Why "Neurodiversity" is wrong

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It's a NT world where most, if not all, of the major scientific advances have been made by the ND.

The average person has no flippin' clue what autism really is. I think ND is a good way to present it to them to quash their negative stereotypes. But it would be wrong to deny that disability is always a part of it. And that the goal is to have-the-back of everyone on the spectrum.

The timeless, epic battle of the Aspies vs. the NTs

Every brain is different and most are not different in a way that would get them a diagnostic label.

I would say MOST Autistic people SHOULD be accepted warts and all and if one is unable to do that just stay away and leave alone.

Two short videos do not demonstrate autism usually equals hell for all involved.

I can not tell what is causing the child to melt down in video 1. We do not see what happened before the video was shot. I did observe the mother touching her which could be the problem. If things were ameliorated maybe some of the melting down would be.

Again hard to tell from a brief video but I do not see any obvious signs of unhappiness in the adult autistic in video 2. The self identified warrior mother is unhappy with his positioning and "non communication". To her credit she identified triggers and was actively ameliorating them.

Treatments to reduce the severity of one or more specific impairments is not the same thing as a treatment that attempts to "cure autism" in the sense of trying to make your entire brain totally NT. Don't you see that the latter kind of treatment would be much more radical than the former, hence much more dangerous and much more likely to be harmful?

For the more severely disabled autistic people, it seems to me that what's needed, primarily, is treatments that focus specifically on their communication difficulties and/or their motor difficulties (the latter of which, in at least some cases, are a significant cause of the former).

Also, at least some non-speaking autistic children are capable of learning how to read and write/type, if only someone would teach them. Too often, however, little or no effort is made to do so. There has been a recent trend toward teaching nonverbal kids to communicate using picture-based AAC, which is much better than no communication at all, but probably falls drastically short of developing the actual capabilities of many (we don't know how many) nonverbal autistic kids.

EDIT: Alas, this has NOT been a major area of research, but it is known to be an issue. See, for example, the following Spectrum News articles:

- Standard tests underestimate nonverbal children with autism, 14 April 2015
- Words say little about cognitive abilities in autism, 5 September 2016
- Revealing autism’s hidden strengths, 19 December 2018

IMO, much more research needs to be done on how to help nonverbal autistic kids learn to read and write/type. Once a lot more severely disabled autistic kids have learned to read and write/type, it will then be much easier for them to participate in research studies, so that autism research generally can focus more on the needs of the more severely disabled autistic people -- who currently are under-represented in autism research.

Neurodiversity is BS!

I am disabled and even though I’m considered high functioning my Aspergers/HFA impacts me in many different ways. It impacts my ability to obtain and keep employment. It impacts my concentration. It impacts my executive functioning and my emotional regulation. It impacts my motor coordination as well making exercise difficult and almost dangerous for me.

Neurodiversity says that there are differing brain variations and they should all be accepted as in having all kinds of differing rights and entitlements. As you all see from posts in the past I can’t stand conservativism and the whole personal responsibility and positive attitude BS. I rail on and on against the problems and issues of personal responsibility and positivity. Neurodiversity is just another social justice warrior movement and quite honestly I like the SJWs and their BS even less then conservativism.

I digress! It’s time to knock down this neurodiversity movement and explain why I think it is BS. I agree with the first domino which says that there are differing brain variations. The second domino which says that, “they should all be accepted as in having all kinds rights and entitlements” or others should accept them for who they are. Should we be accepted for who we are with all kinds of rights and entitlements. There are major issues I have with this concept.

A. What most neurodiversity supporters don’t/can’t accept is that with rights come responsibilities. Ok, we’re accepted for who we are and we’re accepted as a natural variation just like being black or gay. With this acceptance, what will be our responsibilities? And, let’s say we’re given accommodations including exemption from eye contact, alternates to interviews, etc we will still be expected to work, find work and do the duties of our job. Will our executive functioning and social skills allow us to do this? What about other things like paying taxes, medical insurance, etc? We would still have to do these things. Can I do these things as a disabled person? Can I do the things Normal people can if these things are required of me since now that I have rights I have these tacked on responsibilities as well?

B. Those in Neurodiversity gloss over those who would be considered low functioning? My adopted nephew has both autism and cerebral palsy. He is nonverbal and the most he does is rocks in his wheel chair all day and makes noises. How does acceptance come into play for him? He is treated as a person non grata when it comes to the neurodiversity agenda. He is completely ignored since he does not fit their agenda.

C. Cure VS acceptance and/or the Medical Model of Disability vs the Social Model of Disability

The medical model of disability says that our and any disability is a medical condition and treated as such. The social model of disability says it is societal standards that are the issue and that it is society that creates barriers that impede us especially when it comes to employment.

