Thanks to Rebecca Kornmehl for recommending this book to me!
I learnt so much from this book that is essential for my role as parent of an autistic child, and a practitioner who frequently works with neurodivergent clients.
Most importantly, the book helped me understand better the distinction between autism as seen through a pathology paradigm, in contrast with autism as seen through a neurodiversity paradigm.
The pathology paradigm
In summary, the pathology paradigm frames autism as a “disorder” or “condition”. It boils down to two fundamental assumptions:
There is one “right,” “normal,” or “healthy” way for human brains and minds to be configured and to function.
If your neurological configuration and functioning (and, as a result, your ways of thinking and behaving) diverge substantially from the dominant standard of “normal,” then there is Something Wrong With You.
The neurodiversity paradigm
The neurodiversity paradigm views humanity as neurocognitively diverse and autistic people as a neurocognitive minority group. The fundamental principles of the neurodiversity paradigm are:
Neurodiversity—the diversity among minds—is a natural, healthy, and valuable form of human diversity.
There is no “normal” or “right” style of human mind, any more than there is one “normal” or “right” ethnicity, gender, or culture.
The social dynamics that relating to neurodiversity are similar to the social dynamics relating to other forms of human diversity (e.g race, culture, gender, or sexual orientation). These dynamics include the dynamics of social power relations—the dynamics of social inequality, privilege, and oppression—as well as the dynamics by which diversity, when embraced, acts as a source of creative potential within a group or society.
Society is set up to meet the needs of people with a specific set of traits, needs, and abilities. Those privileged people are abled, or enabled—in other words, society is set up to enable their participation. Within the social model of disability, when we say that a person is disabled, we mean that society isn’t properly set up to enable their participation, and instead is often set up in a way that creates barriers to their participation (e.g., building staircases without ramps or good working elevators is a barrier to wheelchair users; the expectation of eye contact in job interviews is a barrier to autistic people). Thus, those people whose needs differ significantly from those of the dominant majority are disabled by society rather than enabled. (p.57)
Language matters
Many people, even those who mean well, still use language that’s based in the assumptions of that paradigm. Here are two very common examples:
Person-first language isn’t appropriate when referring to autistic people. In other words, you should not say they are “a person with autism” but rather “they are an autistic person”. If this seems strange, think about the fact that we wouldn’t say “a person with negroism” to describe a Black person, and we wouldn’t say “a person suffers from homosexuality”. Person first language is about not defining someone by their disability, but neurodiversity (as mentioned above) is NOT a disability (although society can effectively disable autistic people, see further below, which is quite a different thing).
Nobody is “normal”. However, the majority of the population is neurotypical. In this sense, people who are neurodivergent are minority groups in society, and are prone to oppression by the majority group. However, being in the majority doesn’t make you better (or more ‘normal’) than anyone else. (For example, the fact that the largest ethnic group in the world is the Han Chinese doesn’t make them the ‘normal’ ethnicity, compared with any other ethnic group).
When we call someone neurodivergent we don’t mean that they aren’t “normal,” we mean that they aren’t neurotypical. In other words, what a neurodivergent person diverges from are the prevailing culturally constructed standards and culturally mandated performance of neuronormativity. Neurodivergence is divergence not from some “objective” state of normality (which, again, doesn’t exist), but rather from whatever constructed image and performance of normality the prevailing culture currently seeks to impose. (p.55)
Autistic people do not “have a disability” and they are not “persons with a disability”, Rather they are disabled by society when its expectations and structures do not support their neurotype. (Hard to get your head around? Think about dyslexia – this was not a ‘disability’ in human times before writing was an essential part of society, and it may become less of a disability as technological advancements continue to include things like voice recognition).
What’s the problem?
The pathology paradigm asks, in essence,
“What do we do about the problem of these people not being normal?”
while the neurodiversity paradigm asks,
“What do we do about the problem of these people being oppressed, marginalized, and/or poorly served and poorly accommodated by the prevailing culture?”
“And it turns out that maybe you function exactly as you ought to function, and that you just live in a society that isn’t yet sufficiently enlightened to effectively accommodate and integrate people who function like you. And that maybe the troubles in your life have not been the result of any inherent wrongness in you. And that your true potential is unknown and is yours to explore. And that maybe you are, in fact, a thing of beauty.” (p.25)
Questions for reflection
In the book, Walker poses the provocative question (particularly relevant to my role as a parent of an autistic child who can no longer attend school):
What might education look like in a system in which the acceptance, inclusion, and accommodation of every sort of bodymind represents an unquestioned baseline? What if “acceptance and inclusion” didn’t mean neurodivergent students being accepted and included under neurotypical supervision within educational environments created by and for neurotypicals, but instead meant a system which has itself been shaped through the collaboration of a wide diversity of minds—a system sufficiently neurocosmopolitan as to place all students on equal footing and render the concepts of “typical” and “divergent” effectively irrelevant? (p.73-74).
In my work context, I might reframe the question (as I posed it at the Access to Justice for Autistic People Symposium in Melbourne earlier this month):
What might mediation look like in a system in which the acceptance, inclusion, and accommodation of every sort of bodymind represents an unquestioned baseline? What if “acceptance and inclusion” didn’t mean neurodivergent clients being accepted and included under neurotypical supervision within conflict resolution environments created by and for neurotypicals, but instead meant a system which has itself been shaped through the collaboration of a wide diversity of minds—a system sufficiently neurocosmopolitan as to place all participants on equal footing and render the concepts of “typical” and “divergent” effectively irrelevant?
