Our support service is for anyone who identifies as, or suspects they are, a PDA’er, and for those who know or believe they know someone with PDA. We offer information, support, and guidance on PDA, as well as strategies and services that may be beneficial. There is no requirement that the person you know has a diagnosis, or is a particular age, to seek support from us.

PDA Society is a UK charity, and while we wish to support anyone who needs help, our team do not have training to answer queries about systems and services outside of the UK.

PDA can bring unique challenges for PDA’ers and for everyone in their lives. Our team provides information and support to help you feel more confident and informed about PDA and what you can do to tackle any PDA related challenges you are facing.

Our team respond to your queries either by email or over the phone. We aim to respond to all queries within 5 working days.

If you request a phone call, your response will be from a withheld number, and you can expect a call to last around 30 minutes. Our team works flexibly, some of our team members are able to work evenings and weekends, others are not. If you request a telephone call, we will endeavour to arrange a mutually convenient time to speak. We cannot always let you know in advance when you will get a phone call.

We recommend you prepare by noting down 2 or 3 key points you want to explore in a call, and keeping this note with you in order that you can get maximum value from your time with a team member. Whether you request an email or phone call response, you can expect to receive an email with a precis of information that is pertinent to your query. If you have had a phone call with a team member, this email will cover information shared during your conversation. The information contained in our email communications is personalised for the person the email is addressed to, it is not intended or appropriate, for further dissemination.

In most cases we will try to give you a comprehensive reply – however if you prefer to get information in smaller chunks you can indicate this on the form, and we will respond with only the most pertinent information.

The support service cannot help with the following:

• Providing support in person or by video link.
• Offering recorded conversations.
• Making phone calls outside of mainland UK.
• Providing legal advice.
• Undertaking coaching or counselling.
• Providing medical advice.
• Casework or representation at meetings.
• Filling in forms.
• Reviewing paperwork.
• Writing letters on your behalf.
• Providing assurances about the quality of external services.

Our team have an expectation that interactions will be based on mutual kindness and respect – they are encouraged to end calls and email correspondence where they are subjected to any abuse or harassment.

Our support service is staffed by trained people with lived experience. Everyone who works in our support service is either a PDA’er or is the parent of a PDA’er, our team have a wide range of professional experience and work collaboratively to ensure you get responses that meet your needs. Your feedback tells us you value the combination of skills, knowledge & lived experience this team brings. In order to keep our team safe, and ensure they can be there for themselves/their families, as well as for you, we:  offer them completely flexible working hours; ask them to use pseudonyms to protect their privacy and that of everyone in their lives; and train them to keep thorough notes of interactions with you, so that any team member can pick up any query you send us, minimising your need to repeat yourself.

We have limited capacity, and so we don’t do casework. Everyone on the team is very knowledgeable and cares deeply about getting our support right for you. Each query you send us will be replied to by our team members in date order. If you contact us more than once, it is more than likely that your responses will be from different people. Where you regularly come to us for support, we’ll make efforts to allocate your queries to different team members, so that you can connect with people with a variety of lived experience, and also so that should any team member need to take a break from the team, you won’t see any change in service. We believe this is the best way to offer fair and equitable support to everyone who comes to us, and to ensure fair and equitable workloads for our team.

Our service is confidential. This means we will not share your personal information with anyone outside of our team without your permission.

There are a few exceptional situations where we may have to breach confidentiality and pass on your details without your consent. We might have to do this if:

• Someone is at risk of harm (you can read our safeguarding policy here).
• A person poses a serious risk to others (for example making a terrorist threat).
• We have been ordered to share information with the courts.
• A person is threatening the safety of a team member.

In the rare circumstance we decide we must break confidentiality; we will do our best to keep you informed of what we are doing and why.

We are committed to protecting your privacy. Whenever you share personal data with us, we aim to be clear with you, and not to do anything with your data that you wouldn’t reasonably expect us to do.

We will never sell your personal data to other organisations and will only ever share it in appropriate, legal or exceptional circumstances.

PDA Society is a small charity that receives no government funding. We want to make the greatest possible difference with the resources we have, in addition to using the support service you might find it useful to:

Explore our website which includes lots of information and resources.

Attend some of our specialist training sessions. 

Request consultancy support for your school/ service.

Join our mailing list for information on latest research, support and innovation.

Follow us on socials for tips, alerts and information (see website header and footer for links).

Join our forum to share experiences & seek advice from others.

If you wish to support us to do more making one off or regular donation is the quickest way you can support us to maintain and grow the work we do, to make life better for everyone affected by PDA today. You can make a donation here.