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CAMHS nearly killed me, and it’s not okay.

I don’t talk about my childhood much. Partly because I don’t want to upset my readers, but also because it is not my story alone to tell. The people who did so much harm to me as a child also caused harm to others that I love immensely. A sad part of my life is that as a result of the harm done to me, I made choices in my life that hurt those people I loved. I don’t blame myself, but I also haven’t quite reach the point where I can release myself from the sense that I need to make reparations.

Something that I think is really important to talk about however, is the way I was failed by professionals who very well could have turned my life around. I am happy with my life now, but I do wonder what it might have looked like had I not been left to drown by a service that was meant to be my saviour. That service was the UK’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS).

The worst part isn’t even that they ignored my mother’s pleas to assess me for autism. It’s not the time that they tried to put me on Ritalin after a five minute conversation. It’s the way they were nearly complicit in my surrender to the suffering that I experienced. I’m a suicide survivor, and CAMHS didn’t care.

I came to them, beaten and bruised, I laid before them my trauma, my pain, my isolation, my disdain for every aspect of myself. I told them that I couldn’t cope, that I was scared to wake up each day. I told them things about my past that I can’t bring myself to say publicly, even to this day. I was met with silence. Cold, uncaring silence. They did nothing. They labelled me a school refuser. They still refused to assess me for autism.

Is it any wonder then that I found solace in the steel trap of drugs and alcohol? What can one do in the face of unending suffering than desperately scramble to drown out the noise. The noise was inescapable. The voices in my head would scream at me daily. I was paranoid and distrustful of everyone, even those that I loved dearly. CAMHS allowed my psychological wellbeing to deteriorate to the point that I could no longer cope with existing. I resigned myself to an early grave.

Some might ask why this is relevant, I am a man in his thirties, surely this was a long time ago?

No.

This is still happening. Everyday, thousands upon thousands of families are forced to watch on as CAMHS allow their children to suffer. If you want to know why so many Autistic people die by suicide, start by taking a look at this (dis)service. CAMHS are complicit in an untold number of deaths. Each data point in those statistics represents a story untold. A future unrealised. With each child lost by the negligence of those meant to help them, our future becomes a little bit darker.

I am happy today, but it hurts. It hurts to know that my child and millions like them do not have this service in a good working order should they need it. I want a world that protects my child and seeks to heal wounds and change worlds. It’s the least they can do for our precious children.

My name is David, and I’m a CAMHS survivor.

Please help us change children’s lives by signing this petition.

Reclaiming Neurofuturism: An introduction

In some of my recent articles, I have referred to something called neurofuturism. While neurofuturism itself is not a new word (although weirdly, I didn’t know this when I first used it), I do believe that reconceptualising it may allow for a new discourse in the Neurodivergent community. Namely, a discourse around what the future of the neurodiversity movement and paradigm might look like.

With this in mind, let’s start by considering the original use of neurofuturism and take a look at it through a critical lens.

A lot of the discussion around neurofuturism thus far has looked at augmenting human cognition with technology up to, and including, artificial intelligence. This sounds exciting on the surface; fusing the human mind with technology as a way of unlocking our potential. It sounds exciting, but there are two main issues at the forefront of my mind

  • Technology is not universally accessible.
  • Technology can often be created with one purpose while incidentally fulfilling another.

Consider this, technology allowed us to split the atom. Fission reactors meant that we could create huge quantities of carbon neutral energy. It also meant that we were able to create nuclear weapons, fundamentally changing the nature of human conflict. As I mentioned, technology is not universally accessible. It often requires privilege to gain a seat at the table when it comes to research and design. Because of this, it is likely that people creating technology to go on your head either may not consider negative impacts on marginalised communities, or worse, may use it to actively oppress them.

Remember when Elon Musk claimed that neural interfaces could ‘solve’ autism and schizophrenia? We never asked for that, but it’s reasonable to worry that such a technology could be forced upon is if it were to exist.

So, why am I even talking about neurofuturism?

Neurofuturism has a place in human discourse, but it isn’t with the tech world. I firmly believe we should reclaim neurofuturism and reconceptualise it into something accessible and beneficial to all. What better place for such a concept to exist than within the neurodiversity paradigm?

