Enactivism in Autism Healthcare Practices: A Scoping Review

Introduction: Autism support needs can be viewed as ‘wicked problems’, underpinned by various disrupting factors distributed across time and space. This complexity strains care providers’ ability to act swiftly and decisively. An integrative autopoietic-enactive approach may offer guidance by taking the individual’s interactional social-ecological system as the central unit of analysis. In clinical practice and research, however, this approach is only beginning to take shape. A lack of definition and codification hinders practical guidance and clinical innovation.

Method: To explore what autopoietic-enactive autism healthcare might mean in practice, this scoping review maps healthcare practices that are already based on autopoietic enactivism or bear affinity with it.

Results: Forty-nine publications met with inclusion, representing 2.21% of the initial corpus. Findings were synthesized using four analytical lenses: aspects of (I) ecological-, (II) tangible-, (III), intersubjective- , and (IV) socio-cultural life , representing distinguishable albeit not separable dimensions of a person’s social-ecological system.

Conclusion: Our findings present a rich but still loosely integrated picture of healthcare practices. This scoping review provides a reference point from which the approach may be further defined and consolidated into a clinical research field.