Perhaps theoretically Neurodiversity theory centres disabled people as the primary experts in their own experience, but in practice it seems increasingly common for NDM advocates to suggest that you are suffering from some sort of false consciousness if you view your autism, adhd etc as disorders, or would prefer not to have them, and they often suggest that if only you saw things their way you would have a completely different experience and view it as the best thing in your life. That isn't exactly regarding people as the experts of their own experience is it! I also don't get the hostility towards clinicians sometimes on display in the NDM. I mean it is ultimately clinicians who have created the categories of autism, adhd and so on that the NDM is entirely based on - there wouldn't be a NDM without the clinical diagnoses created by psychiatry. It is they, who through peer reviewed research, have delineated which traits when found together constitute these disorders. It seems they trust clinicians to have come up with the Autism Spectrum part, but then totally discredit them and ignore their expertise on the Disorder part. Of course none of that is to say that people should not hold clinicians and researchers to account or that what they say should be accepted without question, but a little bit of consistency and generosity towards them would be a good idea I think.
What many NT people and, most consequentially, clinicians may miss is the distinction between objective reality and social construct. Exacerbating this, we are at a point in our civilization where we are quite lost in our social construct. If you were to wake up tomorrow in the ancient Aztec kingdom, you would probably have trouble accepting the social construct behind the sacrifices, but most Aztecs, and particularly the priests, would not have any trouble. They would go home and pet their dog and feel wholesome and sleep just fine. My point is that there is a baseline natural reality: some people develop and are wired in less common ways. Then there are natural and socially constructed consequences layered on. Disabilities are not relegated strictly to one category or the other, and parsing the distinction is harder, the more real the social construct is for a given person. The clinician is a high priest and their investment in social construct of mental disorder is both their power and their disability with respect to the task of separating the social construct from the natural reality. The same conundrum faces the person who has built a lot of identity on the social construct of, say, ADHD. This is the difficult needle we seek to thread. Where should a person adapt to society and where should we try to change society instead. There is no final answer to that. We are living beings in living relationship with a living world. That said, we are the canaries in the coal mine of modernity. We have become unnatural and mechanical. Modernity (calling it "capitalism" really ignores that socialism has been even worse in this respect) has a fundamental drive to eliminate variation. To me the best solution is to recognize and resist that backside edge of "progress" with a counter-impulse to rewild of self and of society, achieved by softening and loosening the hold of the construct on our minds and our lives as much as we can. This means a devotion to and humbling of ourselves to the higher truth. We used to call this truth God.
Perhaps theoretically Neurodiversity theory centres disabled people as the primary experts in their own experience, but in practice it seems increasingly common for NDM advocates to suggest that you are suffering from some sort of false consciousness if you view your autism, adhd etc as disorders, or would prefer not to have them, and they often suggest that if only you saw things their way you would have a completely different experience and view it as the best thing in your life. That isn't exactly regarding people as the experts of their own experience is it!
I also don't get the hostility towards clinicians sometimes on display in the NDM. I mean it is ultimately clinicians who have created the categories of autism, adhd and so on that the NDM is entirely based on - there wouldn't be a NDM without the clinical diagnoses created by psychiatry. It is they, who through peer reviewed research, have delineated which traits when found together constitute these disorders. It seems they trust clinicians to have come up with the Autism Spectrum part, but then totally discredit them and ignore their expertise on the Disorder part. Of course none of that is to say that people should not hold clinicians and researchers to account or that what they say should be accepted without question, but a little bit of consistency and generosity towards them would be a good idea I think.
What many NT people and, most consequentially, clinicians may miss is the distinction between objective reality and social construct. Exacerbating this, we are at a point in our civilization where we are quite lost in our social construct. If you were to wake up tomorrow in the ancient Aztec kingdom, you would probably have trouble accepting the social construct behind the sacrifices, but most Aztecs, and particularly the priests, would not have any trouble. They would go home and pet their dog and feel wholesome and sleep just fine.
My point is that there is a baseline natural reality: some people develop and are wired in less common ways. Then there are natural and socially constructed consequences layered on. Disabilities are not relegated strictly to one category or the other, and parsing the distinction is harder, the more real the social construct is for a given person. The clinician is a high priest and their investment in social construct of mental disorder is both their power and their disability with respect to the task of separating the social construct from the natural reality. The same conundrum faces the person who has built a lot of identity on the social construct of, say, ADHD.
This is the difficult needle we seek to thread. Where should a person adapt to society and where should we try to change society instead. There is no final answer to that. We are living beings in living relationship with a living world.
That said, we are the canaries in the coal mine of modernity. We have become unnatural and mechanical. Modernity (calling it "capitalism" really ignores that socialism has been even worse in this respect) has a fundamental drive to eliminate variation. To me the best solution is to recognize and resist that backside edge of "progress" with a counter-impulse to rewild of self and of society, achieved by softening and loosening the hold of the construct on our minds and our lives as much as we can. This means a devotion to and humbling of ourselves to the higher truth. We used to call this truth God.
Neither clinicians or the neurodiversity movement want to hear your lived experience unless it fits into their world view.
The Allistic Worldview 😢