About me: Dr. Chris Dabbs PhD

Hi folx, I’m Chris Dabbs (he/him), one of the diagnosticians here at Embrace Autism. I’m an autistic psychologist with a passion for clinical work, research, and teaching. Many psychologists pick one of these paths—I chose the greediest route and opted into all three in my professional life. Across my work, I work hard to cherish and appreciate the strengths of all types of brains.

I believe that my approach to the interdisciplinary work I do is inextricably linked to my upbringing. I grew up in a trailer park within a deindustrialized rust belt city outside of Chicago. My early experiences of social welfare, and subsequent class migration through education, profoundly shape my professional lens. My research emerges from a complex intersection of privilege and marginalization informed by my family’s blue-collar heritage and my personal journey navigating academic spaces often staunchly unfriendly towards my neurology. My mixed positionalities facilitate my analyses of systems that both privilege and oppress.

Raised in the U.S., I currently live in Alberta, Canada where I am a university professor who trains psychologists and counselors to best serve their communities. A core belief of my work—teaching, research, and clinical—is that human interaction is inherently collaborative. I make my greatest effort to push against the objectification that is so core to my field of psychology. I don’t see my clients, my students, or my research participants as things to simply dissect but as people to try to understand through a lens of humility and grace.

What I do

Clinical

My clinical training is interdisciplinary and varied, including discrete training in the U.S. as both a clinical mental health counselor (a psychotherapist) and as a health service psychologist (counseling psychology). As a psychotherapist, I draw extensively from existential, humanistic, and positive psychology, which pose questions such as: “what are my strengths that help get me through hard times?” and “how can I achieve a good life?” As a psychological diagnostician, I strike a hard balance between the overtly pathologizing nature of our medical diagnostic systems and the realities of my clients’ strengths and skills. You won’t find words like deficit, dysfunction, or labels like profound autism or severe behavior, in my psychological reports. In fact, with other autistic community members, researchers, and clinicians, I co-authored a letter pushing against this type of ableist language in autism research. We all have strengths and areas of growth, autistic and non-autistic alike.

I hold three clinical licenses:

• Mental health counselor (LMHC; in Indiana)
• Health service provider in psychology (HSPP; in Indiana)
• A registered psychologist in Alberta

Teaching

I have been teaching in college and university environments since 2019, and I derive an immense sense of occupational joy from teaching about the science of psychology. My specific teaching focuses are clinical: I teach courses such as addiction counseling, assessment and testing, psychotherapy and counseling, and psychopathology. As an autistic practitioner who struggled through clinical training that privileges neurotypicality, I am privileged to show up in these pedagogically clinical spaces to serve as an example of success in the field with a minority neurotype. To that end, I also train psychologists and counselors on testing and assessment skills.

Outside of my traditional clinical courses, I’ve also designed a couple of courses that meld some of my additional interests. These include a take on a traditional psychopathology course through the lens of comic books: I call this class ‘Pow, Bam, Snikt: Comic Books and Mental Health.’ I also teach an advanced research-heavy course called ‘Psychology of Religion and Spirituality’, which I developed through a grant from the American Psychological Association (APA).

Research

As a psychology professor, my research agenda centers on autistic wellness and support. I have published refereed articles critiquing the anti-autistic systems of psychologist training. I have co-authored a forthcoming clinical textbook specific to understanding and supporting autistic clients (which even contains a chapter on assessment), entitled ‘Understanding and Affirming Autistic Clients’. Additionally, I have self-published specific calls regarding the need to standardize assessment processes in adult autism diagnosis.

But my populations of research are varied; beyond autism, my interests tend to circle understanding the mental wellness of marginalized groups—I have specific interests in religious minorities and people largely characterized as neurodivergent. While I began my career as a quantitative researcher, as is reflected in my dissertation, I have moved into a mixed-methods space in my professional career. Being interested in deeply understanding the intersections of identity and lived experiences privileges methods beyond quantitative.

Theoretically, I most often draw from Social Identity Theory (SIT), minority stress theory, attribution theory, and the double empathy problem. From these lenses, I’ve published work exploring ways in which religious marginalization impacts queer folx, how autistic mental health clinicians fare in their graduate training programs, and the history of why people significantly mistrust atheists. My dissertation—which explored mental health differences across secular, religious, and spiritual college students—resulted in two publications: a) the main thesis which saw few differences between these groups, and b) a psychometric to measure spiritual community, the Spiritual Community and Togetherness Scale (SCoTS).

As you can see, I have a pretty large interest in the intersections of psychology and religion. A pet interest of mine is high-control new religious movements, also referred to colloquially as “cults.” In that vein, I’ve published works on the Branch Davidians of Waco, the celebrity cult NXIVM, and both the Satanic Temple and Satanism, in general.

In the last couple of years, much of my research attention has been turned towards topics that center autism and autistics, particularly those in my field of health service psychology. Forthcoming, I have: a) a co-authored chapter regarding anti-autistic ableism in higher education in the textbook Ableism, and b) a co-authored autoethnographic piece which explores and critiques the power dynamics inherent to autism diagnosis. On top of this, I have a forthcoming clinical textbook available for pre-order: Understanding and Affirming Autistic Clients: A Primer for Mental Health Professionals. You can view the collection of my published works via my ORCiD profile.

My educational background

My post-secondary educational journey began at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana—one of only three, secular all-male colleges in the United States. From Wabash, I earned my B.A. with a double-major in Psychology and Religious Studies (are you noticing a trend, yet? ☺)

After graduating with my bachelor’s, I attended Valparaiso University (“Valpo”) in Valparaiso, Indiana where I earned my master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling from the CACREP-accredited program alongside a graduate certificate in clinical addiction counseling. Valpo is where I cut my teeth as a clinician: where I learned to sit with a client without throwing up, where I learned what advocacy was and wasn’t, and where I learned a lot about myself as a clinician and a person.

After graduating Valpo with highest honors, I attended Oklahoma State University for my Ph.D. in counseling psychology. Confusingly, counseling psychology is a field of psychology and not one of counseling. Counseling psychology, in the United States, is one of three health service psychology paths (alongside clinical psychology and school psychology—all three of these fields are licensed the same in the U.S.). If you’re interested, I write more about these degree differences in ‘Mental Health Alphabet Soup’. Alongside my Ph.D., I earned a graduate certificate in college teaching.

After finishing my dissertation, I completed my pre-doctoral residency at the Indiana University-Indianapolis Counseling and Psychological Services center where I fell in love with testing and assessment. One of my rotations during my residency was in educational assessment—essentially testing and diagnosing ADHD and learning disabilities—and I knew from that moment forward that I wanted to be engaged in psychological assessment. Years prior to these experiences, I had begun to loosely self-identify as autistic, and my assessment experiences led me to seek a formal diagnosis. I write about this at length in the article below:

How I didn’t know I was autistic
until I was almost a psychologist

With support from a large Chicagoland-based group practice near me, I was able to collaboratively build a post-doctoral residence around psychological assessment. Specifically, I focused on complex differential diagnosis for clients who had confusing, conflicting, or lackluster mental health diagnostic histories: people with many diagnoses from multiple providers, which complicates treatment. My specific focus during this time was on assessment and diagnosis of OCD, ADHD, and autism in adults—which brings us full-circle to my work at Embrace Autism.

I am happy to be working with Embrace Autism, an organization with which I greatly philosophically align. If you’ve read this far, and you’re a potential client, I hope your time spent on this site, or with our screening and assessment services, helps set you on a path to a life that best supports your needs.

If you are looking for an autism/AuDHD assessment,
Dr. Chris Dabbs PhD can offer help!
You can find more information here:

Autism assessments