The problem with this is that it presumes I must fully take one side or the other when sometimes there are grey areas. My adopted nephew truthfully needs treatment for what he has or a cure. He can’t even wipe his own ass. For me though, acceptance would work in certain cases but what about the things acceptance wouldn’t work on. I have executive functioning issues which means I have difficulty with planning, finding where to go, planning my day, knowing how to prioritize my thoughts and tasks, etc. This means I would have tons of issues not just with employment but with paying bills, taxes, medical, knowing when to go to the store or not, self-control, emotional regulation etc. How would societal acceptance or treating my autism as a civil rights issue help me with this stuff? I don’t need acceptance for these things. I need real, effective medical treatment. Let me put it to you this way, it took me twice as long to go to college then the average person due to my executive functioning and concentration problems.

D. Neurodiversity does not allow room for growth and improvement if growth and improvement would do the individual good. Neurodiversity comes from the idea of be yourself, be true to who you are and if you do this things will work out. I don’t accept this to be true. What the be yourselfers, the gotta keep it realers, etc don’t accept is that sometimes who you currently are sucks major a**hole. I’m executive disfunctioned. I have concentration problems.

My tongue gets tied all the time meaning a lot of times my mind gets locked and I literally can’t respond. I have extreme difficulty conversations in a noisy room. I would love to get rid of all this and if curing my autism meant I could be more functional I would get it cured. Let’s not forget the theory of mind issues that come along with it meaning I can’t read the thoughts, intentions, and body language of others. This can make me come across as inconsiderate without my meaning to. How does neurodiversity and being myself work with this? Wouldn’t it be better to somehow come up with more effective treatments and a cure for these things? How has being true to myself helped me out and helped others out in the end?

E. There is another reason as well I think Neurodiversity is pure unadulterated BS! There are a number of those who want a cure for Aspergers/Autism such as myself. What the people in Neurodiversity is doing whether purposely or not is taking away my choice for this cure. When NDers use all kinds of tactics to change public policy to favor their agenda instead of the cure agenda are they not taking away our choice? Where is our side’s diversity at? Shouldn’t true diversity involve choice?

F. We in Neurodiversity want to be able to be ourselves and be accepted for who we are but what if this involves costs as in other people’s tax dollars? There is another cost though. And, that’s the social costs. As in, those around us having to be our caretakers and dealing with our issues including our meltdowns, etc. And, what happens if I have to take someone who I love to the hospital? Could I do that? Could I communicate effectively with the doctors and nurses at all concerning their health? What if being myself and true to myself is not only harmful to myself but indirectly harmful others around me? This is another strong reason I wish to be cured of this horrible disability. It not only impacts me but others around me. If has affected my marriage to my SO big time.

G. There is another reason why I think Neurodiversity is BS. Let at the bureau of labor statistics. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/disabl.pdf

What are the percentage of those with disabilities who are employed vs those with disabilities unemployed vs those who are not even in the labor force? Ask yourself the same question for those without a disability? Now, ask yourself the question how has Neurodiversity and organizations like ASAN increase those on the autism spectrum’s prospects for employment and what about non ASD disabled prospects? How has it increased the employment prospects for those who are non-ASD disabled? What is the percentage of increase or decrease of those who found employment and that employment enabled them to support themselves and be independent? What is the effectiveness of all of these ND organizations and Neurodiversity itself?

In an argument which has sides to it one has to weigh the pros, cons and evidence of the differing sides. One has to look at the philosophy of the differing sides and see where their philosophy takes them. I supported neurodiversity for a long time and looking at both sides of the entire debate, my experiences as well as the experiences of others sometimes one has to change his position. Sometimes one has to go to the other side because the other side makes more sense. I consider myself a rational and logical man. One of the most rational and logical things one can do is to know when one is wrong about something and change his mind. Letting go of his previously beliefs and embracing new ones.

I believe in neurodiversity-----because there are times when autistic people can do absolutely amazing things.

Alzheimer's has a lot of overrunning symptoms with executive dysfunctions and theory of mind is not so hot either, and their is no current cure, we in general give a lot of accommodations to that population. While autistic executive dysfunctions are not Alzheimers exactly why is accommodating us horrible but ok with Alzheimer's patients?

If ND is so clueless and uncaring about anybody except elitist "high functioning" "Aspies" why are advocating against sheltered workshops? That is trying to help people not in the shiny aspie capacity with work issues.

