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The neurodivergence paradigm started with autism, and later came to encompass common conditions like AD/HD and dyslexia, but it can’t and shouldn’t end there.
I’ve been thinking about this issue for a long time, but reading the neurodiversity manifesto of the British Labour Party threw something into stark relief.
Even as it purports to endorse the social model of disability, the manifesto continues to frame depression, anxiety, bipolar, and schizophrenia as illnesses, rather than differences.
Consequently, this manifesto fails to embrace neurodiversity in all its aspects, which must necessarily encompass thoughts, emotions, and moods, not just differences in cognition.
The disease model of disability is what gave us lobotomies, forced institutionalization, and the Third Reich’s extermination program. We should all fight it for the sake of science and human dignity.
That isn’t to say that people shouldn’t take their medications, much less that these issues aren’t real, but folx ought to be able to manage their differences however they want.
We don’t talk about people with hypothyroidism, who need medication to function, as being disabled. I categorically reject the notion that differences make people invalids. Some people are just different.
