There’s some useful information here, but….

Anything that describes neurodivergence as ‘linked to a chemical imbalance in the brain’ is a 🚩 for me. It tells me the analysis comes out of a mechanistic & medical framing of experience that sees difference as deficit & is often not grounded in evidence. It says ‘the doctor is the authority on your experience & if you don’t agree you are wrong’. Also flags that somewhere along the line, medication will be offered as the answer.

Many of us have learned to interpret our experience only through framings offered by medicine & psychology that see their own maps as truth & the concepts they use to navigate them as material, objective, verifiable things. Like every map these illuminate some aspects of our experience while obscuring others. Like all dodgy science they forget that their concepts are not things, but ‘tools to think with, until we find something better’.

Let’s start by meeting each other where we are in terms of making sense of our experiences, then expand our understanding by listening to how our peers describe what their neurodivergence is like, for them, from the inside. Listening helps us to be kinder to ourselves & each other.

Let’s be aware of the assumptions that reside in the framings we use to make sense of our stories, & learn to hold our concepts loosely so we can start to see the things our current maps don’t reveal.

We are each other’s greatest resource.

#ADHD #AuDHD #ActuallyAutistic #Neurodivergence #kindness #maps #ToolsToThinkWith

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-19/adhd-symptoms-signs-rsd-task-paralysis-hyper-focus-mental-health/104803078?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other

There is no omniscient disembodied knower. The position we look from, the tools we look with & the concepts we use to understand information all shape what we see. Thinking that ‘what I see’ is ‘the truth’ is the blinkered ignorance that comes with privilege.

Acknowledge your assumptions & be transparent about your methods & then I may trust you. Pretend you’re unbiased & objective? No way.

#SituatedActors #ToolsToThinkWith #AI

https://theconversation.com/how-do-you-stop-an-ai-model-turning-nazi-what-the-grok-drama-reveals-about-ai-training-261001

This one presses all my ‘I was an undx & unsupported #autistic child & an undx & unsupported parent of undx & unsupported #autistic kids’ buttons also. I hated school! It was totally overwhelming & full of impenetrable rules & I was bullied & friendless from start to finish. I tried so hard to avoid & refuse but was repeatedly forced to go. When my kids had the same experience I did the same to them.

We had no way to make sense of this experience then except as shame & failure. And the stigma for parents was awful. Now we can see this aversion & avoidance as overwhelm resulting from an inability to filter sensory & other input, & the inevitable bullying we endure as other kids’ response to our inability to figure out the social rules, we can understand our experience more kindly. And maybe even find ways to make school a safe space for everyone.

Let’s think about #neurodivergence in terms of differences in processing sensory & other information, & be kinder to our kids, & ourselves. #ToolsToThinkWith #kindness

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-29/school-refusal-cant-australia-education-four-corners/103669970?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other

This is such an important concept. DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reversal of Victim & Offender. Once we learn to recognise it, we see it used by abusive people everywhere. Invariably a 🚩🚩🚩🚩

When we recognise it, it doesn’t work on us. Pay attention & learn. #ToolsToThinkWith

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/01/trump-victim-political-strategy-manipulation?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

@joshsusser @Dr_Obvious @actuallyautistic

Oh that's lovely! I had not seen those before, thank you.

I came to this position via Buddhism (my finger is not the moon, the raft is not the shore, selling water by the river, etc), William Blake (holding a candle in sunshine), Taoism (the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao), Goedel's incompleteness theorem (however comprehensive any theory is there's always things it cannot describe) & Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith (the map is not the territory, concepts aren't things they're #ToolsToThinkWith until we find something better). It's a powerful epistemological position & frustratingly difficult to assert in some academic settings!!

Paired with an ontology that holds that all things are interconnected & there's way more going on than we can see or imagine, it gives lots of room for insight, creativity & kindness.

As TichNathHanh said, 90% of what we know is wrong 😎

@Dr_Obvious @joshsusser @actuallyautistic

Looking for synonyms for like/unlike that don't sound medicalised or wanky 🤔

Neurosimilar or neurovarious?
Divergent or mixed neurotype pairing?
Homogamous / exogamous (used in sociology to describe marrying within or outside of a cultural group)?
ND/ND or ND/NT (or autistic/allistic)?

Apart from finding the words, one trouble with this is that many of us living with non autistic partners start to see other ND characteristics in them as our understanding, & the concepts, evolve. Eg autistic me recognising ADHD in my partner of 41yr who I'd always thought of as NT (🤦🏼‍♀️ Ikr).

A more basic problem is conceptual. Just as our thinking about race is a wooly mess until we understand clearly & historically what we mean by 'white' (which as an unexamined concept has meant the standard against which difference is othered & considered lesser; in practice means an unexamined entitlement to define & appropriate whatever it sees, believing that whatever we see from that standpoint IS the truth), similarly our concepts around neurodiversity will be poorly grounded until we understand what we mean by neurotypical. We're all part of each other & where we look from & our #ToolsToThinkWith determine what we see. Have to hold our concepts loosely 😎

Fun to think about!

Hannah Arendt defined her famous concept ‘the banality of evil’ as the inability to understand the world from the perspective of another.

For Arendt, accepting the authority of an ‘omniscient disembodied knower’, in religion, politics or science, IS what enables cruelty. Empathy, feeling & seeing through the eyes of others, is everything. #ToolsToThinkWith

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/18/hannah-arendt-prize-masha-gessen-israel-gaza-essay?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other