Where’s the Support? Autism Research in 2025 Still Ignores Autistic Adulthood
Recent autism research focuses on cures, not care. This article exposes the global neglect of housing and employment needs for autistic adults—and calls for solidarity, class struggle, and systemic change.
Introduction
What’s more urgent: finding stable housing and employment, or access to a stem cell transplant? For many autistic adults, the answer is painfully clear. Yet, research priorities around the world seem to suggest otherwise. Every few months, I check in with Google Scholar and ConsensusGPT to survey what has been published recently, especially on topics that impact autistic lives (like mine) in concrete, material ways. This quarter, I ran a simple search for “autism” covering publications from 1 January 2025 to the present, curious to see where the research focus currently lies. The results were not surprising, but they were sobering—medical interventions, early diagnosis, and experimental treatments dominated the landscape. In contrast, when I deliberately searched for research on autism in relation to employment and housing across the broader span of 2024 to the present, the difference in volume and focus was stark. This article explores that disparity. I will highlight key studies from the past year that speak directly to the housing and employment needs of autistic adults—needs that affect survival, dignity, and autonomy. I will then contrast this with the most recent wave of publications, which reflect a systemic bias towards medicalisation over meaningful support. The result is a picture of a research agenda out of step with the lived realities of autistic people, particularly those of us navigating adulthood in a world built for someone else.
Review of 2024–2025 Housing and Employment Research
Across 2024 and into 2025, a small but significant body of research emerged that addresses the pressing needs of autistic adults in the realms of housing and employment. Whilst limited in volume, these studies provide insight into both the challenges faced and the potential pathways for meaningful support. A longitudinal study by Bury et al. (2024) explored employment trajectories among autistic adults over an eight-year period, identifying diverse patterns ranging from stable employment to persistent unemployment. Their findings highlight that stable employment is more likely among younger autistic adults with fewer co-occurring health conditions, fewer expressed autistic traits, and higher levels of formal education. In contrast, older adults and those with more complex health needs were more likely to experience chronic unemployment. This underscores the need for targeted interventions that address not just workplace access, but also the broader social determinants that shape employment opportunities.
Employment, however, is not just a matter of job access but of sustaining that employment within environments that recognise and accommodate neurodivergence. Samtleben (2024) explored workplace disclosure from the perspective of autistic workers themselves, revealing that many remain silent about their diagnosis due to fears of stigma or exclusion. The study found that when workplaces foster cultures of inclusivity, offer clear lines of communication, and provide individualised accommodations, autistic employees are more likely to disclose and to thrive. Such findings have direct implications for workplace policy, pointing to the value of systemic change over mere compliance.
From the perspective of employers, Schuurmans et al. (2024) conducted research in the Netherlands, finding that whilst many employers express interest in hiring autistic workers, retention is often undermined by superficial diversity initiatives that fail to value autistic contributions authentically. The study argues that stigma within the workplace—not the presence of autistic traits themselves—is a major barrier to employment success. In effect, tokenism without structural change does little to support autistic workers. Complementing this, Davies et al. (2024) conducted a scoping review that illustrates the pervasive underemployment of autistic adults. Their analysis identifies consistent barriers to career progression, including a lack of tailored career support, widespread stigma, and insufficient accommodations. However, they also highlight the positive role of mentoring and personalised support structures, which can help to break down these barriers and foster career growth.
Alternative approaches to employment support have also been examined. Dennis et al. (2024) reviewed nature-based interventions—programmes such as community gardening or outdoor work opportunities—and found preliminary evidence that such environments can enhance wellbeing and employment readiness among autistic adults. Whilst the research remains limited, these interventions offer a potentially accessible and supportive avenue for those who may not thrive in conventional workplaces. Meanwhile, Dachez et al. (2024) explored the experiences of autistic adults in supported employment programmes in France, such as Individual Placement and Support. Participants reported that such programmes are beneficial when job coaches respect autonomy and understand autism; however, staff often lacked adequate training, and programmes suffered from resource constraints. This study reinforces the importance of investing in informed, respectful support rather than generic interventions.
