Thanks to RFK's absolutely unhinged maligning of people with genetic differences, I've doubled down on my anti-pathologizing stance around neurodiversity.
Even the world of therapy is infected with an ABA-style bigotry against neurospicy folks, with a strong focus on reducing the perceptability of autistic patterns of behaviour rather than empowerment and normalization of them whenever possible.
Why are we pathologizing excited flapping when we could normalize it?? Why??? We can accept surgeons with full sleeve tattoos these days but we can't accept that a certain percentage of the population expresses feelings through totally benign movements that don't harm anyone?
Every day at my job I have to work my ass off deconstructing a powerful internalized belief in my neurodiverse clients that the very normal expression of their genetics makes them defective.
I get wonderful, interesting, intelligent, ethical, cool fucking people come to me to seek help in being less themselves because they've been told from the beginning that who they are is wrong. They come to me asking for techniques to behave differently, more acceptably and it makes me sick every fucking time.
The really sick part is that my particular client population are actually just better people than average. These are folks who volunteer a lot more than average, folks who are more dedicated spouses and friends, folks with much more robust senses of ethics and justice, and naturally more selfless and generous.
That's obviously not every neurospicy person, I'm not generalizing at all, I'm observing objectively that the kind of autistic folks who come to *me* for therapy are the kind of people I admire, the kind of people we should all want to hire, be friends with, marry into our families, etc, etc.
I do quite a bit of couples counseling between mixed neurotypes couples and it's consistently the neurotypical folks who struggle with intimacy, honesty, self-reflection, accountability, and connection. I spend most of my time in those sessions helping the neurodivergent person better understand the challenges of being neurotypical in our society, not the other way around.
This means I'm focusing very intensely on educating other therapists about the non-pathologizing approach to neurodiversity. That's not to say that some neurospicy folks aren't disabled, many are, but so are many neurotypical folks. It's not a product of having neurodiversity that makes a person disabled, it's a product of having some kind of disabling feature that may require accommodation.
Being neurodiverse is a diversity, not an illness. A diversity is a variation of normal, not a deviation from it. Neurodiverse people are not broken "normal" people, they're just a natural neural/genetic variation within the population.
I'm actually fairly certain that undiagnosed neurodiversity is enormously over represented within this particular community, which I firmly believe is a substantial contributor as to why this place has always been an exceptionally pleasant corner of the internet.
So in response to the US governments heinous and hateful targeting of neurodiverse folks as the latest scapegoat for American economic struggles, I'm getting very, very vocal in my world about the harms of pathologizing diversity, which unfortunately, my profession still does.
