In the deranged online world, everyone and his dog and his mother-in-law is an expert on everything imaginable and quite a few unimaginable things.
So people, self-styled experts, keep coming up with all kinds of nonsensical concepts, which are roundly and instantaneously rejected by mainstream science.
One example is, of course, the empath movement, a self-aggrandizing, highly narcissistic, attempt by self-styled victims to claim a place of their own on this planet recognition, if nothing else.
But sometimes some of these concepts resonate with something that we have learned scientifically via studies and research.
An example is emotional flashbacks.
The word flashback is very, very unfortunate, but the idea is of interest.
Similarly, neurodivergence and neurotypicals, now to make something clear, before we proceed, the vast majority, the overwhelming vast majority of scholars think that neurodivergence and neurotypicality or neurotypicals, this is nonsense.
Some fringe scholars, especially young ones, especially those who have been exposed to the online world and influenced by it, regrettably, these people entertain the possibility that neurodivergence and especially neurotypicals may have a point. That may be something there that needs exploring and researching and studying.
Today I'm going to discuss these twin concepts.
I'm going to do my best to remain objective, not easy, and demonstrate to you that these concepts to some very, very limited extent, do have merit, especially in the study of neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of clinical psychology in multiple universities.
Let's start with an overall view of the disciplines, I'm hesitant to call them sciences, disciplines of psychology and psychiatry.
Number one, statistics.
Psychology and psychiatry deal with normal people versus people with abnormalities.
The very word normal is borrowed from statistics, which is a mathematical discipline.
Statistics deal with normative validation, distributions, and epidemiology, incidence, prevalence and so on so forth. Statistical measures.
If you fall within a specific area in a distribution, Gaussian distribution or otherwise, if you fall within this area, you're considered to be normal because there are many more people like you. You belong to the majority of the population, one way or another. You're normal.
If you don't, you're abnormal.
Now, abnormal is not a curse word. It's not a pejorative. It's not a kind of personal attack.
Abnormal simply means your location on the frequency or distribution graph. Simple. Just your location. Are you in the tail? Are you in the center? Whatever. Your location determines whether you are normal statistically or abnormal.
Number two, self-reporting.
Psychology and psychiatry rely almost exclusively on self-reporting. Even when we observe people in studies, they have to report to us what's going on inside their minds, inside their heads.
So we are reliant on self-reporting to an extent that is uncommon in the exact sciences.
I'm a physicist by training, I'm a PhD in physics, and I can tell you there's a huge difference between physics and psychology. People self-report, moods, emotions, cognitions, and we then conceptualize these self-reports, agglomerate them, analyze them, and come up with suggested conclusions and outcomes.
Self-reporting is highly unreliable. The raw material of psychology and psychiatry is highly mutable.
And so the whole scientific edifice of these disciplines is, to use a British understatement of the millennium, doubtful.
Next, medicalization.
Remember, I'm discussing the foundations of psychology and psychiatry. The next pillar is medicalization.
Psychology and psychiatry claim that there are pathologies.
Now, not every abnormality is a pathology. It's very important to distinguish between the two.
All pathologies are abnormal. Not all abnormalities are pathological.
And this gave rise to the idea of neurodivergence and neurotypicals. We'll discuss it in a minute.
Anyhow, pathologies are medicalized. Pathologiesare considered or perceived to be kinds of diseases that need healing or need curing or need fixing.
Call it the savior rescuer a complex or the Messiah complex of psychiatrists and psychologists.
There's a pathology and I have a cure for it. There's a pathology and talk therapy will take care of it. There's a pathology and I have a medication to reverse it.
The medicalization of human behavior, of human cognition, human emotions, human moods, human reactivity. This medicalization is an attempt by psychiatry and psychology to become a branch of medicine.
Next, individual versus relational, behavioral dysfunction.
It's a huge debate whether the unit of investigation, the unit of research, the unit of knowledge should be the individual, or whether there's not such thing as individual.
The individual, the so-called individual, is the sum total of relationships with others.
In other words, psychology is relational or individual, and the debate is not settled.
Object relations schools in the 1960s claim that people are the sum total of their relationships with other people, known as objects.
