This week is Mental Health Awareness Week, and I've been sitting with how to write this one.

Because here's the thing — when you're parenting a neurodivergent child, particularly one with PDA, mental health isn't a topic you dip into once a year. It's the water you swim in, every single day. The conversations we tend to see this week — the gentle reminders to go for a walk, talk to someone, practise self-care — they're well-meaning. They really are. But for a lot of us in the neurodiversity community, they can feel a little like being handed a plaster when what you actually need is surgery.

So this week, I want to talk about the real stuff.

The mental load that doesn't have a name

There's a kind of exhaustion that comes with this life that I struggled to describe for a long time. It's not just tiredness. It's not even stress in the way most people mean it. It's the constant, low-level hum of hyper-vigilance — reading the room the moment you wake up, calculating whether today is a high-demand day or a low-demand one, mentally running through every possible trigger before you've even had a coffee.

It's holding three conversations in your head simultaneously: the one you're actually having with your child, the one you're scripting in case things escalate, and the one you're already preparing for the school, the GP, the EHCP review, the person at the supermarket who looks like they're about to say something unhelpful.

When you're told to "look after yourself"

I don't say this to be ungrateful — but "self-care" used to make me want to scream.

Not because I didn't believe in it. But because it felt utterly disconnected from my actual life. When your child can't be left alone, when school refusal means your entire week revolves around the chaos of trying to maintain some kind of routine, when you've spent three hours managing a meltdown and it's now 11pm and you still haven't eaten — the suggestion of a bubble bath doesn't really land.

What I've come to understand, slowly, is that self-care for caregivers in our situation often has to be radically rethought. It's not about grand gestures. It's about tiny pockets of recovery.

What actually helped

I want to be honest here, because I think we do each other a disservice when we only share the polished version.

What helped me most wasn't an app, or a mindfulness programme, or a webinar. It was finding other people who got it. Parents in the PDA community, online and in person, who didn't need me to explain what a demand-avoidant child actually meant or why I couldn't just use a star chart. The relief of being truly understood — not managed or advised at — is something I can't overstate.

Professional support helped too, when I found the right kind. For a long time I'd tried to access support that was designed for a different kind of problem, and it hadn't clicked. What changed everything was finding organisations that genuinely understood our specific situation — not just neurodiversity in the abstract, but the daily reality of living it.

Two organisations in particular have made a profound difference to our family. The Mary Frances Trust has been a lifeline in ways I find hard to fully put into words — their support came at some of our hardest moments and offered real, tangible sessions that helped us understand ourselves and each other differently. Barnardo's has been equally transformative, giving us practical tools to change the way we communicate as a family and find a new normal at home. These weren't generic parenting courses or tick-box exercises. They were sessions that genuinely shifted something — in how we speak to each other, how we de-escalate, how we make space for everyone's needs without one person's needs swallowing everyone else's.

If you're at the point where you know you need outside support but aren't sure where to start — look for organisations like these in your area. The right support, with people who actually get it, is something no amount of self-help reading can replace.

And small, practical things have helped more than I expected. Having the right tool for a hard moment — something sensory, something to do with my hands during a stressful phone call — matters more than it sounds. The body needs somewhere to put the tension.

To whoever needs to hear this today

If you're reading this in the middle of a difficult season — and I know many of you are — I want you to know that the exhaustion you feel is real and it makes sense. You are not failing. You are doing an incredibly hard thing, mostly without adequate support, often without being seen.

Your mental health matters. Not because you'll be a better carer if you look after yourself (though that's true). But because you matter, full stop. Separate from your role. Separate from what you provide.

This week, I hope you find one small pocket of space that's just yours. Even if it's five minutes in the car before you go inside. Even if it's a walk around the block. Even if it's just this: letting yourself be tired, without the weight of needing to be okay.

We're walking this together.