A Materialist History of Pathology and Neurodiversity: A Conversation with Robert Chapman

Robert Chapman, PhD (they/them) is a philosopher and social theorist specializing in disability and mental health. They are currently an Assistant Professor in Critical Neurodiversity Studies at the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University in the United Kingdom. Their first book, Empire of Normality, was published by Pluto Press in November 2023.

---

I have followed Chapman's work for many years now with great admiration, and I interviewed them for my Conversations in Critical Psychiatry series in 2021 as well. I had eagerly awaited the publication of their book, having read very early drafts of two chapters, and I was not disappointed! Empire of Normality marks a ground-breaking moment in philosophical and political discussions around psychiatry and mental health. Chapman shows how the entwinement of Francis Galton’s work in statistics, underpinning our modern conceptions of normality and deviation, and the rise of capitalism led to ever-stifling norms of mental and physical functioning. This has resulted in an increase in various forms of disability, including neurocognitive disability in the form of autism and ADHD, as well as worsening mental health in the form of increasing rates of depression and anxiety. According to Chapman’s analysis, the increase in illness and disability is not illusory — it is not merely a pathological reframing of ordinary distress, as many critics seem to contend; it is a legitimate phenomenon that is shaped by socioeconomic and structural forces. Chapman develops a detailed account of “Neurodivergent Marxism” by providing an original analysis of the history and politics of neurodiversity through the lens of Marxist theory.

Chapman investigates how the emergence and rise of the pathology paradigm is enmeshed with the fundamental logic of capitalism, and how our medical and scientific notions of illness, disability, and normality have evolved in response to economic and ideological developments. The outcome is a rich materialist history of pathology and neurodiversity, with important implications for our understanding of the contemporary “mental health crisis” and our response to it. A particular strength of Chapman’s account is that it offers a devastating critique of many strands of the anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry traditions as reactionary, outdated, and inadvertently reinforcing the logic of the pathology paradigm. (Empire of Normality pairs well with another recent book Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, which I’ve discussed in this newsletter previously.)

Empire of Normality is a tour de force, a bold work that I hope will leave an indelible mark on future scholarship and activism.

Pluto Press, 2023

---

Aftab: One of the central ideas of Empire of Normality is that the logic of the pathology paradigm is enmeshed with the logic of capitalism itself; this is complemented by the idea that the experiences of illness and disability are shaped by the needs and demands of the socioeconomic landscape. You consider Francis Galton to be a central figure when it comes to the development of the pathology paradigm and you also treat him, rather than Kraepelin, as the founder of the currently dominant paradigm in psy-sciences. If I am understanding you correctly, what makes the pathology paradigm problematic is the assumption that individuals who share certain profiles of illness and disability (and are diagnosed as having the same condition) share as-yet-unknown cognitive or neurological dysfunctions, i.e. faulty mechanisms in the mind/brain or individual deficits in need of correction. In contrast, you are of the view that experiences of disability are relationally constituted through an interaction of the individual and the environment. I am broadly in agreement with that. I want to home in on this a bit more for the benefit of the scientifically inclined readers. Take autism and ADHD. We can give up the assumptions of essentialism and natural dysfunctions. That is, we can accept that neither category has an intrinsic essence and there is nothing naturally deficient about the cognitive and neurophysiological mechanisms that constitute the conditions. Nonetheless, “autism” and “ADHD” as syndromic categories are capturing overlapping but different bundles or collections of neurocognitive mechanisms. Such that we can meaningfully talk about individuals with autism and ADHD showing different profiles, on average, on neuropsychological testing, neuroimaging, genetics, etc. I imagine that you don’t reject the existence of such mechanisms and such group differences, and I imagine you also accept that such mechanisms and differences can be productively studied by neuroscientific research. But what you caution is that we shouldn’t fall into the trap of reifying the categories and treating the disability as due to intrinsically defective mechanisms. Rather, science would better serve the disabled if we see disability as arising from an interaction of individuals and their environments. And that if we did so, science would be more resistant to becoming a tool of the neoliberal ideology.