Other schools, for example, psychoanalysis, claim that the individual is the organizing principle, especially so in Jung's work, ironically, in early Jung's work, and so on and so forth.
And the debate is ongoing, even today, with neuroscience, for example, trying to recast psychology and psychiatry in terms of the individual brain and other theories, such as social learning theories, trying to reintroduce society, other people, families, couples, interactions, friendships and so on, into the equation.
Okay. Finally, categories versus dimensions.
Categories are based on lists of diagnostic criteria, the famous fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Dimensions are much more flexible. They're much closer to reality, in my view.
They describe people as in flux. They capture the essence of people in relationship to other people. They are much more literary.
The dimensional approach to psychology and psychiatry is much more literary. It's reminiscent of the works of Dostoevsky, for example.
So these are the foundations of psychology and psychiatry and summarize them for you in order to move to the topic of neurodivergence versus neurotypicals.
Psychology and psychiatry are founded on statistics, normal versus abnormal, self-reporting of everything, medicalization of pathologies, rendering them fixable or curable, individual versus relational models, and categorical versus dimensional models.
These are two unresolved debates.
Even if we do not pathologize, even if we do not medicalize, even if we do accept a dimensional view of psychology and psychiatry, the other foundations are still valid.
For example, the distinction between normal and abnormal, statistically speaking, the reliance on self-reporting, and the distinction between individual and relational behaviors. All these are still valid, even when we de-medicalize psychology and we accept that it is a form of literary art.
All this leads us to the issue of neurodiversity.
Neurodiversity is a paradigm. It's a way to look at the totality of what it means to be human.
Neurodivergence says that in order to understand human beings, and especially the human brain, we need to use a framework that recognizes the diversity of the functions of the human brain, diversity of sensory processing, motor abilities, social comfort or discomfort, cognition, and neurobiological differences.
Diversity and differences fall on a spectrum of neurocognitive functioning.
So, the neurodiversity paradigm is the exact opposite of the medicalization and statistical paradigm.
It says there is no such thing as normal and abnormal. There is no such thing as pathological and not pathological.
There's only diversity. There's only a spectrum, a continuum, and people fall somewhere on the continuum, somewhere on the distribution.
Some people have specific neurocognitive abilities. Others lack these abilities. Some people process sensory information from the senses, differently to other people. Some people have different cognitions. Some people are socially comfortable, some people are socially uncomfortable, introverts versus extraverse, and so on and so forth.
It's all one big happy family.
The paradigm of neurodiversity claims that diversity, especially in human cognition, is normal. All of it is normal. There is no abnormal cognitive functioning.
And what today we classify as disorders, for example, autism, these are differences. These are differences.
Even when there is a lack or deficiency or disability, it's not pathological. It's just a difference.
Differences are not deficits. Differences are differences.
They're not deficits. They don't need to be medicated away. They don't need to be treated. They're not to be cured. And differences definitely don't need to be stigmatized and shamed, especially not in public.
It is unethical and impractical to attempt to reduce or to suppress diversity.
For example, when we are confronted with someone with autistic traits, and we try to intervene in order to mask these traits, we're actually causing damage.
It leads to poor mental health outcomes, including in extreme cases, suicidality.
So we need to accept autistic people as they are. We don't need to change them. We don't need to heal them. We don't need to cure them.
And what applies to autistic people? It applies to many other mental health disorders. We'll come to it in a minute.
That's where the problem starts.
When you claim, for example, as some proponents of neurodiversity do, when you claim that psychopathy is normal and, you know, just different, there's a problem there.
Psychopathy may not be a mental illness. I would be the first to acknowledge this.
But it is a cultural aberration and a societal danger. It's threatening.
And while we may not need to pathologize it, we definitely need to take steps to prevent psychopaths from harming us.
And to pretend that psychopathy is totally normal, it's just a form of difference, it's on a range or a spectrum or a continuum, and we don't need to take any steps. That's wrong.
I think this movement of neurodivergence has gone way too far. We'll discuss it in a few minutes.
The idea is that when we try to intervene via therapy, medication, psychoeducation, when we try to intervene in the lives of people based on the medical model that I mentioned before, this one, number one, creates stigma or higher stigma, and number two, it's impractical. It doesn't lead to any outcomes which are, you know, measurable or commendable or desirable.
