Dr Gloria Dura-Vila, MD, MRCPsych, MSc, PhD

Dr Gloria Dura-Vila is a Senior NHS Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and was formerly the Medical Lead for the ASD Pathway (Complex Neurodevelopmental Service) in Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (she has served in the NHS for over 20 years) where she set up the Autism Service. She is a multi-award-winning clinician, prolific author and academic and a renowned expert in the field of Autism, specialising in autistic people who present with particularly complex needs, relating to co-occurring mental or physical health conditions, additional learning needs and/or requiring significant levels of support or adaptation in daily life. These may include, but are not limited to, attachment disorder and trauma, masking, eating disorders, gender dysphoria, extreme demand avoidance and selective mutism.

She is a member – amongst other committees and forums – of the Expert Reference Group of the Autism Education Trust (AET), the co-chair of the Autism and Complex Needs Special Interest Group (ACNSIG) and a member of the Surrey Autism Partnership Board. She has active membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the General Medical Council. She also has a highly specialised private practice offering ASD assessments with a special emphasis on complex and atypical presentations within the Autism Spectrum, and her private assessments are sought after by Local Authorities and the courts. Dr Dura-Vila is a member of the PDA Research Network.

Dr Dura-Vila was invited by Baroness Hollins to join an expert roundtable discussion at the House of Lords on the implementation of her report on improving the lives of people with Autism and Learning Disabilities. She is visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry within the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. She is currently providing clinical supervision to two PhD students at King’s College London researching complex presentations of Autism, including PDA. Dr Dura-Vila contributed to the course run at Great Ormond Street Hospital (Neurodevelopmental Assessment Clinic) on ‘The ‘Diagnosis of Autism in Complex Presentations’, lecturing on Demand Avoidance. This course is presented in the book, Autism in Complex Presentations; A Guide to Assessment and Diagnosis, to which Dr Dura-Vila contributed the chapter on Demand Avoidance (published by Mac Keith Press, 2025).

Dr Dura-Vila has worked in the NHS since 2003, training in Psychiatry at the Royal Free Hospital in London and in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at St Mary’s Hospital in London. She completed an MSc and was awarded a PhD in 2015 in Mental Health at UCL.

Dr Dura-Vila has received multiple awards; she was runner-up for the National Autistic Society’s prestigious Autism Professionals Awards for two consecutive years, 2019 and 2020, in the category of Outstanding Mental Health Professional. She was awarded a Clinical Excellence Award in 2018 and a rare triple Clinical Excellence Award in 2020 for her NHS work as Medical Lead for the ASD Pathway in Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. She received a PDA Star from the PDA Society for her commitment to supporting children and families living with PDA in May 2019.The impact of her clinical and academic work goes well beyond her NHS Trust, reaching a national and international level, through teaching, interviews and publications. She has lectured in many institutions, conferences and universities, including the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Great Ormond Street Hospital and Durham University. She has been a guest lecturer at Queen Mary University of London and a Clinical Lecturer at Imperial College London and visiting Lecturer at University College London. She is currently Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry within the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London.

She has published many books to great acclaim from professionals, parents and autistic advocates (with the prestigious, award-winning Jessica Kingsley Publishers/Hachette). Her passion for communicating the Autism diagnosis in the best possible manner compelled her to write My Autism Book: A Child’s Guide to their Autism Spectrum Diagnosis in 2013, which has become a best-seller for Jessica Kingsley Publishers and is established as a widely-used, valuable resource for parents and professionals to explain ASD to an autistic child; it was translated into Indonesian in 2018. She has also authored the following books Me and my PDA: A Guide to Pathological Demand Avoidance for Young People (2018), The Amazing Autistic Brain. 150 Cards with Strengths and Challenges for positive Autism Discussions with accompanying booklet containing tips and advice (2021), The Panda on PDA: A Children’s Introduction to Pathological Demand Avoidance (2022) and Camille the Chameleon on Masking: How I stopped masking and discovered my awesome autistic self. She has other book projects planned for the near future.

Dr Dura-Vila has published extensive academic work, including papers in world-renowned peer-reviewed journals, the book Sadness, Depression, and the Dark Night of the Soul: Transcending the Medicalisation of Sadness (2017) and chapters in Culture and Conflict in Child and Adolescent Mental Health (‘The Mental Health of British African-Caribbean Children and Adolescents’, 2008 – part of the International Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions’ series) and ‘Common Mental Disorders’ in Spirituality and Psychiatry (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Dr Dura-Vila had an active role at the Royal College of Psychiatrists where she often presented and organised conferences, and she was previously a member of the executive committee of the Special Interest Groups of the Royal College of Psychiatrists for Spirituality and Psychiatry.