I got to talk to neurodivergent philosopher Robert Chapman about their new book Empire of Normality, which explains how norms of brain functioning got baked into our economic system. We talk about how a focus on individual rights and superpowers can only get neurodivergent people so far, why the line between neurodivergent and neurotypical is more squishy than you think, and how anti-psychiatry was actually good for capitalists, pretty bad for disabled people!
We also discuss a materialist view of the rising ADHD and autism diagnosis rates everyone seems to be panicking about, how we might view these categories as real without reducing them to brain scans and synapses, and why executive dysfunction might just be the disability of our age.
NOTES:
Get Empire of Normality from Pluto Press
Follow Robert on Twitter @DrRJChapman or read their blog CriticalNeurodiversity.com
For an explainer on the pathology paradigm, see Nick Walker’s work
Here’s the blog post on executive function as ideology that I bring up
More stuff I wrote about the ADHD workshop in DC
SPK stands for Socialist Patients’ Collective, they were a radical group of psychiatric patients in 1970’s West Germany who wrote a manifesto called Turn Illness Into a Weapon
The books Robert lists as influences at the end are: The Politics of Disablement, Health Communism, Caliban and the Witch, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, A Very Capitalist Condition
You can send me an email at welcome2slugtown@gmail.com and/or get my work in your inbox by signing up at sluggish.xyz
Neurodivergent Power, Not Superpowers w/ Robert Chapman