The mother of neurodiversity: how Judy Singer changed the world

[Jilly_in_VA]

Judy Singer is several thousand miles from her Australian home, on a two-week trip around the UK, which includes an onstage interview at Cambridge University and her receipt of an honorary fellowship from Birkbeck, University of London. Soon after we meet, she will do a round of sightseeing, then travel to meet relatives in Hungary. Her itinerary sounds very taxing, but her tiredness is combined with the pleasure of being belatedly honoured for her trailblazing work.

We meet in a central London cafe where, for nearly three hours, she guides me through a life story that takes in the aftermath of the Holocaust, life in communist eastern Europe, her family’s migration to Australia, and a life that has mixed academia and activism with plenty of struggle and hardship. But what we talk about the most is neurodiversity, the concept she quietly introduced to the world in 1997.

Nearly 30 years after she coined the term in an undergraduate thesis, it is now almost universally used and understood: an idea that beautifully captures the plain fact that autism and a range of other conditions – ADHD, dyspraxia, dyslexia and more – are part of the endlessly different ways that human minds are wired. In doing so, it also achieves something even more powerful: implicitly demanding liberation and acceptance for people who are, to use an associated word, neurodivergent.

“I knew what I was doing,” she tells me. “‘Neuro’ was a reference to the rise of neuroscience. ‘Diversity’ is a political term; it originated with the black American civil rights movement. ‘Biodiversity’ is really a political term, too. As a word, ‘neurodiversity’ describes the whole of humanity. But the neurodiversity movement is a political movement for people who want their human rights.”

Back in the 1990s, Singer could sense that movement stirring in some of the groups that had sprung up in the early days of the internet. What people were talking about chimed with her own history and experiences – her apparently neurodivergent mother, Singer’s autistic daughter, and a range of traits she recognised in herself. To some extent, what people were discussing online was centred on their own psychologies, but it was also about wider society: the ways that its organisations, institutions and attitudes made many people’s lives all but impossible, and how those things could be changed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/05/the-mother-of-neurodiversity-how-judy-singer-changed-the-world

Long, but definitely worth the read, and not only for those of us with neurodivergent family members.

[niyad]

1. KNR and bookmarking. For later. I first saw the term "neuorodivergent" in,

of all surprising places, a romance novel set in the 1800's, that I read earlier this year (actully in the acknowledgements, as the author decribed creating the male leading character). It was one of those, "well, of course" moments. I thought everybody knew that everybody's brains worked and processed differently. I just did not know that there is a specific concept for it.

I mean, there are, in the scientific community, at least ten recognized genders. Of course there are many ways people's brains work. I remember reading many years ago that some believed that ADD/ADHD were adaptive, indeed advanced, survival mechanisms. The human brain is still very much uncharted territtory.