Medicalizing people stigmatizes them and has the adversity. It actually damages whatever is left of their mental health, even according to the medical model.
The persistent focus on biological research, for example, in autism is a problem according to the neurodivergence movement because it tends to cast autism as a form of disease equivalent of, I don't know, AIDS or tuberculosis.
And so there are scholars and advocates of autism, for example, the famous activist, Ari Neiman.
And they say that we should focus on traits, rather than focus on labels, diagnoses, diagnostic lists, categories, and so on, we should focus on traits.
Some traits are counterproductive. They are dysfunctional. Some traits make it difficult to survive or to function in society or to hold a job or to maintain stable, happy relationships.
These traits need to be tackled because these traits are harmful intrinsically.
So, for example, self-injury, mutilation, co-occurring health conditions, and so on.
So we need to focus on these traits. We need to work on them. And if necessary, we need to cure them somehow and so on.
But traits, the totality of traits is not the same as the patient or the individual or the client. It's a holistic approach.
We are much more than our disorder. There's much more there than dysfunctional traits.
So focus on the symptoms. Focus on the problems. Don't try to change the individual, try to change some behaviors, some choices, some decision-making processes.
And indeed, this is the focus in many current treatment modalities, such as dialectical behavior therapy and its forerunners CBT and so on.
There are traits which may be statistically abnormal, but they're not harmful. They're even, to some extent, adaptive.
For example, in autism, stimming and intense interests, they seem to be a form of adaptation. They harm nobody. Actually, in some cases, they have benefits.
For example, if you are laser-focused like most autistic people are, you can be a great programmer or even a great entrepreneur.
So, not everything in autism, however abnormal statistically, is harmful on the very contrary. It could be a positive adaptation.
It's not like narcissism, for example, where the vast majority of behaviors and traits are harmful to others, if not to the narcissists.
That's not the case in neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders.
So you're beginning to see that neurodivergence is not about clinical psychology or psychiatry or psychology.
Neurodivergence is a form of social activism. It's an attempt to redefine certain mental health disorders as non-mental health disorders, as a form of diversity, a form of difference, and thereby removing the stigma and the unnecessary interventions.
So there was in the 1990s another autism advocate, Cassiane Asasumasu. And Asasumasu coined the phrase neurodivergent and neurodivergence about 25 years ago, exactly in the service of a social agenda, social activism agenda.
Autists, people with autism spectrum disorder at the time were subjected to very intense, very intrusive and very pervasive interventions, which made it seriously difficult for them.
There was also a lot of stigma. There was a period in the 50s and 60s where mothers of people with autism spectrum disorder were castigated as inadequate mothers, refrigerator mothers.
The situation deteriorated massively. With this medicalization and pathologizing autism spectrum disorders, the situation deteriorated.
And As Asasumasu said, there's people with autism spectrum disorder are different, but they're not necessarily harmful to anyone or to themselves.
She says that those whose neurocognitive, I'm quoting, those whose neurocognitive functioning diverges from dominant societal norms in multiple ways are neurodivergent.
And she applied this not only to people with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism, but she applied it to attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and other disorders.
We should not, she said, we should not exclude people. We should include people.
She advocated increased rights, accessibility to non-autistic people who do not have typical neurocognitive functioning and so on so forth.
It was a disability social activism movement.
Neurodivergence was never meant to be a contribution to clinical psychology, the way some fringe scholars today are trying to leverage it or use it. It was simply a social rights movement.
Now, since Asasumasu's work, neurodivergence, as I said, has been hijacked by multiple people. And it's now being applied to numerous mental and behavioral traits as well as disorders.
So mood disorders, anxiety disorders, dissociative disorders, psychotic disorders, personality disorders such as psychopathy, eating disorders are all now described as neurodivergent.
That is complete, unmitigated nonsense. Complete.
The vast majority of these disorders, of course, have something to do with neurons in the brain, but they are not neurodevelopmental. And they are not part of a spectrum, and they are not healthy, diverse functioning.