Chapman: First off, this is important as many of us think that the current paradigm in psychiatry and related fields is harmful and needs to be overcome. Yet how we understand the nature and genesis of the dominant paradigm will be part of what determines how we think it should be changed. And there are different ways to understand this. Since the 1980s Kraepelin has been seen as the ‘father’ of modern psychiatry. This is because a century earlier he pioneered a new approach to clinical practice in psychiatry, which attempted to delineate clear diagnostic classifications that would help map behavior to psychological dispositions to biology, among much else. But if we understand psychiatry and psychology – not to mention psychometrics and so on – more from the perspective of their research paradigms rather than clinical paradigms, then, as I show in the book, what Kraepelin did was essentially expand Galton’s paradigm, which had previously been restricted to cognitive ability. For me, this leads to different implications about where the dominant paradigm went wrong and what it would require to genuinely overcome it.

Briefly, Galton was the cousin of Charles Darwin, and in the mid-19^th Century he combined the theory of evolution with new statistical methods to imagine a new metaphysics of the human, with a correlating science, that would naturalize the social relations of capitalism and colonialism. I say this because as capitalism emerged, traditional communities and social relations were increasingly broken apart as people became seen as individuals who could be either more or less productive when compared to each other. From the perspective of capital, humans are isolated individuals who have sets of abilities and disabilities, relative to the norm, for each bodily mechanism, organ, system, and so on. What Galton did was generate the theoretical and methodological basis for naturalizing and reifying this. He used this to rank individual cognitive ability and in turn to attempt ranking the races, with wealthy white people at the top of his rankings and Black people at the bottom. My argument is that just as Galton’s paradigm was being widely adopted in psychology and psychometrics, Kraepelin also took that theoretical basis and suggested it should be expanded to what he called ‘mass psychiatry’, which would go far beyond just intelligence. Kraepelin wrote about how this could be used to determine fitness for anything from military service to what he thought of as mental degeneracy. Basically, through Galton, Kraepelin helped imagine the world we live in today. It was in the service of this that he began expanding psychiatric classifications to try to understand a greater variety of forms of, in his view, subnormal mental functioning. So Kraepelin was influential but to truly understand the paradigm we need to go back to Galton, and in turn the political and economic context of the time. We also need to see how the paradigm is much broader than existing merely in psychiatry, and is part of a nexus of interlocking disciplines, institutions, and systems.

The ensuing focus in psychiatric research through the 1980s to 2000s, on essences and attempts to link them to diagnostic classifications, was only one manifestation of this way of thinking, and one of the crudest ones at that. The paradigm is still the same, and encounters the same problems, if we switch to cluster conceptions of diagnoses that see them as pragmatic constructs rather than natural kinds. It also remains if we disregard diagnosis and switch to, say, psychological formulations, as I’ve written about previously. They also remain for psychotherapy that focuses on building resilience and so on. All of this may help some people but also enforces and naturalizes population level normalization. So I’m neither for or against diagnosis as such. The issue is more about how we rank people into hierarchies and determine who needs to be treated or cured. Looked at this way, switching to a view where we see all disablement as relationally constituted helps us to begin to see a way out of this. That is, it helps us focus more on the political, while also recognizing the reality of disability and the immediate needs of disabled people. Yet as I warn in the book, a change in framing alone will be far from sufficient. We also need to change the deeper structures of society that the paradigm grew out of and came to naturalize in the first place. And that will require mass political organizing.

Chapman: Switching to a view where we see all disablement as relationally constituted helps us to begin to see a way out of this. That is, it helps us focus more on the political, while also recognizing the reality of disability and the immediate needs of disabled people. Yet as I warn in the book, a change in framing alone will be far from sufficient.

Aftab: You talk about the tendency towards a neuronormative double-bind that increasingly traps each of us. Some people have the sort of psychological and physiological profile that contemporary capitalism values – that is, the sort of cognitive-psychological profile that is more amenable to contemporary workplace, and demonstrates the sort of mental flexibility and performance under stress that is desired by employers. Others have a sort of mental and bodily profile that falls outside the usual range of acceptability and desirability. The former with desirable neurocognitive characteristics are “ruthlessly exploited”; they are subject to stress, exhaustion, and vulnerable to anxiety and depression. The neurodivergent are excluded from the workforce and the social sphere (“disenabled, devalued, and discriminated against”); they experience disability and become subject to a different sort of exploitation, extractive abandonment. However, people move in and out of these categories, and boundaries are dynamic. Those in the former group can become sick or injured and move out of the labor pool, while some in the latter category can function better with medical or psychological interventions and become “productive” members of the society. However disabled individuals whose functioning is improved with interventions or work accommodations, and I am thinking of many individuals with ADHD and autism, experience a sort of double whammy. They still have the residual effects of their disabilities to contend with, but they are now also subject to being exploited as workers. What I liked about your book was that it opened my eyes to this dynamic in a manner that I wasn’t quite cognizant of.

