Neurodiversity: bridging the gap between the disabled people’s movement and the mental health system survivors’ movement?

Authors

Abstract

The concept of neurodiversity - developed in recent decades by people with diagnostic labels such as autism, AD(H)D, dyspraxia and dyslexia, and focused on de-pathologising such conditions and arguing for their recognition as fully valid ‘ways of being’ - has drawn on the theory and activism of both the Disabled People’s Movement and the Mental Health System Survivors’ Movement, as well as on other bodies of thought such as feminism and queer theory. This chapter considers whether insights from the emerging neurodiversity movement can resolve tensions between the disabled people’s and survivor’s movements - such as disagreements on whether mental distress should be considered as an impairment or mental health system survivors as “disabled” within a social model of disability. It argues that all these liberation movements can be brought together into a broad alliance under a banner of diversity and anti-normalisation.

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