These are mentally ill people. Psychotic people are mentally ill people. And it's a brain disease in this case, in this particular case, schizophrenia, for example.
Similarly, psychopaths, people with bipolar disorder. I mean, this is very dangerous. Applying the neurodivergence paradigm to real mental illnesses is not helpful to the mentally ill.
And it's not a question of stigma here. They need help. They need treatment. They need medication. It's very dangerous to do this.
And this is why the mainstream of psychology and psychiatry has and is rejecting neurodivergence because the advocates on neurodivergence have gone way too far and are beginning to seriously damage and harm groups of people who are in dire need of intervention and assistance.
Neurodivergence today, the movement is a danger to mentally ill people, truly mentally ill people.
It's debatablewhether the medical model of disability, what the activist called the pathology paradigm, it's debatable whether it should be applied to autism spectrum disorders, for example, or at least level one, autism spectrum disorders. That's debatable.
But it's not debatable that people with psychotic disorders are not neurodivergent. Yes, their neurons work differently, but it's not a question of divergence, it's a question of extreme dysfunction in pathology.
Similarly, these people, these activists, who frequently have no idea what they're talking about, by the way. It's a very common phenomenon in modern victimhood movements, modern woke movements, modern social activism movements. Most of these people have no idea what they're talking about.
They're focused on virtue signaling, on attention seeking, the narcissists and psychopaths, according to multiple studies since 2020.
Similarly, they refuse to use the term neurotypical, because that implies that other people are not typical.
I don't know what's wrong with that. I'm not typical. Vast majority of you are not typical. I don't know what's wrong with that.
I'm not typical. Vast majority of you are not typical. No one is.
So they don't want to use neurotypical. They want to use neuroconforming, as if your neurological system is a choice. You decide to conform.
Such idiocy, such unmitigated, moronic idiocy. These peopleare amoral, simply.
Neurotypical is a neologism. It's a new word, new coinage. And it describes anyone who has a type of neural activity, neurotype that fits into the norm of thinking patterns, norm not in the social sense, not like it's normative, norm in the statistical sense. Statistically, most people feel a fit into a specific neurotype.
And so to claim that there are not neurotypical is inanity, it's dumbness in its extreme form. Of course most people function neurologically the exact same way. And of course there are people who function neurologically differently. For example, people with autism spectrum disorder. And I suspect narcissism, borderlines.
Neurotypical is simply anyone who is not autistic, who does not have ADHD, dyslexia, and other brain dysfunction and so on, so forth.
And they have a problem with that. They want to call this kind of people neuroconforming, as if they were making a choice to conform.
Neurodivergent experiences are an anomaly. They are not typical. And there's no denying this.
We do belong statistically to some place on the distribution diagram. It's inevitable. We fit in the middle. We fit in the tails. We fit somewhere to pretend otherwise is to deny reality, common trait of most victimhood and woke movements.
Now, modern neuroscientists, psychologists and psychiatrists regard neurodiversity, the current neurodiversity movement, is completely beyond the pale. Pseudo-scientific, ill-founded, counterfactual and is, truthfully speaking, dumb. A movement of dumb people it is definitely not based on neuroscience or psychology and so it is legitimate to argue about medicalization in psychology and psychiatry i've done my share 20 and 30 years ago.
Thomas Szasz, the anti-psychiatry movement. These are legitimate debates. It is legitimate to ask whether psychology and psychiatry could ever be a science. My personal question is not.
But it is not legitimate to pretend that fantasy is preferable to reality.
The reality is some people are abnormal. They're anomalous. They're not normal. And it's not a pejorative, it's not a stigma. They simply don't belong to the body of the distribution function. They belong to the tails. Their location on the distribution function is different.
That is all there is to it. And yes, in some cases, it's a question of diversity and differences. It's not a pathology and it's not a medical condition. It's harming no one and it's not harming the person himself or herself. I agree with that premise.
But to apply it widely to all mental illness and to claim there's no such thing as mental illness, there are only differences among people. That is to deny reality. Denial, may I remind you, is a pathological defense mechanism when taken to extreme.
People with any form of neurocognitive or mental disorder, congenital, acquired, and so on so forth, they are also not neurotypical, if you come to think of it.