On the housing front, Nguyen et al. (2024) examined the conditions necessary for autistic adults to live independently. The study highlights that most autistic adults continue to live with family due to limited suitable housing options, and whilst sensory-friendly design is often prioritised, it is not sufficient. What is needed are flexible, adaptable spaces that support autonomy and allow for meaningful social engagement, recognising that independent living is as much about dignity and agency as it is about design. Finally, Bedard (2024) offered a personal and systemic critique of group homes for autistic individuals with high support needs. The account describes the emotional toll on families navigating underfunded, bureaucratic systems and calls for systemic reform to better support both autistic individuals and those who care for them.
Taken together, this collection of research paints a clear picture: when it comes to the daily realities of autistic adults—employment, housing, autonomy—there is both need and opportunity for focused, applied research that informs policy and practice. Yet, as we shall see, such research remains the exception rather than the rule.
Reference List
Bedard, S., 2024. Autistic Children and Group Homes. Canadian Journal of Autism Equity. https://doi.org/10.15173/cjae.v4i1.5680.
Bury, S., Hedley, D., Uljarević, M., Li, X., Stokes, M., & Begeer, S., 2024. Employment profiles of autistic people: An 8-year longitudinal study. Autism, 28, pp. 2322 - 2333. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613231225798.
Dachez, J., Seksek, S., Ete, N., Bianciotto, M., Toubhans, M., Nasri, Z., Bureau, R., & Garnier, P., 2024. Experiences of autistic people in supported employment in France: a participatory research project. Advances in Autism. https://doi.org/10.1108/aia-03-2024-0022.
Davies, J., Romualdez, A., Pellicano, E., & Remington, A., 2024. Career progression for autistic people: A scoping review. Autism, 28, pp. 2690 - 2706. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613241236110.
Dennis, M., Henderson-Wilson, C., Watson, J., & Lawson, J., 2024. Nature-Based Interventions for Adults with Developmental Disabilities: A Scoping Review Centering Autistic Adults. Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16031077.
Nguyen, P., d’Auria, V., & Heylighen, A. (2024). Home tailoring: independent living on the autism spectrum. Housing and Society, 51(2), 124-145.
Rickard, G., & Deveau, R. (2024). Frontline managers’ experiences of practice leadership for when supporting autistic adults with complex support needs residing in community housing. Tizard Learning Disability Review.
Samtleben, E. (2024). Autistic perspective on workplace disclosure and accommodation. Canadian Journal of Autism Equity.
Schuurmans, J., Wright, E., Bunders-Aelen, J., & Regeer, B., 2024. Exploring autistic employment and retention realities: A qualitative study among 12 Dutch organizations. Neurodiversity. https://doi.org/10.1177/27546330241272232.
Contrast: Recent Research (Feb 2025–Present)
In stark contrast to the handful of studies from 2024–2025 that engage with the real-world needs of autistic adults, the most recent research—published between 1 January 2025 and the present—returns to well-worn ground: early diagnosis, symptom management, and speculative medical interventions. A simple search using only the term “autism” yields a glut of studies, all reinforcing the medical model of autism as something to be treated, managed, or corrected, with not a single study addressing housing or employment directly. The disparity is not just one of quantity but of focus—and of relevance to the lives of autistic adults.
Rocha and Salguero (2025) explore early diagnosis, highlighting the need for better family awareness of so-called early indicators of autism. Their study emphasises that delayed diagnosis correlates with poorer outcomes, a familiar narrative in autism research. However, the methodology is limited by a narrow participant base drawn from clinical settings, and the authors rely heavily on standardised diagnostic tools that often fail to account for cultural, linguistic, or neurodivergent variations in developmental trajectories. As such, the findings are only loosely applicable outside of the specific socio-economic and cultural context of their sample, but the message—that earlier detection leads to better outcomes—will no doubt continue to attract funding and institutional backing.