Broadly speaking, neurofuturism as I conceptualise it has existed for some time. Neuroqueer theory could be considered somewhat of a flagship of neurofuturism. The idea that we can queer our identity and embodiment in line with our neurology is liberational, and that is what neurofuturism should be, a school of thought that emancipates us from the chains of the past.

In my mind, neurofuturism is a word to describe ideas that ask us to not blindly accept the knowledge of the past. It is a school of thought that asks us to take a degree of criticality to everything that has been taken for granted, including the ideas that the neurodiversity movement takes for granted.

Consider the ever-present threat of identity politics. We see it everywhere, and the neurodivergent community is not free of this threat. Much of the politics surrounding how people identify and what the embodiment of that identity should look like is based on some form of normative thinking. It’s necessary to consider the uncomfortable truth that even the neurodivergent community has its own normative ideas.

Wherever there is community, there is a status quo.

Thus, neurofuturism can be reclaimed as a way of advancing the community through criticality. This critical thought can be used to surgically cut through the chains of “normality”, shedding the excess so that we can walk unburdened into the future of our community.

This comes with a lot of uncomfortable thinking. It raises questions about objective truth and the social construction of everything from language to our own sense of Self.

Neurofuturism is not a ‘natural kind’. It does not exist without people observing its growth and trajectory. Moreover, it cannot exist without accepting certain truths, chiefly;

  • Human thought and experience should not be pathologised. It recognises that our psychological world is not a matter for medical intervention.
  • Where people experience psychological distress, we must look to their environment and the experiences it has afforded them.
  • That if human experience is not a medical matter, then such branches of medicine such as psychiatry must use social change as a means of support, with medicine being a tool rather than a requirement.

These points to me seem as the necessary first ideas to acknowledge in a neurofuturist approach to neurodiversity.

There is much more to be said on the nature of neurofuturism, and I hope that as this blog series progresses, we can explore what the future can look like together. I hope we can use the reclamation of this concept as a way of accommodating all Neurodivergent people, and not just the select few with the privilege of being platformed in the right places.

Defining and emancipating weirdness: A reflection for Weird Pride

With Weird Pride Day coming up on the 4th of March, I have been considering the way I embody my identity, and how I can use my Self-expression to reclaim neurofuturism from the tech industry and use it to drive us into a post-normal society. It seems to me that post-normal thinking is growing throughout the communities I find myself in. Little by little, we’re getting weirder.

So, how does one embody weirdness? Weirdness is, much like all other adjectives, a social construct. Different cultures and societies have different standards for what classes as weird. Weirdness, then, has been restricted in its own way by normative thinking and what we see as objective weirdness has become somewhat of a caricature. Stereotypical machinations of a prefabricated construct.

True weirdness doesn’t come from the expected. It is not a quantifiable and boundaried concept. Weirdness is abstract, and to embrace, weirdness is to subvert expectation. Weird Pride is not just a refusal to be ashamed of your difference, it is using your weirdness in ever more surprising and innovative ways in order to escape from the soul crushing normativty of the status quo.

Weird Pride is emancipatory. It liberates us from being defined by the observations of others. It is freedom from being a caricature of yourself.

If I can ask one thing of you for March 4th, it is this; be the unexpected. Innovate, generate, emancipate. Don’t be weird by someone else’s standard. Be weird by your standard.

Bigots keep trying to tell us the meaning of words, I have bad news for them

I have repeatedly seen bigots use the “correct” meaning of words in order to try and invalidate and oppress minority groups. An immediate example is the use of singular “they/them” pronouns. Ignoring the fact that the singular use of these pronouns outdates the use of the word “you“, there is further discussion that needs to be had.

The bigots are going to hate this.

Language, at an essential level, is the use of non-verbal symbols and organised sounds. We have, ad a society, decided that particular shapes, sounds, body movements, facial expressions, and actions mean things. The meaning of these things has arisen from our collective agreement. To put it another way, language is a social construct.

Because language is socially constructed, even if words have prior meanings, we can collectively choose a new meaning for those words. This has happened many times throughout history, and in some cases, we have invented entirely new linguistic conventions where prior ones have not been able to convey what we need them to.

