Looking for Normal – An Autistic Boy Who Beat The Odds.

Looking For Normal is the memoir of author,
musician and filmmaker, Steve Slavin.

His obsession with music, as a child, led to a long career in the creative arts; albeit one plagued by clinical depression and the symptoms of a condition he was unaware of until 2008.

In recounting the 48 years that led to his autism diagnosis, this darkly humorous memoir will inform and inspire anyone with an interest in mental health and autism. But more than this, it is the story of an “emotionally disturbed child, without a future” who, against the backdrop of low expectation, became an ambitious, independent adult, with a wife, daughters, and a career stifled by the long shadow of his childhood dysfunction. Read More

Psilocybin: the magical new psychiatric drug for depression?

In 2020, I took part in a psilocybin trial. Psilocybin is the psychedelic ingredient found in magic mushrooms. The trial was carried out at a London hospital and designed to study the potential benefits of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression—a condition I have struggled with for fifty-five years. The program consisted of five therapy sessions, a single dosing day, then six weeks of integration therapy where I discussed, with the therapist Read More

Clinical Depression – How Meditation Saved My Life

In February 2019, my world crashed into a life-shattering wall of all-consuming clinical depression. Following 6 months of increasingly poor mental health, I could go no further in any direction. I feared that I had plunged so deep into the well of despair and hopelessness that perhaps life was simply to painful to carry on. Read More

Autism Meets OCD

OCD-ACTION Annual Facilitator DayBirmingham 2017 On November 4th, ocd-action kindly invited me to speak about autism at their annual facilitator’s event in Birmingham, UK. This is due to the rise in people with OCD asking them for advice that are also on the autistic spectrum. I spoke for around an hour to groups of OCD support groups from around the country, that are brought together each year in order to attend Read More

Lets Talk About Stereotypes

Lets Talk About Autism StereotypesCLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEOOnce I overheard a doctor say; ”Oh, so he’s on the autistic spectrum…they are very high achievers you know.” Now that’s a doctor that needs to check her facts.So lets bust some other myths about autism.STEREOTYPE NUMBER ONEYes, I have a clinical diagnosis of high functioning autism. but does this mean I have a passion for science fiction? Absolutely no it Read More