And when we use control groups, the groups are usually neurotypical, holistic, if you wish, is another term, holistic, which means the opposite of autistic.
And so the neurodivergence paradigm is out of control and has entered the land of nonsense.
If you want to use neurodivergence in its original form, 25 years ago, 30 years ago, that's still debatable.
But what's happening today with neurodivergence, the way neurodivergis is used, especially online, on platforms like YouTube, that is as nonsensical as twin flames and as ill founded as empaths. In other words it's not science.
There is a within the neurodivergents and neurotypical movements or paradigm shifts, when they try to apply these paradigms to observations or studies, they come up sometimes with fascinating explanations, but these fascinating explanations, again, are not scientific, because the truth is, the fact is, that the majority of people involved in the neurodivergence movement don't have scientific qualifications or education at all.
They're activists. They're not scientists. They're not psychologists. They're not licensed social workers. They have no track with psychology or psychiatry, which is a pity, of course.
So take for example what is known as the double empathy problem theory.
When they apply the neurodivergence and neurotypical paradigm, so they come up with the following explanations.
Both autistic and non-autistic people find it difficult to empathize with each other. Autistic people cannot empathize with neurotypicals. Neurotypicals cannot empathize with autistic people.
And so both groups are compromised as far as empathy is concerned. They are both dysempathied. They have deficient empathy.
And this is why it's called the double empathy problem.
And they say that autistic people do not lack empathy. They have empathy, but only for other autistic people. Whereas neurotypicals have empathy only for neurotypicals.
That is of course a profound misunderstanding of the concept of empathy. Empathy is exactly about identifying with people who are not like you.
If you identify with people who are like you, like-minded, people who are in your in-group, people who come from the same background, then that's not empathy. It has other names, group affiliation and so on. That's not empathy.
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in other people's shoes because they are not like you. It's the capacity to experience other people's emotions and cognitions when they're alien to you, when they're strange, that's empathy.
And so to say that autistic people have empathy because they empathize with other autistic people, but incapable of empathizing with something like 97% of a population, that is of course rank nonsense.
It would be true, however, to say that autistic people are capable of recognizing other autistic people and resonating with them somehow. They are incapable of deciphering or decoding accurately, cues, social cues, sexual cues, behavioral cues, emanating from neurotypicals.
But what does any of this have to do with empathy? I have no idea.
This is an example of the misapplication of concepts borrowed from clinical psychology, a kind of therapy speak, and it yields nonsensical results and nonsensical theories.
Damien Milton, the guy who came up with the double empathy problem in 2012, has a lot to learn about what is empathy.
And yes, when autistic people socialize, when they have conversations, they identify with other autistic people. They build rapport with other autistic people. And they fail to do so with non-autistic people.
What does any of this have to do with empathy is beyond me.
So the only good thing that came out of this pseudo-scientific theory, not to say idiotic theory, is that we realized that we should construct environments which would allow people to feel more comfortable with each other and somehow prevent clashes or conflicts or dissonances.
And so we need to realize that autistic people feel more comfortable with other autistic people. And we need to build environments in workplaces, in classrooms, in universities, and churches. We need to build environments where autistic people would be mostly with other autistic people.
That's not sequestering, that is not quarantining. Autistic people are free to go wherever they want.
But if they do want to socialize with other autistic people, talk to other autistic people, spend time with other autistic people, we need to make it possible for them.
We also need to teach people who are not autistic, neurotypicals. We need to teach them to empathize with non-autistic people.
But frankly, neurotypicals who need teaching lack empathy to start with.
People with empathy would empathize with autistic people. They would empathize with poor people. They would empathize with uneducated people. They would empathize with stupid people. They would empathize with geniuses.
Empathy is an extensive property. If you're capable of empathizing with another human being, the traits and qualities and personal history and mentality and mental health of that other human being are irrelevant.
That's why, for example, good psychologists and psychiatrists empathize with psychotic people. They even empathize, sometimes, with narcissists.
You need empathy if you were a good psychologist or if you are to be a good psychologist or psychiatrist.
But we do need to recognize that people flock together when they are the same.
