The notion that there is a hard core of “neurodiversity” nuts who oppose “treatment” is a false one, put about by people who can’t really understand that being positive about what we are is inherently better than being negative.

I have been treated for depression in the past, indeed depression, whether formally diagnosed or not has been a somewhat recurrent phenomenon in my life, and it is not surprising at all. The insanity is believing that depression is never justified by circumstances, I have a certain realism, and that is that I am going to have to live with what I am, so why not make the most of it.

Nobody can say what I might have been had I had this or that intervention in the past, I would still have been the same person inside I am sure. My dad gave me a hard time because I think he projected onto his children a desire for a success he never had, but there are some things where he was supportive. My schools always used to write in reports about my lack of social involvement, but my dad said, if that is the way he wants to be, that is the way he wants to be.

I do not believe autism can be cured. If I were to have a stroke tommorrow, I would equally have to live with that. You can regain capacities, you can improve on things, but you cannot ever become something you are not.

Those who accuse us of wanting to leave everything as it is, have an agenda which necessitates painting us in a bad light. It is simply not true.

Cure and treatment are not synonimous, there is a middle ground of “amelioration” If I were to have a stroke tommorrow, I would equally have to live with that. You can regain capacities, you can improve on things, but you cannot ever become something you are not.

I also live with the consequences of physical diversity. Many people speculate that there are hypermobile syndromes that seem to parrallel autism in some of us. I don’t know the true prevalence, but I do know that I am one of them.

When I was younger I can recall hypermobility being described as a medical disability, and I could not concieve why because I thought that it was great that my limbs could bend in so many different ways that others could not. Now I am older, I am beginning to realise what the legacy is … ouch !

The disability movement has a way of describing non disabled people, the word is “temporarily able bodied”

You see perfection is not normal at all.

Anyway it is not just Einsteins mathematical genius that I appreciate, it is the way he was committed to peace, the way he used his celebrity.

As for the hairstyle, I guess like me he needed a haircut

I like your comments.

For the record, Einstein is cited as an archetypal example of the Idiosyncratic personality trait, the extreme of which is Schizotypal Personality Disorder. So ‘autistic like’ on one aspect of personality front. Close but no biscuit

I am pretty militant, but my militancy is of the kind that abhors “Aspie supremacism” as an unhelpful and dangerous tendency within autism politics, and one that is sure to drive a wedge between various groups who are also “stakeholders”.

My militancy derives from the disability movement, and I go back a long way in that, it comes from a pan disability perspective encompassing neurodiversity, sensory impairment, psychiatric survivors and physical impairment. There has long been a tendency within the disability movement for some people to impose an artificial “heirarchy of impairments” valuing some impairments as more fundementally within the concept of disability than others. That is outright wrongheadedness.

Autism is a culture, but not a monolithic one, it has it’s subcultures too. One can also see that the culture is a relatively young one when compared to other disability cultures, and so the same mistakes are being made amongst the “militants”

It is of course understandable for any “out group” who has been devalued and discriminated against to build a positive identity that involves going over the top in self affirment to the point of denying others. It is not much different really to Coventry City supporters clinging on to the belief that the team is not (no I had better not go ther.

Any way is being one eyed worse than being binocular? I would not know, and I cannot, I simply have no desire for those things that are not within my capability.

I laugh sometimes at all the Einstein talk, he may well have been one of us, but he has been claimed by dyslexics equally, indeed everyone wants a piece of him and you can see why. However Einsteins are not all that common (unfortunately) and within any culture there are exceptions, there are the good the bad and the ugly (which reminds me, I really need a haircut)

Because smoking usually involves progressive addiction which occurs at the neurological level, we could say smokers experience a shift from their ‘norm’ into a neurologically altered state… one in which they will pay thousands to multi-billionaire conglomerates to inhale carcinogens, pre-maturely reduce their health and looks, impoverish their finances (most will spend $30,000 in 10 years on cigarettes), make themselves smell like an ashtray, contribute to environmental damage (air pollution, deaths of millions of birds and fish a year from discarded butts washed into waterways) and all whether they support these things or not.
They ultimately can do all this just because they have (in accordance with the cigarette companies’ rat experiments) been unable to overcome their addiction. Smokers are not a social majority either. They may make themselves more visible by standing in doorways or some may posture against walls or lamposts (a throw back to James Dean style glorification of smoking?), or gather with other smokers making them more conspicuous, but they are actually only 1 in 5. So, technically, they are not neurotypical in terms of being nicotine addicts. They are technically part of the neurodiverse.

