The Neurodiversity Paradigm in Psychiatry

Abstract Robert Chapman, PhD, (they/them), is a philosopher in the UK, an Assistant Professor in Critical Neurodiversity Studies at the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University in the United Kingdom, and the author of Empire of Normality (Pluto Press, 2023). They have published widely on issues in philosophy of disability, the ethics of autism, and critical neurodiversity studies. The neurodiversity perspective and sister movements such as Mad Pride centre the voices of mad and neurodivergent individuals and facilitate a dialogue that enables collective self-reflection on the relational nature of dysfunction and disability. Chapman talks about the origins and history of the neurodiversity movement, its relationship to psychiatry, how the movement forces us to rethink long-standing medical assumptions and criticisms directed at the ideas, and why the neurodiversity perspective is in opposition to Szaszian critiques of psychiatry.