NEURODIVERSITY FOREVER
Thank you Dr. Ratey, Dr. Damasio, Howard Gardner and Dr. Hallowell for your humanity. Psychiatry may be going overboard with all the labeling, but at least it’s looking like neurodiversity may be headed our way.
NYTimes.com – May 9, 2004 – NEURODIVERSITY FOREVER – The Disability Movement Turns to Brains – By AMY HARMON  – (my favourite excerpts)
“What all of our efforts in neuroscience are demonstrating is that you have many peculiar ways of arranging a human brain and there are all sorts of varieties of creative, successful human beings,” Dr. Damasio said. “For a while it is going to be a rather relentless process as there are more and more discoveries of people that have something that could be called a defect and yet have immense talents in one way or another.”For example, when adults with A.D.D. look at the word “yellow” written in blue and are asked what the color is and then what the word is, they use an entirely different part of the brain than a normal adult. And when people with Asperger’s look at faces, they use a part of the brain typically engaged when looking at objects.Dr. Damasio and others compare the shifting awareness about brain function to the broader conception of intelligence that has evolved over the last two decades, driven in part by the theory of Howard Gardner, a Harvard education professor, that children who don’t excel in “traditional” intelligence – the manipulation of words and numbers – may shine in other areas such as spatial reasoning or human relations….. For patients, being given a name and a biological basis for their difficulties represents a shift from a “moral diagnosis” that centers on shame, to a medical one, said Dr. Ratey, who is the author of “Shadow Syndromes,” which argues that virtually all people have brain differences they need to be aware of to help guide them through life.
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.”
Knowing you are a mild depressive, for instance, could induce you to exercise often. A bipolar person could adapt their lives to fit their mood swings, or treat them with drugs if that works better. And a neurologically tolerant society would try to accommodate as well as understand behavior that remained aberrant.