If ND is throwing the low functioning under the bus why do they hold days of mourning for victims of fillicide and advocate against thinking of fillicide against autistic persons as lesser evils than other fillicides? These victims are not usually shiny aspie types either.

About that positivity thing I agree that the everything will work out if you just think positive that is so pukingly prevalent in America is unrealistic and a set up for usual failure. But the opposite has its major problems. I am horrible or have this horrible disability attitude discourages you and defeats you before you start and it makes a difficult situation impossible.

No you don't. ND advocates are starting to come around to these gray areas and in some ways as been pointed out over and over again in these pages have always been around. That said IMHO the ND movement has been guilty of not fully following up on "nothing with us without us" slogan. Pro cure autistics are "us".

Taking the above further everybody needs to compromise. Up until recently everything has been a one way street we are the wrong, we have to change utterly and completely. That is why the ND movement started and the remaining continuation of that thinking why it is still needed. Sure they have oft failed due to being an outlier opinion, being vastly outspent and f*****g up by over correcting and just f*****g up. We/our autism are the problem period did not work in the past and I see no reason that going back there will work again.

Believing in ND is one thing.....creating a ND community is quite the other....

I don’t believe in segregation. Away from the big, bad NTs.

I believe in creating a community of support for each other.

We all have to live on this rotating rock together...come what may...

What precisely do you mean by "SJW"? Are you against minority rights movements in general, or just the more obnoxious manifestations thereof?

If you mean only the latter, it's not accurate to characterize the entire ND rights movement as "SJW" in that sense, although I agree that some ND rights proponents have been very obnoxious in an "SJW" sort of way (particularly on Twitter, apparently, from what I've heard; I'm not a Twitter user myself).


Up to a point I agree that "with rights come responsibilities." But there are also some rights that should be considered "inalienable," as the Declaration of Independence puts it. Do you reject, for example, the idea that elderly people who are no longer able to work should still have all the basic rights of citizens?

In an attempt to accommodate your concentration difficulties, I will break up my reply into a series of posts, treating one of your major points in each post . Continued below.

Depends on the nature of the job. See Autistic-friendly workplaces. Regarding the social aspect, see Autistic-friendly social skills vs. blending in with NT's.


If possible, one needs to develop, perhaps with the help of a good autism-aware therapist, workable systems for handling these things. Plenty of worthwhile advice can be found in Valerie Gaus's book Living Well on the Spectrum: How to Use Your Strengths to Meet the Challenges of Asperger Syndrome/High Functioning Autism. Also, the two autism conferences I've attended so far have featured panels of work-capable autistic adults talking about how they handle executive functioning difficulties.

As for myself, I used to have an awful time with keeping track of bills until the advent of online banking and auto-pays. Currently, most of my bills get auto-payed out of one credit card credit account (while my electric and gas get auto-payed directly of my bank account because there's apparently a law against them using credit card auto-pays); so, for me, the problem of keeping track of a gazillion odds and ends of bills has been simplified to just logging in to my bank account regularly and keeping an eye on my bank account and credit card account.

My boyfriend and I have developed some systems for making sure we don't run out of stuff. For example, the newest not-yet-opened containers of his most frequently used medications are kept in my dresser drawer, for the specific purpose of making it slightly less convenient for him to get them, so we both can more easily notice when he is down to his last container and we need to get more.

One of the defining behavioral traits of autism, an attachment to rigid routines, is actually a way of coping with executive functioning difficulties. An important part of what many of us need to do is to figure out and then commit ourselves to routines that will work for us.

No one system will work well for all "high-functioning" autistic people. We each need to try to find systems that will work well for us as individuals.

Of course, some of us do have executive function difficulties too severe to be dealt with by such workarounds. For these people, yes, it would be highly desirable to have a medical treatment for executive functioning difficulties, specifically. More about this later in this series of posts.

Question: What kinds of efforts have been made to help him learn to communicate? Has any effort at all been made to teach him to read and write, type, use sign language, point at letters and/or picture cards, or whatever his CP will allow him to do?

On autistic rights websites, I've seen a lot of advocacy of the idea that the abilities of many non-speaking autistic people may have been greatly underestimated, with the result that not enough effort has been made to teach them things (such as reading, writing, and basic math) that they might indeed be capable of learning, despite their inability to speak. This idea seems to have gradually gained some acceptance in the autism research establishment; see the Spectrum News articles I called attention to in this post, and see also this article on the website of the Interactive Autism Network.

Such underestimation of cognitive abilities is especially likely for those non-speaking autistic people who, like your nephew, also have severe motor issues such as CP, whose inability to speak may be caused (at least in part) by those very same motor issues.

Alas, this issue isn't nearly as high a research priority as it should be, in my opinion.

