Neurodiversity

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About Judy Singer

Read about my connection with the idea of Neurodiversity, a term I believe I coined in its activist sense.

Read the original quote

 

My work

Includes my honours thesis, published and unpublished articles, and academic papers

Titles include:

  • Genius and Moral Responsibility

  • Uncovering the Neurological Procrustean Bed

  • Why can't you be normal for once in your life?

  • The Old Woman of the Sea

  • Odd people in

  • When Cassandra was very very young

  • Travels in Parallel Space

 

Contact

webmaster@neurodiversity.com.au

 

 

 

 

 

  


Light and Dark

   Correcting the Balance

When I first started thinking about the idea of Neurodiversity, I was in the first flush or, more accurately perhaps, the last efflorescence, of Identity Politics. It seemed to me that Autistics and Aspies, nerds, weirdos, oddballs, trainspotters, geeks, mavericks, different drummers — always the last to be included, the last to participate — should not be denied their moment of basking in the sun.

I believed the "Neurologically Different" deserved the joy of discovering their identity as an oppressed minority. I knew from the lessons of the women’s movement that much of women's behaviour was made to appear more pathological than it needed to be by the “gaze” of the dominant discourse - either by...

  • Invisibility or omission: the lack of a language to describe or speak up for oneself, and a lack of empirical observation about the deeper causes of seemingly aberrant behaviour, or by

  • Direct oppression: bullying, exclusion, institutional barriers, etc.

I believed the “Neurologically Different” deserved the joys of linking up with others, the excitement of making mutual discoveries with their peers and pioneering new pathways to empowerment, the heady emergence from humiliation to pride, into new careers, new fields of studies, a whole new world!

But nothing in this world is all bad or all good.
It is time to remember that each minority group that moves to power
creates new tyrannies and new problems.

 

The dark side of identity politics is its eternal victimhood, its infantilism, its demand for unconditional love and acceptance without concomitant adult self-reflection, self-criticism, a measure of stoicism, and a willingness to see light and dark in oneself as well as in "the Other".

As a woman with an AS (Autism Spectrum) mother and an AS daughter, as a woman who identifies myself as being somewhere midway on the "spectrum", I have complex and multiple identities, sometimes contradictory, and perhaps irresoluble.

As a woman on the "cusp", I have experienced oppression and humiliation for my AS traits of disorder and clumsiness, but also admiration and idealisation for my original intellect and my ability to stand outside social conformity to put forward new ideas

As the daughter of an AS mother, I have experienced the cruelty and neglect, however inadvertent, of someone who could neither read nor prioritise the needs of others, even those of her dependent child

As the mother of an AS daughter, I simultaneously love her essence and am frustrated by the demands she creates in my daily life. I feel her pain and frustration sometimes that things that come easily to others seem to be out of her reach.

Coming from this multi-layered background I want to encourage the development of new 'ways of seeing" that depathologise AS as much as possible, which is why I pioneered the idea that AS should be seen as a neurological minority rather than as a "disability". But I have now come to the conclusion that balance requires us to acknowledge that that not all is for the best in this brave new world that the "neuroscience revolution" delineates.

Much is made of the positive contributions of Autistics to society. We've heard about Einstein and Wittgenstein and Cavendish and Erdos and Gould, but the dark side of Autism is swept under the carpet. In online autism circles, there is no shortage of speculation about autistic villains in society, but nobody wants to go there in public for fear of villifying disabled people. Yet reason dictates that autistic "bad guys" must exist. I have thought for many years about going public with some of these speculations, and I only hope nobody decides to "shoot the messenger".

Before looking at the dark side, which many will find shocking, here are some thoughts.

These are ideas for further research, discussion and debate. They are not intended as academic arguments, but as thoughts for other researchers to pursue.

If the neurodiversity movement is to mature, it cannot hide its collective head in the sand, but must look at the idea that not all Nature's experiments are inherently good. It must consider how we can contain anti-social behaviours that endanger others, while safeguarding civil liberties for all.

In the following list, I do not claim that these people are all autistic. As my honours thesis suggests, "AS" — unlike classic Autism of the type depicted in "Rain Man" — is a social construct, not an immutable something "out there". AS arises as a new disability from a society that has higher demands for social communications and emotional expression than societies that preceded it.

What I do suggest, however, is that some people are not born "inherently benign". When they are not, we need to face the fact that there may be innate neurological causes as well as learned behaviours relating to nurture and culture.

And one of the places to look is amongst people who are not wired for empathy.

What you read below are intended as

brief notes and ideas for further research

 

Hitler: the mad genius

  • inability to understand humour
  • obsessively fixed routines
  • insistence on wearing multiple copies of the identical outfit
  • his obsessive "stims" (autostimulatory repetitive behaviours designed to reduce anxiety) : his preoccupation with rooting out imagined impurities in the body politic, ie Jews, Gypsies, people with disabilities, homosexuals, in the same way that some of us quell anxieties and try to impose central coherence by more benign stims like rooting out blackheads and split ends
  • inability to factor in the suffering of humans on the way to creating the grand system
  • short fuse
  • technically competent artist lacking subtlety and insight, stereotyped imagery
  • inability to maintain relationships

Eichmann, the Evil Trainspotter

The architect of the Final Solution, the Evil Trainspotter, Mr Banality of Evil himself. Someone should look into this. This was a man preoccupied with trains running on time, never mind the cargo.

Neitsche, the self-hating Autistic?

A classic disconnected childhood, a man who despised Aspies, i.e. intellectuals like himself compared to the red-blooded men of action of an imaginery "Master Race". On the lighter side, is it possible that all of Neitsche's high-faluting philosophising comes down to a potboiler on the perennial warfare between the Jocks and the Nerds, or that "The Revenge of the Nerds" did it so much better?