The fun thing about language is that you can repurpose it with very few negative consequences. Don’t like a change? Don’t use it. These changes can have huge positive impacts when made in the right spirit.

Language is the biggest social endeavour in history. It is a work of art, and each of us is the artist. By experimenting with language and altering it, we can create new images that we never thought possible. Language is the social construct that controls all other constructs because without it, we can not convey information. This is why we need to honour the words that describe a person’s identity. They are using language as a tool to dismantle normativity. Each time a person uses the words that feel right to then, and not the words they’ve been told to use, the weaker the chains of normative oppression become.

The people who are so attached to their understanding of words that they can not fathom new uses are not the future of the human race. In order to meet the future, we must first cut loose the chains of the past. Normative thinking has so conditioned the bigots that they react with fear at the suggestion of making even the smallest of changes. Mankind can not survive with such aversion to change, and we need to recognise that growth, like many changes, is not always a matter of personal comfort.

Power dynamics and mental health: Neurofuturist discourse of mental health

When we consider power dynamics, we often consider our external environment and how power flows through the various parts of society, and where privilege is afforded by that power. While discussion of intersectionality and power dynamics is important when considering where discourse comes from and how it affects groups of people, we often don’t think about how such discourse injures our relationship with the Self.

Mental health has long been the remit of medicine. Distressing or unusual behaviour has been positioned as a pathology requiring treatment for decades, despite this approach not improving outcomes for those it affects in that entire time. We use a lot of troubling language when talking about psychological distress; disorder, condition, ailment, mental illness, psychopathology. Each of these words conjure up images of a medical emergency. They tell us that a problem is situated with us and that we need to be fixed.

We then also have to consider the militaristic language that surrounds medicine. “Chronic illness warrior” and “lost their battle to cancer” immediately spring to mind. The effect that these co-occurring discourse (see what I did there?) have on our sense of Self is to enter us into a fight with our own experiences. Experience helps shape the Self meaning that the popular discourse around mental health is placing us into a war with our Self. It is no longer okay to be us.

The irony here is that constant fighting with our own sense of identity causes further psychological distress. Perhaps the reason that outcomes in psychiatry have not improved for over half a century is because their methods and discourse are actually escalating our distress.

Instead of asking “what’s wrong with me?” We need to shift discourse over to “what happened to me?”. It’s vital that psychological distress be placed in the context of one’s environment and experiences of the complex power dynamics within them. There is a word for systems that require us to fight ourselves into a more socially acceptable place; oppressive.

Current systems within mental health treatment are weapons of the oppressive cult of normal.

As we look to the future, we need to consider how we will emancipate ourselves from normativity of all kinds and what we will accept as freedom. Society has spent a long time pathologising those identities and experiences that do not serve its own goals, and the time has come to stand tall and proclaim aloud; who I am has value, I will not be placed at odds with myself.

BBC’s “Inside our Autistic Minds” documentary has some awful resources online

To put this in context, you can visit the Open University web page where these resources are housed here.

Many people are talking about the BBC’s latest documentary on autism and finding it refreshingly validating. However, the resources that have been put up online by co-producers at the Open University are exceedingly outdated and missing key advances in knowledge of Autistic experience. It is clear that while the documentary itself may be okay, those behind it have learnt very little about the reality of Autistic experience.

The first thing you need to know is that the interactive documents take an obvious deficit based approach. This is evident in the theories they promote and the language used throughout. You can tell a lot about organisations from the way they talk about marginalised communities, and the OU are marking themselves as unsafe and ignorant. Using neurodiversity-affirming language and up-to-date theory is the minimum expectation one can place on an institution that provides degree level training to people who will work with Autistic individuals.

Being more focused, the most obvious issue that stands out to me is the references to Baron-Cohen’s now debunked theory of mind claims. They reference the claim that we struggle to understand the minds of others and understand their feelings as different to ours. This is largely baseless and incredibly harmful. Quoting Baron-Cohen on matters of Autistic experience is like quoting Freud in modern psychology; he is a relic of the past and has not ages well.

