There's a movement afoot to stop labeling those who think differently as disabled, but instead to think of them as neurally diverse:
As the number of Americans with brain disorders grows, so has skepticism toward the grab bag of syndromes they are being tagged with, from A.D.D. to Asperger's to bipolar I, II or III.
But in a new kind of disabilities movement, many of those who deviate from the shrinking subset of neurologically 'normal' want tolerance, not just of their diagnoses, but of their behavioral quirks. They say brain differences, like body differences, should be embraced, and argue for an acceptance of 'neurodiversity.'
And as psychiatrists and neurologists uncover an ever-wider variety of brain wiring, the norm, many agree, may increasingly be deviance.
'We want respect for our way of being,' said Camille Clark, an art history graduate student at the University of California at Davis who has Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism often marked by an intense interest in a single subject. 'Some of us will talk too long about washing machines or square numbers, but you don't have to hate us for it.'
And we don't have to medicate their eccentricities away, either, or label them as diseased:
In an effort to rein in the number of diagnoses, the American Psychiatric Association imposed a new criterion in its latest edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual: an individual must now suffer from "impairment" to qualify as having one of its 220 psychological disorders. "We're not adequately differentiating normal from pathological if we just use the criteria that are in the syndrome definitions," said Dr. Darrel A. Regier, director of research for the American Psychiatric Association.
...But the most humane approach, some experts argue, may lie in redefining the expanding set of syndromes as differences rather than diagnoses.
"We're doing a service on the one hand by describing many more of these conditions and inviting people to understand themselves better," said Dr. Edward Hallowell, a leading authority on A.D.D. "But when we pathologize it we scare them and make them not want to have any part of it. I think of these as traits, not disorders."
And that's the way we should think of them. For too long we've been labeling everything that doesn't fit a preconceived "norm" as diseased, where the definition of normal is a Lake Wobegon standard of "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." And where everyone thinks and feels the same.
Article comments
1 - jadester
interesting stuff.