Aftab: You talk about the tendency towards a neuronormative double-bind that increasingly traps each of us… Those with desirable neurocognitive characteristics are “ruthlessly exploited”; they are subject to stress, exhaustion, and vulnerable to anxiety and depression. The neurodivergent are excluded from the workforce and the social sphere; they experience disability and become subject to a different sort of exploitation.

Chapman: Part of what I was doing here was trying to move away from views I think are at least relatively prevalent in the dominant liberal reformist, identity politics based, approach to neurodiversity advocacy. One view I wanted to move away from holds that neurotypicals oppress neurodivergents. If we think that is the core problem, then what we need to do is to ensure rights and reduce stigma for neurodivergent people, and to help neurotypicals unlearn their ableism, change their attitudes, and so on. On my view, by contrast, the problem is about the system rather than any one group. The point is that capital has increasingly expanded its domain to the point of ordering us all in cognitive hierarchies in ways that hurt everyone, including those who sit closest to the norm, by alienating us from each other, and by imposing compulsory neuronormative standards that nobody can fully adhere to consistently. In suggesting this, I also wanted to push back against the view that neurotypicality and neurodivergence are fixed states. They rely both on the condition of one’s body and mind at any given time, and also on the needs of the economy, the current state of technology, and so on. And all of these are things that can change.

This is not to say that we’re all harmed in the same way or to the same extent. For instance, as you point out, I try to show how many neurodivergent people who are too disabled to easily fit in with the norms of system yet not quite disabled enough to be totally locked out of work seem to constantly be hit from both sides of this double-bind. It is also true that neurotypicals do sit in a relatively privileged position, and in many ways benefit from the oppression of neurodivergents. Still, if we adopt the perspective I propose, I hope we can see that we are all increasingly harmed by a new, neuronormative form of capitalist domination that grows as capitalism intensifies. If we take that seriously then there is more room for solidarity across people positioned at different points on the current cognitive hierarchies of capitalism. If that’s the case, while we do need to recognize the very real differences between those positioned as typical and those positioned as divergent, then what we need to do is organize together to fight against the system itself.

Chapman: I hope we can see that we are all increasingly harmed by a new, neuronormative form of capitalist domination that grows as capitalism intensifies. If we take that seriously then there is more room for solidarity across people positioned at different points on the current cognitive hierarchies of capitalism.

Aftab: This probably isn’t a very productive question to ask, but I’m gonna ask anyway because I’m curious about what you’ll say. What do you think differentiates illness from disability? I’m sure you see them as overlapping concepts, lacking intrinsic essence and without natural boundaries (I do too). You say that we should view illnesses and disabilities as real, but relationally constituted. I agree with that too. But they are also different concepts, invoking a different kind of logic and different connotations.

Chapman: Yes, I don’t think there can ever be a final, objective, or universal definition of any of these, and I’m very skeptical of anyone who claims they have such a definition. People who claim to have some kind of objective analysis of things like health, functioning, and so on are, in my view, mainly expressing hubris and ideology. But I do think these concepts serve different political uses in different times and places. The downside is that both are stigmatized and diagnosis can be used to undermine rights in all sorts of ways, as is well known. Yet they are also important for recognition of rights. At least right now, disability increasingly comes with hard won rights to access or for adjustments to be made for accommodations, so I think it’s useful to use that when those things would be useful. At the same time, illness tends to come with recognition of a need for treatment or clinical support, so if you want treatment or clinical support then it is often unwise to reject the term in those cases.

Chapman: People who claim to have some kind of objective analysis of things like health, functioning, and so on are, in my view, mainly expressing hubris and ideology.

Many conditions are of course both illnesses and disabilities of course, since sometimes it’s helpful to have both clinical support and environmental adjustments. But sometimes illness and disability come apart. For instance, for me, I think of my being autistic as a form of disability but not an illness. That’s because it is actively harmful to attempt to cure or treat autism with things like biomedical or treatments of psychotherapy, so it’s harmful to frame it as an illness. Yet I am disabled in relation to the time and place I live in, which is Britain deep into the post-Fordist era, so I am happy to say that for me it’s a disability. By contrast, I’m perfectly happy to think of other things I’ve experienced — those I’d like the state or insurance to provide clinical support for — as forms of illness. For me, my depression or anxiety is largely socially caused, but that does not mean I don’t want things like psychotherapy or medication to at least be available in the short term. In a different world I might use another term, but my approach starts from this world — and the reality that most people can’t afford to forgo state support — and goes from there. I think when people reject both disability and illness framings simultaneously then recognition risks getting lost, and then the most disadvantaged people tend to lose out.

Aftab: You tie the rise in rates of diagnoses such as ADHD and autism to a narrowing of socioeconomic norms. You write “as capitalism has intensified, the kind of alienation we experience has shifted. More specifically, many workers today perform cognitive, attentive, and emotional labour more than the manual labour of Marx’s time, while our requirements as consumers and citizens, to have the correct desires, have also been restricted.” (p 14) Neurocognitive differences existed previously as well – they are not illusory – but the contemporary capitalism has amplified the experience of disability. “Traits that were previously relatively benign became associated with some level of disablement, while traits that might have only been minimally disabling became significantly so. This has increased as the intensification of capitalism has become so pervasive: it structures or at least taints almost every aspect of sensory experience and cognitive processing in day-to-day life, whether in work or in leisure time.” (p 117)

Can you say more about your notion of post-Fordism as a “mass disabling event.”

Chapman: In the book I link the oppression of disabled people to the rise of capitalism, to its fundamental logics and its focus on productivity and individual ability. But I also cover how different stages or moments – the industrial revolution, the Fordist era, and post-Fordism – each brought different paces, tempos, expectations, and norms in education, the workplace, and ultimately everywhere else too. I think each of these tended to both create new disabilities and impact people with existing disabilities in different ways. But post-Fordism was the worst when it came to those disabilities associated more with cognitive or affective functioning.

Let’s consider a concrete example. In a modern service industry economy, a coffee shop barista is a relatively typical job. Many young people can get a job at a coffee shop chain with relatively minimal experience. This is often seen as relatively low skilled work. But in fact, the kind of sensory, cognitive, and emotional profile one needs to be able to function in a job like this requires a quite restricted baseline across many different areas. First you need the kind of sensory processing profile to be able to hear customers and co-workers in a busy, bright, loud, and fast paced environment. Second you need strong capacities relating to things like working memory, to remember sometimes lengthy and complicated orders of different kinds of coffees and milks and so on. And then you need to be able to do emotional labor, to be able to smile, laugh, empathize and so on. And finally – since these roles tend to be relatively low paid – you need to be able to do all of this for many hours on end, day after day, just to be able to survive. To manage that you need a kind of neuro-cognitive profile that is very different from most roles people would have occupied historically, and you also – vitally – need to be a cognitive all-rounder.

Chapman: It’s not just that workers now tend to have to work longer than workers did prior to the industrial revolution, it also that the neurological requirements of work in the post-Fordist era are tighter than anything we’ve ever seen.

That’s just one example, but I think it reflects quite well the kind of age we are in and the requirements it imposes on workers. That’s what I mean when I say post-Fordism has been a mass disabling event. It’s not just that workers now tend to have to work longer than workers did prior to the industrial revolution, it also that the neurological requirements of work in the post-Fordist era are tighter than anything we’ve ever seen. I think this is important as understanding how and why neuronormativitiy restricted so much over this period, leading to many people becoming disabled or ill. And vitally, seeing this will also help us understand what overcoming neuronormative domination might require.

Aftab: I love that your book – similar to Adler-Bolton and Vierkant’s Health Communism – offers a Leftist critique of antipsychiatry. You highlight how “anti-psychiatry is part of the problem, not the solution. For despite looking different on the surface, in fact, it reinforces rather than challenges the logics of the pathology paradigm and the broader apparatus of normality.” (p 18) You also point out the “failings of contemporary bourgeois critical psychiatry,” and — you don't use this exact term, but I think captures the spirit — the distressification of disability. Can you elaborate on why the contemporary strands of critical psychiatry are erasing disability in the process of rejecting psychiatric concepts, and why their approach is a political dead-end?

Chapman: Let’s start with how I define anti-psychiatry. For me this refers to a movement, or perhaps less than a movement, primarily from the 1960s and 1970s. I say ‘less than’ as it was mainly focused around key leaders, most of them white, middle class, male psychiatrists, who wrote best-selling books. Beyond this, they had various, often quite different critical analyses of psychiatry, and they occupied many different places on the political spectrum. But they shared the view that psychiatry and especially the big state asylums of the time were oppressive. Between them they provided a body of theory that was then adopted widely by critics of psychiatry on both the left and right. This movement has partial overlap with, but is different to, other movements, such as the subsequent Psychiatric Survivors Movement, which was primarily built by and for psychiatric survivors. Although, arguably it has resurfaced in elements of the contemporary critical psychiatry movement, which again is primarily a small group of psychiatrists and psychologists rather than a mass organized movement.

While I am much more sympathetic to those on the far left of 1960s anti-psychiatry, such as the Basaglians in Italy, I am highly critical of the dominant Anglo-American version, which I associate most strongly with Thomas Szasz, since he was the most influential in the long term. Szasz was a hard right libertarian who was influenced by one of the fathers of neoliberal theory, Friedrich Hayek, back in the 1950s. His main critique of Hayek was that he didn’t go far enough, because Hayek still believed in mental illness, which Szasz believed was a concept primarily used by weak people to escape their individual responsibility by pretending to be ill. Based on this, Szasz developed a critique of the concept of mental illness and of psychiatric diagnoses, suggesting that as they were so unlike those used in bodily medicine, they were merely pseudoscientific. He thought that convincing the world that mental illness wasn’t real illness – and was really just problems in living or ordinary distress – then we would be freed to take responsibility, and states would no longer need to provide mental health services. This fit with his neoliberal conception of freedom, even though he began writing decades before neoliberalism was implemented in policy.

It’s obvious why people on the libertarian right would adopt Szasz’s analysis, which became extremely influential and ultimately helped ease in neoliberal cuts to services in the 1980s. And it’s worth noting that his analysis was directly opposed in far left of the anti-psychiatry movement. For instance the Basaglians defended the concept of mental illness while also politicizing it, and then developed a dialectical materialist analysis to build an anti-carceral healthcare system in the city of Trieste. This is now recognized as among the best healthcare systems in the world. The Socialist Patients Collective, a radical group in West Germany, developed a similar defense and politicization of mental illness, and sought to use this to organize against capitalism. Like those on the radical left of the anti-psychiatry movement, I disagree with the Szaszian analysis, and see all illness as political rather than accepting a misleading dichotomy between natural illness and political distress.

But I was especially interested in how this more Szaszian analysis nonetheless became by far the most widespread, including among people who consider themselves progressive or even among some on the radical left, starting with the psychiatrist David Cooper. I make the case that in part the Szaszian analysis was adopted because a critique of psychiatry was needed due to the very real abuses and forms of oppression psychiatry was and remains complicit in, and Szasz was an excellent and prolific writer who provided a seminal analysis that recognized the real harms of psychiatry too. And to be clear, in some ways this was helpful for activists, including for pushing back against over-medicalization and various psychiatric harms. At the same time, those on the left of the movement were simply not so well known. Most of Basaglia’s writings, for instance, were not even translated, and those writings that were translated were not easy to find. So over time the Szaszian version – or some combination of Szasz and Laing, who was on the center-left – became more dominant.

Despite correctly recognizing some of the genuine harms of mainstream psychiatry, Szasz’s analysis was not just an expression of his neoliberal political commitments but also, thereby, deeply disability denying. And ableism wasn’t something the left was ready to confront back then, so those on the left didn’t recognize this as a problem. However, Marxists such as Peter Sedwick did argue that this view retained and even reinforced a depoliticized, objectivist understanding of bodily normality along with a sharp body-mind dualism. Then as now, this dualism was more divisive for the disabled person’s movement than anything else, since needs to make out bodily disability to be simply natural and objective to make the case that psychiatry is comparatively pseudoscientific. Moreover, Szaszian rhetoric also helped not just ease in neoliberal cuts, but also a shift from incarcerating Mad people in asylums towards incarcerating us in prisons, which were often no better and sometimes worse. In line with Sedgwick’s analysis, I argue that the Szaszian project of rejecting mental illnesses concepts completely while maintaining a depoliticized conception of bodily normality was never going to be liberatory. Those of us on the left – or indeed anyone even vaguely progressive – should reject that tradition, including its contemporary offshoots where they remanifest in the ‘critical psychiatry’ approach, where Szaszian logics have not just reemerged, but have even been rebranded, ironically, as a critique of neoliberalism rather than its fullest expression. Ultimately, this reactionary politics will never lead to liberation, especially for those of us who are multiply marginalized. This is why I believe that a lot of contemporary critical psychiatry, at least the dominant Szaszian approach, is thus bourgeois ideology masquerading as something else.