I would next like to discuss their claims that Autistic people struggle to communicate and follow social conventions. Even newcomers in the field of Autistic experience become aware of The Double Empathy problem exceptionally quickly. Rather than positioning us as having a deficit in social reciprocity, this theory demonstrates that the issue is one of experience. Autistic people have different cultural experiences to that of non-Autistic people, resulting in difficulties with communication on both sides. Unfortunately, due to the power imbalance in our society Autistic people are labelled as having a deficit and required to conform to non-Autistic communication.

It is not okay that the Open University are upholding this power imbalance.

My final note is that they espouse the view that cognitive behavioural therapy is the gold standard for the treatment of anxiety. Autistic people have been reporting for some time now that due to the double empathy problem and a lack of understanding of Autistic culture and experiences, CBT is more of an exercise in gaslighting than a beneficial treatment for what is a very reasonable response to systemic oppression.

These issues highlight to me the short-sightedness of so-called professionals and academics. You can make all of the wonderful documentaries that you like. If the resources you are sharing are harmful, then your allyship is performative at best.

Society has a long way to go in order to treat Autistic people equitably, but a good first step that will benefit everyone is to consult Autistic voices from diverse backgrounds on Autistic matters. We are not the ones with a deficit. Society is.

The infantilisation of Autistic people and the future of our blossoming culture

I would be lying if I said I was not somewhat inspired by the fact that it is Valentine’s day today. It’s a day that gets mixed responses from the Autistic community. Relationships are often a touchy subject for us. We live in a world that fights hard to keep us at the fringes. This, of course, led me to a talking point that has been considered time and again. Autistic people are not perpetual children. We do become Autistic adults, and we engage in adult relationships. You might think that this is all that needs to be said, but actually, there is a deeper conversation to be had about the infantilisation of our community and how this impacts our growing culture.

Wider society views us as “less than”. This is not a debatable point. It’s a fact. When you consider the history of autism and neurodiversity as a whole; we have been relegated to a lower rung of the social ladder than those who can successfully perform neurotypicality. We are treated as though we are child-like, and at times as though we aren’t even human. I have genuinely heard people say that having sex with an Autistic adult should be criminalised. It is assumed that we lack the capacity to make those sorts of choices for ourselves.

Let me pause their for a minute. Yes, it is true that there are Autistic people who lack the capacity to make decisions around romantic and sexual partners. There are Autistic people who are very vulnerable, whom predators wait to take advantage of. I do not want to take away from this. What I want to highlight is that Autistic people, in general, are more than capable of deciding they want to engage in an adult relationship or sex.

So now, we are left with this uncomfortable fact; we are seen as perpetual children. What purpose does it actually serve for those in power and privilege to allow the perpetuation of an idea that is so incredibly incorrect and harmful?

Autistic people are finding new ways to connect and organise. This has resulted in us having our own dialect, forms of socialisation, social rules, and collective hopes and dreams for the future. The growth of the online neurodiversity movement has empowered Autistic people beyond the point of activism. At this point, we are an emerging counter-culture. This is an important distinction to make.

By centring our existence as an identity and culture, we are disempowering medical and diagnostic models of neurodiversity. Normative systems have relied on the framing of autism as a condition of asociality and a lack of meaningful personhood. If we are emerging as a culture, clearly, we are more than a tick box exercise that can be used to fuel a captialist medical industrial complex. The claim that we lack sociality and personhood is fundamentally dismantled when we show the world that we are capable of not just building a culture but building one that diametrically opposes existing oppressive structures.

The quickest way to conquer your cognitive dissonance in this scenario is to assume we are incompetent. This incompetence comes on the form of infantilisation, which itself is rooted in childism and the assumption that all child-like people lack full personhood.

This is why, for the sake of our communities future, we need to crush infantilisation. We need to demonstrate not just our personhood but the reality of Autistic adulthood. We need to build the taboo nature of adult pursuits into our culture. This has been all-the-more important to me in my work with Autistic drug users. So many times have I seen Autistic people denied support because “Autistic people don’t use drugs”. Infantilisation is more insidious than invalidation of out culture, it is life-threatening.

If we want to move into a future where being Autistic can be more than an identity in a hidden counter-culture, we need to start by disproving the idea that we lack competence. We need to take a stand and demonstrate that we will not tolerate being treated as children.