"Mad Scientists" and Policy Boffins

Popular culture stereotypes don't just grow out of thin air. When I started the world's first support group for the now adult children of Autistic parents, ASpar, which has had over 200 members since its inception, I was expecting to find that many of our members would have parents in the sciences, but what astounded me was how many of their parents (fathers, actually) were part of the medical, scientific and academic establishment of the United States.

What happens when theories are developed in a social vacuum by people who understand facts and ideas, but not the emotional impacts of their theories? Can the brilliance and factual mastery of autistic scientists and policy-makers undermine the confidence of dissenters? Does Autistic self-conviction mimic strong leadership and appeal to attavistic responses that conditions most of us to follow strong leaders? We do not live in close quarters with our tribal leaders any more, conditions that might expose some of our scientific and policy leaders as eccentrics to be taken with a grain of salt.

Obviously this is a very broad argument, it is not intended as an attack on intellectuals and thinkers, with whom I would like to identify, but rather as a new take on the existing real political tensions between "intellectuals" and "practical people".

Fundamentalists and fanatics

What are fundamentalists if not rule-based people, as opposed to intuition-based and interaction-based, even love-based people? Might not many of them be people whose intuition does not work, who cannot conceive how the world manages to hang together without rules clearly delineating right and wrong? To what extent are fundamentalist leaders people whose low anxiety thresholds give them a heightened need for control, one of the key traits of AS? And is there a subtle interplay between fundamentalist priests, the intellectual interpreters of theory, and their followers, those who may be more intuitively based, but who defer to intellectual authority, as discussed above under "Mad Scientists and Policy Boffins"

Conspiracy theorists, crackpots, Holocaust deniers

Look at Error Morris' cult film, Dr Death , about Fred Leuchter, Holocaust denier, and inventor of a "better" electric chair. If ever there was a classic case of AS....

Think about David Irving, another indefatigable Holocaust denier

They are both men who single-mindedly follow "the facts" and tunnel away in supreme isolation, disconnected from social intelligence and the social information context that the rest of us factor in without even thinking about it.

Why so much focus on the Holocaust? Why indeed does the subject of the Holocaust appear to attract such an odd mix of crackpot intellectuals? We know there is a condition known as “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” (ODD) sometimes associated with AS. On the one hand, ODD a dangerous label because of its potential to stifle dissent and social criticism. On the other hand we know children with AS from loving,well-adjusted families who simply must say “NO” to everything their families hold dear. May not Holocaust deniers be saying “NO” to what society holds dear, the sorrow and regret of all feeling people for the pre-eminent human tragedy of Western Civilisation?

Hunters and Collectors (of other humans)

Remember the 1960s film hit "The Collector"? Or recent cases of lonely men kidnapping children because they want to be fathers, forgetting that the essence of parenthood is sacrificing ones own needs in the interests of the child? Or lonely friendless obsessives who stalk celebrities as imaginary friends made real?

Cold, abusive, neglectful parents

I started ASpar, which I believe was the first place in the world to recognise that AS children not only grew up but became parents, in an attempt to come to terms with my own painful experiences in a family dominated by an AS mother. In the years since I began this group, I have seen a common pattern of parenting emerge, and it is a pattern of emotional neglect and abuse by AS parents, not malicious, but . Children are suffering because society's liberal institutions are afraid to face two conflicting rights: the “rights of the child” versus the “right to parent”.

It is time to say that the rights of the child must come first.

With the right to parent come responsibilities also, and people who know themselves to be autistic must think very carefully about what it means to choose to parent if :

  • they cannot read a child's facial expression or body language
  • they cannot understand a child's needs
  • they cannot prioritise the child’s needs over their own
  • they cannot generalise from simple rules in an emergency
  • they cannot bear noise
  • they cannot bear touch
  • they seek to isolate their families from the outside world
  • they have short fuses
  • they cannot stop perseverating or obsessing
  • they cannot organise themselves sufficiently to run a reasonably clean and orderly household and put regular meals on the table

From my membership of AS support groups, I know that many people with AS have taken this on seriously and are choosing not to parent when they think they cannot handle the anxieties.

 

This is not about advocating eugenics,

but about autistics making informed choices,

and being assured of adequately funded support services if they do have children

Vexatious litigants and Fathers Rights vigilantes

In my work on ASpar, I frequently come across reports of AS parents who cannot relinquish control over their children, while at the same time being incapable of raising them for some of the reasons given above. Perhaps out of shame, or perhaps out of the experience of oppression, where people with AS have been tormented and rejected so often by a society that doesn't understand them, they attempt to salvage their pride through the courts, and become vexatious litigants. We have heard many cases of AS fathers repeatedly hauling their families before the courts, even bankrupting their families, and then in some cases once winning their cases, not actually coming to collect the children. I cannot expect anyone to take my word for my "anecdotal" evidence, but clearly more independent research is needed.

As the daughter of an AS mother and a wonderful NT father, I had night terrors as a child at the prospect of my mother ever gaining custody of me, as she was barely in touch with practical matters or emotional realities.

I TOTALLY sympathise with the ordeal of anyone of any gender with a partner who cannot parent - for whatever reason. Courts do obviously favour mothers, and this is probably the best decision in the majority of cases, given the closer bonding of birthmothers to their children. But I have long suspected that militant, rage-filled, Fathers’ Rights groups are unholy alliances between good fathers with genuine cases — a minority — and the vexatious litigants described above.

 

... to be continued