, including suicidal thoughts and anything about acute danger, aren’t described on this page at all. No screenshots are used, and the raw comments are not published. (franzke et al., 2020; Fiesler & Proferes, 2018; British Psychological Society, 2021)
If you commented and want your comment left out, tell me. It will be removed and the counts updated. You don’t need to give a reason. The same goes if a paraphrase misrepresents you. (Townsend & Wallace, 2016)
The findings go back to the community first, on this free page. Themes come from your words rather than from a framework decided in advance. (Wilson, 2008; Fletcher-Watson et al., 2019)
I have lived this myself, and I made the claim these comments respond to. That shapes what I notice. I’ve tried to report disagreement as fully as agreement. (Nicolaidis et al., 2019)
All 1,488 comments and replies (614 on Facebook, 312 on Instagram, 562 on TikTok) were collected the day after the video went viral, not counting my own. Instagram’s on-screen count also includes the Facebook comments on the shared post, so the platforms were counted separately. A set of codes was built from reading a sample across all three platforms. Each code was then applied to every comment. A count is the number of comments that touch a theme, and one comment can touch several. The numbers are good for comparing themes, not exact figures, which is why they’re given as “about.”
In keeping with my note on AI, access, and authorship, AI assistants applied the codes to every comment, counted them, and drafted paraphrases, following a codebook written for this study. The examples on this page were chosen and rewritten from the original comments. Every comment was then checked a second time, against the original words, by a separate coder working from the same codebook. That second pass corrected about 190 of the 1,488 codings, mostly by removing a theme that wasn’t clearly there. The counts on this page use the corrected coding. The interpretation is mine to stand behind.
The people who commented chose to respond to a video that made a strong claim, wrote mostly in English, and found it through three platforms’ algorithms. People who agreed were probably more likely to comment. This describes a community conversation, not autistic people in general.