Neurodiversity as a radical social movement

In 1999, Judy Singer contributed to an academic series titled Disability Discourse published by the Open University. Her paper, titled ‘“Why Can’t You Just Be Normal for Once In Your Life?” From a “Problem with No Name” to the Emergence of a New Category of Difference’, detailed a burgeoning community of individuals who knew themselves to be different but lacked a name for what they described as ‘hardwired neurological difference’. Frustrated with the lack of academic attention being paid to what she understood as the introduction of a new category of disability, she explained:

The ‘Neurologically Different’ represent a new addition to the familiar political categories of class/gender/race and will augment the insights of the social model of disability. The rise of Neurodiversity takes postmodern fragmentation one step further. Just as the postmodern era sees every once too-solid belief melt into air, even our most taken-for-granted assumption – that we all more or less see, feel, touch, hear, smell, and sort information, in more or less the same way (unless visibly disabled) – are being dissolved.

This term, popularised by Judy Singer but ultimately created in autistic/neurodivergent communities, offered new perspectives on how human beings understand the world, giving shape to the experiences of a group of individuals who were usually written off as social outcasts and isolated for this difference.

They were, as Singer states, ‘starting to fight back against the exclusion and mistreatment – from ridicule to active bullying – that had been their lot’. Singer believed that the three categories that ‘disability’ was understood to include at that time – physical, intellectual, psychiatric – did not properly capture the experiences of ‘high-functioning’ autistic people or those with Asperger syndrome (of which her work focused and terms to which I will return shortly). For this reason, she described them as ‘disabilities in social communication’.

Neurodiversity is, at its core, a social movement tasked with categorising something previously ignored while also rejecting the disorder paradigm that perpetuates the idea of a ‘normal’ brain and a ‘non-normal’ brain, ultimately serving only to privilege those who are part of the ‘normal’ group. The neurodiversity campaign does not accept that autistic people and other neurodivergent people are inherently ‘disordered’ compared to the rest of the population. It asserts that these neurotypes are simply less common forms of neurocognitive functioning, disabled by the hegemony and inaccessibility of wider society.

While this may not superficially seem a radical idea, the discrimination that many neurodivergent individuals face proves otherwise. This discrimination is fuelled by ableism, entrenched in our societies in service of a status quo that marginalises and demonises those who deviate from the norm. I believe that it is also related to the context in which autism emerged as a disability.

Having been given many other names over the years, including ‘childhood schizophrenia’ and ‘feeblemindedness’, this disability acquired the name ‘autism’ within an ever-shifting political landscape. This haphazard history is a contributing factor to the whirlwind of ideas about what autism is, combined with shifts in the role of genetics and psychiatry, as well as growing political movements.

While most people attribute the term autism to the work of Austrian psychiatrist Leo Kanner following a paper he wrote in 1943, it was Eugen Bleuler who introduced the first seeds of the idea in 1911, while studying schizophrenia. He believed that autistic thinking was a method for avoiding ‘unsatisfying realities’, in which patients could turn away from reality by replacing it with fantasies and hallucinations. A few decades later, Kanner was the first to introduce the concept of autism to the world. His work made a larger distinction from the behaviour of children he believed could be classified as autistic as opposed to schizophrenic. This focus on childhood in the earliest research is notable not only as a reflection of Kanner’s work on the world’s first book on child psychiatry, but also as a reflection on autism research and understanding in the present day. Much of the research conducted continues to be around autistic children, neglecting the needs of autistic adults. 

Working in Vienna at around the same time, in the 1940s, was Dr Hans Asperger. While his 1944 thesis was not widely known until Lorna Wing popularised it during the 1980s, it was his work that helped to expand the idea of an autism ‘spectrum’. He was hailed for some years as a heroic figure in autism history, and the man behind the previously used term Asperger syndrome. But it has come to light in recent years that he was involved in the deaths of many disabled children under the Nazi regime. Describing autistic children as ‘in opposition to Nazi Party values’, Asperger is thought to have referred many sick or disabled children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, where they were killed using barbiturates.

So it seems that part of the history of autism emerged hand in hand with Nazi eugenics, with Asperger describing autistic children as outside ‘the greater organism’ of the Nazi ideal. This portrayal of autistic people as faulty is also likely to have led to discrimination before the concept of autism was even understood. In the UK, the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 was created to treat ‘moral defectives’ – including those classified under the terms ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’, ‘feeble-minded persons’ and ‘moral imbeciles’. This law was used to segregate groups of people from society, forcing many into asylums. It is thought that many of these individuals would today be described as having learning or developmental disabilities. 

Given that many studies show that a large number of autistic people also have learning disabilities (although the numbers identified in these reports vary), it is not too much of a leap to  suggest that some of these ‘mental defectives’ would have been autistic or otherwise neurodivergent.

We can see, therefore, that much of the earliest work on autism, neurodivergence and disability began from a position of prejudice and fear, asking how society could protect itself from those who were ‘defective’. These grotesque attitudes are longstanding, and have contributed to the proliferation of ableist narratives, infiltrating cultures on a global scale and being partly responsible for the necessity of the neurodiversity campaign.

— An edited excerpt from Autism Is Not A Disease: The Politics of Neurodiversity by Jodie Hare. 

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Autism Is Not A Disease

by Jodie Hare

Neurodiversity is one of the most urgent political issues of our time. As the number of diagnoses of autism, ADHD, and other types of neurodivergence rises, we are starting to understand that there...

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