We’re excited to share the latest updates on our continuing partnership work with EDAC - as part of an innovative and collaborative approach to research around autistic people and eating disorders.
New Best Practice Guidelines Published
in 2024, researchers and colleagues at the Eating Disorder and Autism Collaborative (EDAC) ran a series of 5 workshops with autistic people with lived experience of an eating disorder, along with SWAN and Scottish Autism.
Around 15 people with lived experience - many of whom were from the SWAN network - worked together with researchers on this collaborative project, aiming to understand how best to work with, and be led by, autistic people and exploring challenges and solutions for meaningful co-production.
The goals of the project were to support the development of more meaningful, inclusive, and ethical research by:
- Developing a shared understanding of how to collaboratively develop novel, autistic, and lived/living experience led approaches to ED research.
- Co-producing best practice guidelines for achieving this.
- Making these guidelines accessible to support adoption by the broader autism and ED research community.
The Best Practice guidelines which were developed as a result of this collaboration have now been published and are available for future researchers to use:
'You’re Not Alone' Exhibition
The second phase pf the EDAC collaboration used arts-based methods to capture experiences of being an autistic person with an eating disorder. Contributors - including members of the SWAN network - took photos or drew pictures of things which resonated with their experiences in relation to the following questions:
- What are autistic people's experiences of having an Eating Disorder?
- What are the research priorities of autistic people with lived experience of eating disorders?
- The photographs and drawings now form part of an exhibition which highlights the experience of being autistic with an eating disorder and informs future research in line with the priorities of the community.
The exhibition, which was launched in Edinburgh, can now be viewed online:
