Introduction

This chapter traces the origins and evolution of the neurodiversity movement, which consists of people with conditions (such as autistic spectrum ‘disorders’, AD(H)D, dyspraxia, or dyslexia) which have been positioned somewhere between the traditional categories of ‘disability’ and ‘mental illness’. The neurodiversity movement has roots in, and, as will be argued, has new insights to offer to, both the disabled people’s and survivor movements. Therefore, it should be of interest to those seeking to bridge conceptual gaps between the disabled people's and survivor movements – such as the sticking point between them over the concept of ‘impairment’ (Plumb, 1994).

Writers and activists within the neurodiversity movement are acutely aware of, and concerned with, the social construction of both ‘distress’ and ‘disability’, and have developed their own distinct analysis of these concepts. This chapter gives an overview of some of that thinking. It draws on my own experience within the neurodiversity movement, as well as on published literature from all three movements, to illustrate the convergences and divergences between them, and finally offers some suggestions for ways forward.

Disabled people and mental health system survivors: two movements

The relationship between the disabled people's movement and the survivor movement is complex. In its early stages, the modern disabled people's movement was overwhelmingly focused on physical impairment. This is reflected in the names of seminal groups such as the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), in whose founding policy statement ‘people who are called…mentally ill’ were classed among ‘other oppressed groups’ with which it was felt that the physically impaired ought to ally, while retaining a separate identity (UPIAS, 1974). The movement's ‘big idea’ was the social model of disability (Hasler, 1993). As a broader understanding of this was developed, however, survivors increasingly became considered part of the movement and of the category ‘disabled people’. Included within this group were other ‘non-physically’ impaired groups such as d/Deaf people and people with learning difficulties, which groups have also notably remained somewhat separate in their self-organisation from the ‘broader’ disabled people's movement.

Reactions to this from the survivor movement have been mixed. Some survivor activists have welcomed the social model because of its attribution of disability to social exclusion and oppression, rather than to something inherent in individuals.