And our insistence that autistic people should be normal, should function normally, should understand normal people, and so on so forth, is a problem.
Autistic people are incapable of doing this. They can't accomplish this. It says them out of failure, makes them feel bad with themselves. It depresses them. It destroys the self-esteem, it stigmatizes them.
So we need to stop this. We need to stop pathologizing the inability of autistic people to empathize with non-autistic people, to decipher and decode their cues and behaviors and communication and so on.
They're just not capable of doing this. Not all of them, but the majority of them. We need to accept this.
Empathizing with them means catering to their special needs. Without pathologizing these special needs, if they don't harm other people or the autistic person himself or herself.
And that is the essence of the early stages of the neurodivergence paradigm shift, which I'm all for.
If you don't harm anyone and if you don't harm yourself and if you're just different, it is my obligation to make it possible for you to live your life to the fullest, to self-actualized and self-realize.
Very important scholars such as Jaswal and Akhtar.
Akhtar came up basically with a codification of covert narcissism. He's the father of covert narcissism, among others.
Jaswal and Akhtar in 2019, for example, studied this issue and the difference between being socially uninterested and appearing socially uninterested.
And they discussed the issue of social motivation or the lack of social motivation, not only in autistic people, lack of social motivation in schizoid people, for example.
So, autistic individuals who participated in the study reported that when they avoid eye contact, it's because they're trying to concentrate. It's very difficult for them to concentrate during the conversation.
That's not an indicator of social disinterest.
That is something we can teachneurotypicals. Listen, autistic people behave differently. Don't misread their behaviors. Don't misunderstand their behaviors. Here's a dictionary. Here's something to help you to understand autistic people.
And when I say autistic people, it's just an example. People with neurodevelopmental disorders, intellectually challenged people. I mean, there are so many groups that we stigmatize and pathologize and medicalize and mistreat and so on so forth when there's no need for it.
I agree they're simply different. We need to accept their differences, these differences, and we need to help them, help them to flourish and thrive despite the differences in an environment which caters mostly to our needs as neurotypicals.
It's very reminiscent of what happened between men and women. You know? It was a man's world and women had to fit in somehow.
And so then women got liberated or emancipated. And now we are negotiating the construction of a new world, which would cater to the needs of everyone involved.
Same liberation and emancipation should reach groups of people hitherto pathologized as mentally ill when they're not. They're just different.
I fully agree.
But having said that, to apply neurodiversity, to apply this concept of neurodivergence, to manifestly mentally ill people, or people with extreme dysfunctions, people with, for example, developmental speech disorders, including dyslexia, dysphagia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia, discalculia, dysnomia, intellectual disabilities, which are harmful to the individual, even obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, anti-social personality to apply neurodivergence to these groups is wrong.
It's simply wrong. It's not good for them. It's not good for society.
And so, some things we need to intervene. I don't know if we can cure. I don't know if we can fix, but we need to try. We need to create support systems, inclusive support systems, for other groups of people who are just different, in a benign way.
But whenever there's a risk to the individual or to people around the individual, we need to intervene. Simple.
And when I say risk, if you have an extreme speech problem, you're at risk for a variety of reasons. And you need help. And calling you different or neurodivergent is not going to help you.
We should honor human diversity, but we should not fetishize it. And we should not use it to eliminate the acknowledgement that one could be mentally ill as well as physically ill.
So we should never use coercion in treatment, except in extreme cases, for example, with psychopaths.
But we should never use coercion in treatment. We should not pretend to be superior in some way. We are not benchmarks and standards to aspire to, neurotypicals.
All this I agree.
The ethos and the mythology of mental illness and mental health treatments should change. It should change.
And it's not a question of making people conform to us. It's a question of allowing them to live better, fuller lives.
It's about them, not about us. It's not about adapting to social norms. It's about functioning better, surviving, and not arming others. It's not about conforming to behavioral standards.
There are no behavioral standards anymore. There's no clinical ideal. It's all nonsense.
It's about helping people, much more than about molding people, shape-shifting people. It's not helping them.
Of course, taking into account the needs of society. You help people also in the sense that they don't harm other people.
Because if they do, they're going to be penalized. It's bad for them to harm other people.