Mental health and the diagnostic process: A neurofuturist perspective

As I discussed in my recent article about co-occurring conditions, the diagnostic process in psychiatry is inherently flawed on the basis that we have failed to find any meaningful relationship between the so-called “symptoms” of psychiatric conditions, and physical biomarkers which can be measured. Despite this lack of physiological cause, we are still diagnosing people as mentally “ill”. Despite this model not improving outcomes for around half a century.

So now we are faced with the issue of how diagnosis is not just given, but also how it is given responsibly.

One of the biggest flaws of psychiatry is the circular logic that dominates the diagnostic process. A person is Schizophrenic because they have symptoms of Schizophrenia, and they have those symptoms because they are Schizophrenic. This logic does not allow for a nuanced understanding of why a person may experience this particular cluster of traits, it simply follows that A = B, which is because of A.

If this is the case, how does one escape from circular logic?

We have to look for causes for traits and “symptoms” outside of the realm of medicine. While I have often remarked that external factors are the only thing with a meaningful relationship to these experiences, medicine is yet to catch up. It seems reasonable to assume that traumatic experiences are the cause of psychiatric conditions and not a problem within the body. This has ramifications for the future of psychiatry.

If people are not “unwell”, psychiatry now has a moral duty to advocate for it’s patients. Psychiatry needs to evolve into a tool for social change, and cease to be a weapon wielded by normative society. Beyond this, psychiatry needs an understanding of the relationships between neurodivergence, trauma, and psychological distress. It is not enough for psychiatrists to bandage the wound, they need to remove the knife from the hand of society.

This requires us to radically rethink our entire perspective on normality and cultural normative standards. We can not just medicate people and expect them to assimilate into society. We need to help them understand their own unique space in the environment and how to embrace their journey through that space.

As I discuss in my book A Treatise on Chaos, identity is a shifting and ever changing value. We are, at our core, beings of chaos. Psychiatry needs to be a tool for supporting us in the more challenging parts of that chaos, and not serve as a ring-fence around the Self.

Psychiatry is not completely off the trail. Medication can serve as an important tool to support a person’s wellbeing, and can be very helpful for reducing the more troubling and distressing aspects of psychological distress. The most important thing is that we all put in the work to evolve psychiatry and mental health support into a means to challenge the oppressive systems that exist within our world.

It’s time to stop the navel-gazing, and build a better future.

Autism and ADHD: The myth of co-occurring conditions

It’s a very poorly kept secret that many people who are given a diagnosis of autism also meet the criteria for a diagnosis of ADHD. One could be forgiven for assuming this means that people who meet the criteria for both (often termed AuDHD) have two co-occurring conditions. Unfortunately, nothing in life is simple, and the actual answer to this situation is far more complex.

Co-occurring disorders refer to two separate conditions that are occurring at the same time. For example, one might be both asthmatic and diabetic simultaneously. I have chosen this particular example because I want to explore the disconnect between physical health and psychiatric diagnoses.

Diagnosis is a two part system. Step one is research. Clusters of symptoms are matched up to biological signs (known as biomarkers). Where a meaningful relationship can be found between symptoms and biomarkers, you have a disorder. In psychiatry, however, it does not go this smoothly. We can identify clusters of symptoms, usually behaviour or thoughts and feelings that have been deemed troublesome or pathological by those with the privilege of not being oppressed. The problem comes when we try to find a meaningful link with biomarkers.

Despite decades of research, we are not any closer to finding a quantifiable difference in the human body. The research that does exist has been largely inconclusive.

So here’s where autism and ADHD come in. Many of us meet the criteria for both diagnoses. This is because diagnostic manuals specify lists of traits, and if you meet enough of them, you get diagnosed. The problem is that much like pseudoscientific personality tests, humans don’t fit neatly into categories. The criteria for many diagnoses overlap and mic together.

The point I’m trying to make is that AuDHD’ers do not have two conditions simultaneously. In fact, according to the neurodivesity paradigm, there is nothing medically quantifiable. Humans have individual sets of traits that are diverse and interlinked. Remember the saying “if you’ve met one Autistic person, you’ve met one Autistic person”?

That’s because autism doesn’t actually exist. It’s not a physical abnormality, it has no presence. Autistic people exist, and being Autistic is an identity based on shared culture and language. So, what is far more likely is that Autistic and ADHD people are more likely to share particular clusters of traits. You don’t have two conditions, your particular flavour of diversity just happens to tick the right boxes for both.

