The Double Empathy Reader: Exploring Theory, Neurodivergent Lived Experience and Implications for Practice

by Damian Milton

The Double Empathy Reader brings together a substantial collection of work from leading researchers, theorists and practitioners, with first-hand accounts of neurodivergent people, to explore this growing area of study within the neurodiversity movement. This comprehensive handbook explores Damian Milton’s ‘double empathy problem’: the breakdown in mutual understanding that can happen between any two people yet is more likely to occur when people of differing dispositions attempt to interact. It challenges the traditional view that in exchanges between autistic and non-autistic people, this breakdown was simply the result of autistic people being inherently deficient in empathy.

Thirteen years after the theory was first published, The Double Empathy Reader brings together an important volume of work to explore the research that has developed in that time as well as the many gaps in our understanding that still exist, with the aim to understand the potential of this theory to aid a reframing of autism itself and the radical change this could bring when considering best practice models for supporting autistic people in different settings. This title is the first in a new Readers in Neurodiversity series, which follows Milton et al’s The Neurodiversity Reader , first published in 2020. In keeping with this earlier collection, this new volume also explores how the concept of the ‘double empathy problem’ may be of use in wider theory and practice regarding neurodiversity.

827 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 29, 2025