Challenging Psychiatric Classification: Healthy Autistic Diversity and the Neurodiversity Movement

Abstract

This chapter explores the perspectives of members of the neurodiversity movement (NDM). ‘Neurodiversity’ is a concept that avoids the trappings of diagnostic language that distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy. Relying on the vocabulary of ‘neurotypical’ and ‘neurodivergent’ persons, the NDM promotes a more inclusive understanding of peoples’ states of mental health, consciousness, and, fundamentally, a way of being. We examine how the arguments of the NDM are reminiscent of other struggles within the broadly defined arena of disability activism, mad pride, and consumer-survivor movements and show how the NDM co-opts medical language to avoid the tradition developed by anti-psychiatrists who fundamentally reject psychiatry altogether.