Lucy Kross Wallace is an accomplished writer and sophomore at Stanford University who has written about her disenchantment with the neurodiversity movement.
In conversation with Jill Escher, Lucy tells about how she was diagnosed with Level 1 autism at age 18, after years of severe mental illness and failed treatment (she prefers the term Asperger Syndrome). She found autism a useful framework to help her understand herself and enable her to exit the hospital and enroll in college, and the first year at Stanford she found camaraderie and meaning in the neurodiversity movement. The neurodiversity crowd featured much black-and-white thinking but it felt good to her to be crusading against the ableism of the world. She explains how neurodiversity is part of a larger critical social justice movement, but found it was not aimed at “justice” as she understood it. Lucy felt her life on Tumblr was a bit of a performance but she is no longer on social media, she considers it a mental health risk.
Lucy thinks the diagnostic scheme for autism does not reflect actual functional realities, and asks what is the unifying factor for autism? “We need multiple labels, it’s hard to talk about when ‘autism’ means so many things.” They discuss the postmodern roots of the idea that language constructs reality, a driving force behind neurodiversity tropes, and the bullying of parents by online activists.
Links:
NCSA: The cognitive distortions that feed neurodiversity radicalism
Quillette: My brief spell as an activist