Two studies on cannabis-based treatments (Gherardi & Salguero, 2025; Maia & Salguero, 2025) investigate the use of cannabidiol (CBD) to manage “traits” such as hyperactivity, aggression, anxiety, and sleep disturbances in people diagnosed with autism. While these studies report some improvements, their sample sizes are small, typically under 50 participants, and lack robust long-term follow-up. Furthermore, they do not explore the impact of such treatments on quality of life, autonomy, or participation in community life—factors that matter deeply to autistic adults. The emphasis remains on symptom suppression rather than support or inclusion. Without longitudinal data or diverse samples, it is difficult to see how these findings could be generalised to the global autistic population, yet they are already being positioned as promising “breakthroughs.”
Perhaps the most headline-grabbing of the recent studies is Kabataş et al. (2025), which documents the use of Wharton’s jelly mesenchymal stem cell (WJ-MSC) therapy in a single autistic child. After two years of combined stem cell treatment and neurorehabilitation, the authors report improved language and motor skills with no serious side effects. However, this is a single case study, and whilst it may generate media buzz and appeal to families desperate for answers, its relevance to the autistic adult population—or indeed to autism more broadly—is minimal. The framing of this intervention as a potential “safe and effective treatment” ignores the vast ethical, logistical, and financial barriers to accessing such therapies, particularly in countries without robust public health systems.
A marginally more relevant study by Randall et al. (2025) examines assistive technology use among adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including autism. The study reveals that whilst such technologies are often used at home, adoption in the workplace is rare, largely due to environmental and attitudinal barriers. However, the sample size is small and the grouping of intellectual and developmental disabilities means that autism-specific findings are difficult to isolate. As a result, whilst the study touches upon employment, it does so peripherally and without offering targeted recommendations for autistic adults seeking workplace support.
Lastly, Sanders et al. (2025) explore healthcare access for adults with neurodevelopmental conditions, including autism. Participants reported valuing empathetic, knowledgeable providers, coordinated care, and accommodating clinic environments. However, once again, the framing is medical, focused on service delivery within healthcare systems rather than on broader structural supports like housing or employment. The sample appears to be limited to clinical populations, and the study does not specify whether the findings are generalisable beyond its immediate context.
Across all these studies, the common thread is medicalisation—autism as a condition to be diagnosed earlier, treated pharmacologically or biologically, and managed within clinical settings. Not one of these studies grapples with the systemic issues that shape autistic adulthood: unemployment, underemployment, housing insecurity, or the lack of social support. Despite their methodological limitations and small, context-specific samples, these studies are far more likely to attract attention, funding, and institutional support. Meanwhile, research into the daily realities of autistic people—work, housing, autonomy—is left on the margins, viewed as secondary or even optional.
This focus not only distorts public understanding of autism but also perpetuates a system where resources follow spectacle, not need. The studies may make headlines, but they offer little hope or guidance to the vast majority of autistic adults navigating systems that continue to exclude and overlook them.
References
Berg, A., Nili, A., Evans, L., Paltell, K., Kaiser, A., Anderson, E., Egan, S., Kaat, A., Nesbitt, G., & Myers, L. (2025). Assessing Communication Impairments in a Rare Neurodevelopmental Disorder: The SCN2A Clinical Trials Readiness Study.. Neurology. Clinical practice, 15 1, e200391 . https://doi.org/10.1212/cpj.0000000000200391.
Gherardi, A., & Salguero, P. (2025). Use of Cannabis in people with autism spectrum disorder. Interdisciplinary Rehabilitation / Rehabilitacion Interdisciplinaria. https://doi.org/10.56294/ri202534.