See the article I Have Nonverbal Autism. Here’s What I Want You to Know, written by Philip Reyes with the help of his mother Lisa Reyes, and see the author's personal blog. See also the blog Ido in Autismland, by another non-speaking autistic young man.

Of course, even if your nephew ever does manage to learn to read and write/type/whatever, he almost certainly will never be able to work. He still should have the right to as much basic education as he is capable of absorbing and to learn as much as he can, rather than being presumed to be unintelligent because he's trapped in a body he can't control.


No he is not. See above. It can be argued that the ND rights movement doesn't do enough to advocate for the rights of "low-functioning" people, but to claim that "low-functioning" people are "completely ignored" shows utter ignorance about the ND rights movement.

ASAN has two non-speaking (but educated) autistic people, Amy Sequenzia and Ben McGann, on its Board of Trustees. See also the description of Cal Montgomery on that page.

One of ASAN's requirements of its affiliate groups is that they must be "Inclusive of the entire autistic and disabled community. To give a few examples, your group should be welcoming and accessible to people with intellectual disabilities, nonspeaking people, people with mobility impairments, etc."

Most ND rights proponents emphasize the social model but are not absolutists about it. We're not against any and all treatments. We're against specific kinds of treatments that we see as harmful, and we're against pouring billions of dollars into the goal of radically re-wiring our brains.


Certainly he does need treatment, especially for his CP.


It would certainly be desirable to have medical treatments for executive functioning problems, for those whose executive functioning issues are too severe to be dealt with via the kinds of workarounds I wrote about in one of the previous posts in this series.

What I'm very wary of, on the other hand, is the idea of medically re-wiring one's entire brain, as would be necessary in order to "cure autism."

As for emotional regulation, there are already medications that can help with that. What's needed is for more psychiatrists to be educated about the various ways that autistic people may react to medications differently from the ways that other people do.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 27 Dec 2019, 11:57 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Self-improvement is indeed necessary for everyone. The ND paradigm does not deny this. However, self-improvement is much more likely to be effective if you can identify whatever personal strengths you might have and use them to deal with your challenges. There's a difference between self-improvement and a total rejection of oneself, or trying to force oneself into an utterly unnatural mold.


It would indeed be desirable, and might indeed be feasible, for there to be medications for the kinds of concentration problems associated with some kinds of autism, just as there are medications for ADHD. However ....


Treatments for specific issues are one thing.

However, a total "cure" for autism would entail a radical re-wiring of your entire brain. How could that possibly not be a devil's bargain at best? How could it possibly not entail a great risk of losing whatever abilities you already have? How could it possibly not violate the most basic principle of medicine, "First do no harm"? The human brain is extremely complex, and it's not a mass-produced machine with interchangeable parts.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 27 Dec 2019, 8:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The following is part of a series of posts begun here, on the previous page.

And by asking for billions of dollars to be poured down the rabbit hole of pursuing a total "cure" for autism, you are effectively trying take those billions of dollars away from, for example:

- research into cure/prevention of Alzheimer's and other dementias, which are degenerative conditions that affect many more people than autism does.

- research into a possible cure, or at least better treatments for, cerebral palsy. It must be absolutely horrible to be trapped, from birth, in a body that one cannot control, as your nephew apparently is -- far worse than autism per se, in my opinion, and possibly one of the reasons (possibly perhaps even the main reason?) why he can't talk. Do you not agree?

- research into better ways to help "low-functioning" autistic people learn to communicate. (See my earlier post here.)

- research into various possible simpler, less risky autism-related medical treatments (e.g. for autism-related attention issues) that could make your life a lot better without an attempt to totally re-wire your brain.


The medical research budget, and the larger scientific research budget of which it is a part, are necessarily finite. So there will inevitably be debates over what's the best use of all that money. However it gets budgeted, it's never going to please everyone. So, all we can do is make the best arguments we can for whatever we think the priorities should or shouldn't be.

In the interests of so doing, I will repeat one of the central arguments I made on the previous page:

Possible future treatments for specific autism-related issues (e.g. concentration, executive functioning, emotional regulation) are one thing. It is at least reasonable to imagine that at least some such treatments could be relatively harmless.

But a total "cure" for autism would entail a radical re-wiring of your entire brain. How could that possibly not be a devil's bargain at best? How could it possibly not entail a great risk of losing whatever abilities you already have? How could it possibly not violate the most basic principle of medicine, "First do no harm"? The human brain is extremely complex, and it's not a mass-produced machine with interchangeable parts.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 27 Dec 2019, 10:41 pm, edited 9 times in total.