Grieving Differently: Could Social Media Be a Grief Tool for Neurodivergent People?

Grief has always been social. We mourn in the company of others, and the people around us shape what our grief is allowed to look like. For most of human history, that social circle was small: family, close friends, the people who happened to be geographically near. Social media changed that. It connects grievers across distance, and it links people who never knew each other before a death drew them together. In doing so, it has widened the social world in which mourning happens.

That shift raises a genuine question for those of us who work in grief and loss. Is a wider, more public, more digital social environment good for grieving people? The honest answer is that it depends, and the research points in both directions.

What social media does for grieving people

On the helpful side, online mourning spaces give people room to express grief in ways that feel true to them, including ways that do not fit the polite, contained script many of us were handed. They let people personalize how they remember someone, whether that means posting photos, writing directly to the person who died, or marking small everyday moments. They support what grief researchers call continuing bonds, the ongoing relationship we keep with someone after they are gone. And they connect grievers to others who understand, sometimes people who knew the deceased, sometimes strangers who simply recognize the loss.

On the harder side, these same spaces carry real risks. Public grief can slide into performance, shaped more by what gets seen than by what actually helps. Support can start to feel tied to likes and views, so that a griever whose post goes unnoticed feels more alone, not less. And because online content reaches a wide audience, it also invites judgment, minimizing, and unkind commentary at a moment when people are most raw.

None of this is settled. But it is enough to say that social media is neither a cure nor a threat. It is a tool, and like any tool, its value depends on who is using it and why.

The part I keep coming back to: neurodivergent grievers

Here is where my real interest lies. If we accept that online mourning spaces can help people grieve in ways that feel right to them, then I want to ask about the people whose grief is most often treated as wrong.

Neurodivergent individuals are more likely to experience what Kenneth Doka called disenfranchised grief: grief that is not openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly recognized. This happens to neurodivergent people in several specific ways. Their grief is sometimes silenced, when caregivers or staff avoid talking about death because the topic is uncomfortable, or because they fear a conversation will trigger distress. Some neurodivergent people may not have the verbal language to talk about grief in the expected way at all. They are frequently left out of the rituals that help others process loss, from funerals to goodbyes. And perhaps most troubling, their grief can be misread entirely, interpreted as “challenging behavior” rather than mourning, which means it gets managed or medicated instead of supported.

Layer these on top of one another and you get a population whose grief is disenfranchised at multiple points at once, and whose usual sources of support may be the weakest. A recent systematic review by Mair and colleagues on the neurodiversity of grief found that the emotional support most available to neurodivergent people often came from support staff and caregivers, yet talking with those same people about grief frequently made the person feel worse.

So typical support may not reach them. Which is exactly why I find myself wondering about the untypical kind.

Why online spaces might fit

Look again at what online mourning spaces do well, and notice how closely each strength answers a barrier neurodivergent grievers face.

They allow emotional expression that is not limited to the usual verbal, visible, socially approved forms. That matters for someone who may not process grief in words, or whose way of showing grief risks being read as a behavior to be corrected.

They let people build death rituals that are personal rather than prescribed. That matters for someone who is routinely excluded from the traditional ones.

They connect grievers to others who understand. That matters most for someone whose social isolation often predates the loss rather than beginning with it.

And they reach past the immediate environment, which may be the most underrated part. For many neurodivergent people, the individuals physically present in daily life, including support staff and caregivers, are not always the ones best able to help with grief. Sometimes they minimize it, avoid the subject, or without intending to make it worse. Online mourning spaces are not limited to whoever happens to be in the room. They can connect a grieving person to others who are better equipped to understand and support them, which loosens a person’s dependence on a small circle of nearby people who may not be able to meet that need. When the people closest to you are not the people who can help you grieve, being able to reach further out is not a small thing.

Because neurodivergent grievers may be hit at several of these points at the same time, a space that addresses more than one of them at once could be disproportionately valuable to them, more so than it would be for a griever who only needs one kind of support. The affordances that are merely nice for many people might be genuinely enabling for this group.

An honest limit, and a question

This is a hypothesis, not a finding. Very little research has directly examined whether neurodivergent individuals use social media to process grief. The studies that interviewed grievers did not separate neurodivergent from neurotypical participants, and the broader reviews were not specific to this population. What I have done here is connect two bodies of research, one on disenfranchised grief and one on social media and mourning, and follow the line to a place neither has quite gone yet. I offer these ideas as educated guesses and as directions worth studying, not as established answers.

If you research grief, disability, or digital mourning, do you know of work that looks at this intersection directly? And if you support, love, or are a neurodivergent person, have you seen social media used this way, whether it helped, hurt, or something more complicated? I would genuinely like to hear what you know and what you have seen. The gap in the literature is real, and the people living inside that gap are the ones most likely to tell us what is actually true.

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