Wild stuff

Oh, that’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.

It had occurred to me that “neurotypical” is problematic in that implies that their minds all work the same way, which I *KNOW* they don’t, anymore than ours do!

But I hadn’t thought to question the existence of a divide between neurotypical and neurodiverse. That’s very interesting.

I don’t think my autism is separable to my self but I can say there are ways my selfhood defies the limits and obstacles of my autism just as vice versa. So I see them as interactive. I do feel there are some things which are ME but are just about being a human or an animal. I’m cool with that.

I do resonate with those with other sensory perceptual differences. As someone with visual and verbal agnosias, Helen Keller, who was deaf blind, is one of my heroes. I also resonate with gay people but perhaps because I’m rather bisexual with gender identity differences but maybe also because many gay people have also been treated as a case, rejected for differences which are inherent and part of their normality, and because we all care about a more diversity friendly society.

I think you’re a moderate culturalist.
I probably am a moderate with culturalist leanings who is pro respectful and fitting treatment, support and adaptations for those who need these.

I think neurodiverse includes any person who has also had transient but significant experience of altered neurological states, whether because of CFS or addiction, grief, trauma, identity disorders, dysmorphias etc. In the end I find it hard to find many who have never directly experienced degrees of neurodiversity.

I think I fall somewhere between the Moderate and Militant Culturalist categories in this scheme.

Like yours, my autism involves a lot more things than just my personality (for me, there are a lot of sensory and processing issues as well), which can be quite disabling, and can cause the person a lot of trouble and grief. I am therefore totally on board with treating these symptoms, and with trying to develop better treatments. I’m also totally in favor of teaching autistic children the skills we often don’t pick up as readily as some of our peers — general life skills, organizational skills, study skills, social skills. What I do not want is a cure for autism, or treatments whose sole purpose is getting us to appear indistinguishable from nonautistic people, but which do not actually give us anything we can use. (This apparent treatment goal of “indistinguishability,” and of appearing normal for its own sake — as well as its ongoing history of abuse — is why I am leery of most behavioral treatments for autism). I also do not doubt at all that autism — even without any of these other problems — is a disability, although I blame most of its disabling effect on the way much of modern society is set up.

At the same time, I am proud to be autistic, I do think we have our own shared culture and constitute a minority group. I do feel that my autism is inseparable from my self. I don’t consider us superior to neurotypicals*, though: our minds work differently from theirs in a few shared ways and a lot of ways that also vary among individual autistics. (Similarly, I think NTs are just as internally heterogeneous; like us, they’re united only by a few diagnostic criteria — or the lack of any. Other than that, they vary, as we do). I do think our liberation movement is like the gay liberation movement, and also owes quite a bit to the disability and Deaf movements. I don’t think we should be penalized for being different, or have to hide our differences to be accepted.

So, what does that make me? Moderately Militant?

(Also, I love the look of your blog. Very beautiful! I lack the graphic-design know-how to customize the look of my blog very much, so I very much admire those who can).

*I do not use the term “neurotypical” to refer to non-autistics: for me, the word refers to people whose nervous systems work in more or less the expected way. This category therefore includes not only people who are not autistic, but people who are not ADHD, not dyslexic or otherwise learning-disabled, don’t have tics or seizures, don’t have CP or any other neurodevelopmental disorder, who haven’t suffered brain damage, who don’t have synesthesia, hallucinations or other unusual sensory experiences, etc. This is accordingly a much smaller group of people than the group of people who are not autistic.