Robert Chapman

Durham University | DU · Institute for Medical Humanities

We, an international group of autistic scholars of autism and neurodiversity, discuss recent findings on the origins of the concept and theorising of neurodiversity. For some time, the coinage and theorising of the concept of ‘neurodiversity’ has been attributed to Judy Singer. Singer wrote an Honours thesis on the subject in 1998, focused on autis...

The neurodiversity movement is a social movement that emerged among autistic self‐advocates. It has since spread and has been joined by many with diagnoses of attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and developmental coordination disorder among others. By reconceptualizing neurodiversity as part of biodiversity, neurodiversity proponent...

The contemporary form of critical psychiatry and psychology focused on here follows Thomas Szasz in arguing that many of the concepts and practices of psychiatry are unscientific, value-laden, and epistemically violent. These claims are based on what I call the 'comparativist' critique, referred to as such since the argument relies on comparing psy...

This summarises my forthcoming journal article titled a “A Critique of Critical Psychiatry”. The full article is almost ten thousand words and gets a bit technical so this is a more accessible summary. I don’t fully justify the arguments in this summary, so please check the main article for all the nuances, arguments, examples, and full citations.

Abstract: The neurodiversity movement is a social movement that emerged among autistic self-advocates. It has since spread and has been joined by many with diagnoses of ADHD, bipolar, and dyspraxia among others. By reconceptualising neurodiversity as part of biodiversity, neurodiversity proponents emphasise the need to develop an 'ecological' socie...

Autism has typically been framed as inherently harmful and at odds with both subjective happiness and objective flourishing. In recent decades, however, the view of autism as inherently harmful has been challenged by neurodiversity proponents, who draw on social and relational models of disability to reframe the harm autistic people face as arising...

In psychiatry, mental dysfunction is typically framed in relation to models that seek to be continuous with physiology or evolutionary biology and that compare individual fitness to a broader functional norm. Proponents of the neurodiversity movement, however, challenge the pathologization of minority cognitive styles and argue that we should refra...

In psychiatry mental dysfunction is typically framed in relation to models that seek to be continuous with evolutionary biology, and which measure individual fitness in comparison to a broader functional norm. Against this, proponents of the neurodiversity movement challenge the pathologisation of minority cognitive styles, and argue that we should...

Typically, although it’s notoriously hard to define, autism has been represented as a biologically-based mental disorder that can be usefully investigated by biomedical science. In recent years, however, problematic findings regarding the biological underpinnings of autism; historical research examining the shifting nature of the categorization; an...

Cognitive disability has traditionally been framed on a medical model, which takes individual impairment to be the primary cause of distress and disablement among the cognitively disabled. This is often accompanied by the notion that cognitive disability is inherently at odds with living a good life. In recent decades neurodiversity paradigm propon...

Typically, although it is notoriously hard to define, autism has been represented as a biologically-based mental disorder that can be usefully investigated by biomedical science. In recent years, however, problematic findings regarding the biological underpinnings of autism; historical research examining the shifting nature of the categorisation; a...

Autism is often taken to be a specific kind of mind. The dominant neuro‐cognitivist approach explains this via static processing traits framed in terms of hyper‐systemising and hypo‐empathising. By contrast, Wittgenstein‐inspired commentators argue that the coherence of autism arises relationally, from intersubjective disruption that hinders access...

This book explores the central questions and themes lying at the heart of a vibrant area of philosophical inquiry. Aligning core issues in psychiatry with traditional philosophical areas, it presents a focused overview of the historical and contemporary problems dominating the philosophy of psychiatry. Beginning with an introduction to philosophy o...