I only learnt of Steve Silberman after the reporting of his recent death. All I can find suggests he was an awesome person, and way ahead of the pack on matters of neurodiversity. 

This piece for example is packed with relevant insights for right now, even though it’s nearly 10 years old: ”We’re still dealing with autism like it’s this wacky historical aberration”: Steve Silberman on the truth about autism.

While it’s predominantly about autism, it contains a lot of broad feelings and assumptions about neurodiversity that I’ve been making myself, but that I’ve held off writing down. Things I’ve been looking for more evidence and authority on. Authority, such as Steve! 

On the terms ‘disability’ and ‘disorder’…  

Disability is something our society understands and knows how to accommodate. We often don’t do it well. We need much more input from disabled people to figure out how to get it right…

Autism is a cognitive disability that deserves appropriate accommodations and support across the whole lifespan. Is it a disorder? The NIH and the Autism Speaks website describe it as a disorder. To me, disorder is like a theological label. It’s like saying that it’s against nature. There’s a proper order, and autism is not it, so let’s call it a disorder… 

What’s disordered is our response to autism, which is to stigmatise it, and to call it a plague, and to describe autistic kids as kidnapped and not leading the life they were meant to lead. Really? Who’s to say? Perhaps we should help the autistic people who are here lead the best possible lives they can.

In response to the question “Is neurodiversity a next generation civil rights struggle?” Which I personally reckon was a bit loaded, but OK… 

Sometimes the word “neurodiversity” is framed as if it’s merely a political stance or a political conviction. It’s not. It’s a living fact, like biodiversity in rain forests. We clearly have people with many different kinds of minds. There are people with dyslexia, there are people with ADHD, there are people with autism, there are people at all points of the spectrum. And all of these labels are the names of “disorders,” but if you look at them another way, they’re just different kinds of human operating systems.

We have to get beyond the fact that these conditions were discovered by people looking for forms of illness, basically, and recognise that they’re just there. They’re part of the human fabric. They always have been. People with these conditions have been making contributions to the evolution of science, art and technology for centuries—invisibly, mostly. You know, most of the labels were invented in the 20th century. We have to start looking at those labels, instead of the checklist of modern disorders, as human resources that we have not learned to tap fully because we’ve been so busy treating those people like carriers of disorder.

On representation (remember, this piece is from 2015)…

One thing that’s very interesting to me is that many, many young autistic people that I meet describe themselves as non-binary, genderwise. So, they either don’t identify as a man or a woman, or they use non-standard pronouns, sometimes of their own invention, to describe themselves, or they describe themselves as bisexual or asexual. I think that’s very, very interesting, and science has virtually nothing about that.

[He goes on to talk about the brilliantly strong willed and self aware author of Don’t mourn for us]

In response to the prompt “You’re telling a story of society trying to fit people in boxes, with some pretty tragic effects.” 

I think one of the most underestimated statements of the 20th century was Lorna Wing’s statement that “the spectrum shades imperceptibly into eccentric normality.” That is a profoundly subversive statement. Because what it suggests is that there is really no such thing as normality. There’s no “healthy ideal state of cognition.” What there is is a patchwork of different kinds of minds in society, trying to work together, and it has always been like that. 

You know, in the 1950s, white, upper-middle-class males could fantasise that they were the defining example of normality. Women were not normal; they were hysterical. Gay people were not normal; they were sick, they were mentally ill. So what we find is this kind of central monolithic totem of society, which is one form of cognition to rule over them all. That is not the way it is, and it’s not the way it’s going to be, and we have to start thinking about our society in different ways so that we can accommodate the fact that life is various in its manifestations, and that cognition comes in many different flavours.

What an utterly wonderful human.  

I’m desperate to really his book Neurotribes now. And anything else I can find that he’s writing, or written about him.