Kabataş, S., Civelek, F., & Uğurlu, E. (2025). Advances in the treatment of autism spectrum disorder using stem cell therapy: A case study. World Journal of Methodology. 15 1. https://doi.org/10.5662/wjm.v15.i1.95857.
Maia, R., & Salguero, P. (2025). Effects of cannabis oil on people with Autism Specter Disorder. Interdisciplinary Rehabilitation / Rehabilitacion Interdisciplinaria. https://doi.org/10.56294/ri202538.
Randall, K., Drew, H., Gilman, E., & Dixon, E. (2025). Assistive Technology Uses and Barriers in the Home and Workplace for Adults With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.. Journal of applied research in intellectual disabilities : JARID, 38 1, e13306 . https://doi.org/10.1111/jar.13306.
Rocha, N., & Salguero, P. (2025). Characteristics for the diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. AG Salud. https://doi.org/10.62486/agsalud2025101.
Sanders, J., Dafoe, A., Glaros, C., & Holliman, B. (2025). The New Frontier of Adult Neurodevelopmental Care: Individual and Caregiver Values.. Neurology. Clinical practice, 15 1, e200384 . https://doi.org/10.1212/cpj.0000000000200384.
Analysis: The Glaring Disparity
The contradictions that emerge from this analysis are impossible to ignore. On the one hand, autistic adults face material conditions that demand urgent attention: housing insecurity, chronic underemployment, and exclusion from the means of social participation. On the other, the vast majority of autism research continues to focus on individualised, medicalised ‘solutions,’ promising hypothetical gains whilst doing nothing to alter the structures that produce precarity. This is a textbook example of the contradiction between use value and exchange value. Research into housing and employment offers use value to autistic people—practical knowledge that could materially improve lives. Medicalised research, by contrast, offers exchange value—it attracts funding, produces patents, generates publications, and sustains the industries of pharma and biomedicine. It circulates capital, not care.
What drives this imbalance is not an abstract oversight but the logic of capital. As Marx and Engels understood, under capitalism, the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class. The medical model of autism—which casts autistic people as disordered individuals in need of correction—serves the interests of capital by pathologising difference and justifying intervention. It depoliticises the experience of marginalisation and frames it instead as a matter for the clinic, not the commons. In this schema, research that examines systemic barriers—such as the lack of affordable housing or the exclusionary nature of workplaces—poses a threat to the status quo. It calls into question the allocation of resources, the organisation of labour, and the ownership of property. In short, it reveals the structural violence of capitalism.
Moreover, the dominance of medical research is sustained by a funding apparatus that reflects these same priorities. Grants flow to projects that promise ‘innovation,’ especially those with potential for commodification—new drugs, therapies, or technologies. Autistic-led research, particularly that which critiques the system itself or advocates for collective, liberatory solutions, is marginalised or excluded entirely. The result is a research landscape that aligns not with the needs of autistic people, but with the imperatives of capital: profit, control, and the management of deviance.
This is the central contradiction: autistic people need emancipation; the system offers treatment. The few studies that do focus on housing and employment reflect a flicker of what is possible, but they remain on the periphery, crowded out by the more lucrative, more palatable promise of biomedical ‘progress.’ Until research is decoupled from the profit motive—and reoriented toward solidarity, material support, and autonomy—these contradictions will persist, and autistic adults will continue to be left behind.
Consequences for Autistic Adults
The consequences of this distorted research agenda are not abstract—they are felt materially and daily by autistic adults. Underemployment and housing instability remain pervasive, not due to individual failings, but because the systems meant to support people have either withered or never existed in the first place. Yet the resources that could address these conditions are instead channelled into the pursuit of a cure, a quest to eliminate autism rather than to support real lives. This diversion of resources serves capital, not the community. It commodifies autistic existence, turning our bodies and brains into sites for experimentation, while the social determinants of our suffering remain untouched.