We can reconceptualize autism and related conditions in society and individually. We can say that these conditions, some of them at least, don't require any cure or intervention.
We shouldn't even call it a condition or a disease or a disorder or illness. We should just maybe a different language.
We should focus on healthy and independent living, acknowledge certain types of autonomy and agency, emphasizeseparateness and independence, give more control over treatment options.
I agree with all this. I agree with all this when it comes to specific disorders, such as autism.
And not all types of autism. There are extreme types of autism which are dangerous to the individual and sometimes to other people.
That's the key.
Is the individual functional? Is the individual content, not to say happy, and does the individual harm other people?
If the answer to any of these three is yes, there is need for treatment, and it is a disorder.
If the answer to all three is not all three is not cumulatively, there's no need for intervention, there's no need for pathologizing, there's no need for medicalizing, and there's definitely no need for stigmatizing.
This is the key, I think, and this is the way forward.
This is the way forward as far as when we deal with this kind of divergences or differences, some of which are actually positive adaptations, as I mentioned.
Autistic people are very good in certain tasks, much better than neurotypicals.
There is inevitably huge controversy when it comes to the neurodiversity or neurodivergence paradigm.
The medical model of disability is contested not only by the neurodiversity movement, is contested from the inside as well.
But the debate is about how far to go and how applicable the new paradigm is, and to whom is it applicable?
The application of the neurodiversity paradigm to autism is, for example, debatable because it comes from the understanding that even with a framework of natural variance that neurodiversity includes, individuals with functional difficulties would continue to have challenges.
And to ignore that, to pretend that these challenges are normal part of diversity is doing a disservice to autistic people.
So when you're a family member in charge of caring for an autistic person, you know what I mean, a highly autistic, not high functioning but low functioning autistic person. You know what I mean.
The neurodiversity paradigm is detached from reality and from the needs of individuals.
And similarly, you could claim that people with dementia or Alzheimer's, they're just different than neurodiverse. Alzheimer's is a neurodivergence. There's no arguing about this. It's a brain disorder.
And yet, would anyone suggest that we should not help these people? Should not treat them, should not intervene, should not help their family members.
So how far to go?
Currently the neurodiversity paradigm is too widely applied. It encompasses people that shouldn't be there. People with severe impairments, neurodiversity should apply to pervasive neurocognitive differences.
That is a suggestion by Nick Walker, who is another advocate. And pervasive neurocognitive differences intimately related to the formation and constitution of the self.
So medical conditions, for example, there's a form of epilepsythat's very common comorbid with autism. Medical conditions should be treated.
There was a critique of the neurodiversity movement in 2020. It reviewed the literature and analyzed it and so on. And it raised two concerns regarding the term neurotypical.
Number one, many people who do not have an autism diagnosis have autistic traits, and this is known as broad autism phenotype.
So there is no clear bimodal distribution separating people with and without autism. In reality, there are not two distinct populations, one neurotypical and one neurodivergent, but it is really a spectrum spread across the entire population.
In other words, many people have autistic traits, but they're not autis. But they're not neurotypical either. What should we call them?
And the second objection was that neurotypical was a dubious construct because there is nobody who could be considered truly neurotypical. And there's no standard, agreed upon standard, for the human brain, for behavior, finally.
Anyhow, this is all at its inception. This is all beginning. This debate is just beginning.
While I strongly dispute the applicability of neurodiversity and neurotypicality to a multitude of mental health illnesses and disorders, and I think it should be much more confined to highly specific neurodevelopmental disorders, such as level 1 autism.
I think the movement for neurodiverg diversity, the concept of neurodivergence and the idea of neuro-typicals, I think they're having a beneficial impact and influence on the internal debate within psychology and psychiatry, a debate which has been ongoing for probably 150 years at least, as to what constitutes illness, what is normality, is psychology and psychiatry, a science, a form of medicine? Should we adopt the medical pathological model, medical model of pathologizing, should we attempt to cure and change and heal and force people to conform?
All these questions are tackled by the neurodiversity paradigm, albeit in sometimes in a nonsensical and non-scientific manner, still raising the question and forcing the profession to confront them the way I'm doing right now is laudable and I'm all for it.