Chapman: In line with Sedgwick’s analysis, I argue that the Szaszian project of rejecting mental illnesses concepts completely while maintaining a depoliticized conception of bodily normality was never going to be liberatory. Those of us on the left – or indeed anyone even vaguely progressive – should reject that tradition, including its contemporary offshoots where they remanifest in the ‘critical psychiatry’ approach.

Aftab: There is an alarming degree of moralism around psychopharmacology in critical psychiatric discourse online. There are people online who tell folks with ADHD (who have found tremendous benefit with the use of stimulant medications) that they are no different than a “street junkie” using meth or that they are simply using stimulant medications for personal enhancement. It seems to me that if someone doesn’t recognize the reality of disability and if they don’t see medication use as restoring functioning in the context of disability, they will be vulnerable to this kind of moralism. There is another kind of critic who says something like, “You shouldn’t be taking the medication; the society should better accommodate people like you.” And there’s some truth to it, which if fleshed out, resembles the account of capitalism and disability that you’ve offered. But the sort of critic I have in mind is cruder than that. They mean something like “If you were in medieval Europe, you’d be a farmer, and you wouldn’t be diagnosed as ADHD. But here you are, trying to get a PhD and taking psychiatric meds.” And sure, maybe, but the person doesn’t want to be a farmer! The person wants to be a successful academic, and saying “you shouldn’t change, the society should” can be – in the wrong hands – a way of saying, “you should settle for less, because if you settled for less, you wouldn’t feel so disabled.” What are your thoughts?

Chapman: Yes, this is part of the issue with the continuation of the tradition Szasz sat in, which sees not just acknowledgement of the reality of illness but also reliance on drugs as a form of weakness, an inability to be able to cope with and accept reality as it is currently constituted. Interestingly, I actually agree that there are many similarities between people who take clinically prescribed medications (across all medicine, not just psychiatry) and people who self-medicate with, or chose to use, so-called ‘street drugs’. But unlike the bourgeois moralists I think it’s okay for people to take street drugs and prescribed medications, albeit with caveats about side-effects. I think most ‘street’ drugs should be legalized and made more accessible and that the war on drugs is mainly a way to reinforce the criminalization of already marginalized people. Obviously, we also need awareness of risks so people can make informed choices, and moreover we need to tackle the social conditions that drive people towards reliance on drugs. But I have no time for people who moralize about people who use drugs, addiction, and so on, at the individual level, and who use terms like ‘street drugs’ in a disparaging way to critique psychiatric medications. That again is just more neoliberal ideology.

Frankly, I think even in a utopia that was much more equal, many of us would still either need or simply enjoy taking drugs, and that’s something that should be supported. As to how to improve things here, I think that moving towards worker owned pharmaceutical companies and user-led research would help. If our companies were worker owned, they could center the needs of people over profits. This would help change how meds are studied and produced, including their side-effects, how they are disseminated, and so on. But the moralists wouldn’t like this as this might mean even more, rather than less, drugs were available.

Aftab: Are there any other conclusions or themes from Empire of Normality that you’d like readers of Psychiatry at the Margins to be aware of?

Chapman: A key conclusion of the book that we need to recognize neurodivergence as a historically contingent class of people, which arises in relation to capitalism. This doesn’t mean there weren’t ill or impaired people prior to this or that some disabled people won’t always exist. But it does mean that our oppression stems primarily from the logics and workings of the current economic system. Vitally, if this is so, attempts to shift the paradigm in psychology or psychiatry — for instance away from meds and towards psychotherapy — won’t liberate us without deeper systemic changes. So I hope the book helps neurodivergent people understand this, and I also hope the analysis can be used to help us collectively think about how to organize in new ways. When it comes to the neurodiversity movement, I want to move away from neoliberal discourses about individual neurodivergent ‘superpowers’ and towards understand neurodivergent power as something that emerged from an organized collective. There are enough of us to change the world, but only if we manage to develop a deeper analysis of our situation and then use this to organize, in the Marxian sense, in pursuit of collective liberation.

Aftab: Thank you!

Chapman: Attempts to shift the paradigm in psychology or psychiatry — for instance away from meds and towards psychotherapy — won’t liberate us without deeper systemic changes.

This post is part of a series featuring in-depth interviews and discussions intended to foster a re-examination of philosophical and scientific debates in the psy-sciences. See prior discussions with Diane O’Leary, Richard Gipps, David Mordecai, Emily Deans, Nicole Rust, Rob Wipond, Martin Plöderl, Peter Kramer, and Kirk Schneider.