One could argue that this means a separate diagnosis should be created for people who meet both criteria or that classification should be changed to have them listed as part of a shared spectrum. The problem is that current diagnostic models are unreliable and prone to mistakes. We often find our diagnosis changing from doctor to doctor.

This isn’t necessarily because doctors are bad at their job. It’s because we are trying to pathologise human experience and identity. You can’t measure psychiatric conditions with a blood test, doctors know this, and they’ve been trying to do it for many years. This means that not just diagnosis, but the criteria themselves are at the whim of individuals. Experts and professionals bring their own individual biases to the table, and each one will interpret traits differently.

This is why it’s important that we move towards a demedicalised approach to neurodiversity. We need to stop assigning people fixed identities through diagnosis and instead explore the very real fact that everything about us, including our neurology, changes with time.

People should be allowed to explore their identity and try on whatever labels they feel are right for them.

If this has intrigued you I highly recommend the Neuroqueer series that I co-author with Katie Munday and the interview I recently has with Dr. Nick Walker for my podcast.

Neurodivergence and Normality: The meaning of words

“I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.”

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

The neurodiversity movement is predicated on three deceptively simple ideas:

  • There are as many variations of the human mind as there are humans.
  • Those who can not perform to neurotypical standards are neurodivergent.
  • Neurodivergent people deserve equity and inclusion in our shared environment.

Upon this premise, an entire collective culture of shared knowledge and community-connectedness has blossomed. Creating spaces where neurodivergent people have, for the first time, felt they belong. For many of us, including myself, it has been not just life-changing. It has saved us from an early demise.

But what is neurotypicality? What is it exactly that we diverge from?

Neurotypicality is a performance. It is a set of normative ideas that we have come to accept as “normal”. While those normative ideas my change based on the local environments culture, the truth remains that the word “normal” has been weilded as a weapon to justify the dehumanisation and oppression of all who can not, or will not, assimilate.

Normality is itself a social construct. It is an abstract entity. It is not measurable or tangible. While one could argue that normality is a word that represents that which most have on common, we could just as easily have given it the opposite meaning.

All words are essentially meaningless. The objective truth of a words meaning is something of a social contract between ourselves and those around us. For the context of this essay, let us take normality or “normal” to mean the most commonly found attributes of a given population.

In this sense, Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people are abnormal. We have diverged from normality, representing what is framed by wider society as an aberration in the status quo. On the basis of this, a global industrial complex has risen up in order to not only force our assimilation into normality but also turn that endeavour into a profitable business.

How does one move forward when the world is at odds with your existence?

Even in neurodivergent communities, we frame ourselves through our differences. Celebrating the idea that we are different to that which normativity requires. While their is beauty to be found in such an existence, I believe that we must transcend the limitations of normality. Not through our difference, but instead by our assertion that “normal” does not exist.

We are not different because of our lack of normality. We are different because we embrace individuality and diversity. The difference between normality and normativity is semantic in nature. Normality is the attractive package that is gifted to us to take into our home. We must challenge normativty at its core and not at its surface.

To move into a post-normal society, one must first be able to conceive of such a place. We must establish new boundaries that turn the sound of normality into background noise. Drowning out normative beliefs with the voices of those that refuse to assimilate.

This, of course, presents a problem for not just neurotypical society but also neurodivergent communities. Even in our own culture, there exists a kind of essentialism in the idea that you are either neurotypical or neurodivergent. In a post-normal world, words like “divergent” and “typical” become redundant. If we have no preconceived notions of normality, then there is no need for a counter-culture. There is nothing to assimilate into.

Such a world would allow for the emancipation of neurodivergent communities but fundamentally alter the meaning of what it means to be neurodivergent. We would not be connecting over our differences but rather our shared culture. Such culture is difficult to quantify at this stage because we still have a long way to travel.

For now, this kind of neurofuturism may sound naively utopian, perhaps even dystopian, depending on your outlook. If I can be sure of one thing, it’s that it’s time for us to conceive of a world beyond normality. It is the first step on a journey toward a world where the oppression of neurodivergent people is no longer possible.

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