In this context, autistic adults are not merely neglected—we are afterthoughts. Despite making up the largest demographic of autistic people, our needs are routinely sidelined in favour of interventions aimed at children, interventions that promise to ‘normalise’ future adults before we can ever become a burden on the system. This is the logic of preventive control: if you cannot cure the adults, then focus on the next generation before they demand inclusion, housing, or dignity. It is eugenics by another name, sanitised through academic language and couched in terms of ‘early intervention.’
Compounding this, the current agenda of the U.S. administration—led by figures deeply entrenched in neoliberal looting—offers no relief. Most of the research that centres real needs comes from outside the United States, where the grip of capital on public policy and research funding, whilst still present, is less absolute. The appointment of RFK Jr., a scion of one of America’s ruling families and a lifelong adversary of the autistic community, to oversee Health and Human Services, is no accident. It reflects the state’s role in protecting capital, not people. He will not improve conditions for autistic people; rather, his mission is to reinforce a biomedical surveillance regime that furthers social control under the guise of public health.
This is why we cannot rely on institutions built to serve capital to deliver liberation. Solidarity and class consciousness—not only among autistic people but across the entire working class—are essential. Our struggle is not isolated. The same system that abandons autistic adults is the one that exploits labour, hoards housing, and privatises care. The solution lies not in appealing to our oppressors for inclusion but in organising for systemic change—demanding a world where the worth of a life is not measured by its productivity or conformity, but by its intrinsic value as part of a shared human struggle for dignity, autonomy, and justice.
Call to Action
We cannot accept the premise that the current system—rooted in exploitation, accumulation, and control—can be nudged into meeting our needs through polite advocacy or appeals for inclusion. The research landscape, like all institutions under capitalism, reflects the interests of the ruling class, not the needs of the people. What is required is not simply a shift in funding priorities, but a revolution in consciousness and action—a movement that connects the liberation of autistic people to the broader struggles of the oppressed worldwide. As Pan-Africanist thinkers like Frantz Fanon have argued, liberation does not come through integration into colonial structures; it comes through dismantling those structures entirely and rebuilding in service to the people. Autism research, when controlled by elites and corporations, will never serve us. Only autistic-led, community-based knowledge production—rooted in solidarity, mutual aid, and class struggle—can.
This requires us to build solidarity movements, both within and beyond the autistic community. The struggles for housing, employment, and dignity are not unique to us—they are shared by the global working class, by disabled people, by those colonised and dispossessed. As Amílcar Cabral insisted, we must “return to the people” and ground our resistance in material conditions, not abstract policy debates. Research must be reclaimed as a tool of resistance, tied directly to housing policy, employment law, and public services that are socialised and democratically controlled—not commodified for profit.
The future we fight for is not one in which autistic people are ‘included’ in an unjust system, but one in which autistic liberation is bound up with the liberation of all peoples. This means aligning ourselves with movements for tenant rights, labour rights, prison abolition, and decolonisation. It means rejecting charity and representation in favour of autonomy, self-determination, and collective power. Research, in this context, must be action-oriented, aimed at building capacity, not careers; at serving communities, not institutions. Let us not ask for scraps from the master’s table. Let us organise, resist, and build a world where all of us can live freely and fully, beyond the grasp of capital, and beyond the reach of systems that would rather we disappear.
Final thoughts …
Supporting autistic lives means meeting needs, not chasing cures. It means recognising that the challenges we face—poverty, housing insecurity, unemployment—are not the result of our neurotype, but of a system that was never built for us and sees no profit in supporting us. The fact that research continues to prioritise medical interventions over material support is not an accident, nor is it a failure of understanding. It is by design—a feature of a system that pathologises difference, commodifies suffering, and resists any call for structural change. Until research is reclaimed as a tool of solidarity and liberation, autistic adults will remain underserved, excluded, and disposable in the eyes of capital. But we are not disposable to each other. In the cracks of this broken system, we are building something else—rooted in care, in struggle, and in the refusal to be anything less than whole.