Neurodiversity Studies

A New Critical Paradigm

Hanna Rosqvist, Nick Chown, Anna Stenning, Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Nick Chown, Anna Stenning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000073805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Neuroscience
• Index: Biological Sciences

Building on work in feminist studies, queer studies and critical race theory, this volume challenges the universality of propositions about human nature, by questioning the boundaries between predominant neurotypes and 'others', including dyslexics, autistics and ADHDers.

This is the first work of its kind to bring cutting-edge research across disciplines to the concept of neurodiversity. It offers in-depth explorations of the themes of cure/prevention/eugenics; neurodivergent wellbeing; cross-neurotype communication; neurodiversity at work; and challenging brain-bound cognition. It analyses the role of neuro-normativity in theorising agency, and a proposal for a new alliance between the Hearing Voices Movement and neurodiversity. In doing so, we contribute to a cultural imperative to redefine what it means to be human. To this end, we propose a new field of enquiry that finds ways to support the inclusion of neurodivergent perspectives in knowledge production, and which questions the theoretical and mythological assumptions that produce the idea of the neurotypical.

Working at the crossroads between sociology, critical psychology, medical humanities, critical disability studies, and critical autism studies, and sharing theoretical ground with critical race studies and critical queer studies, the proposed new field – neurodiversity studies – will be of interest to people working in all these areas.

Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I

Curing neurodivergence/eugenics

Chapter 1

The production of the ‘normal’ child

Neurodiversity and the commodification of parenting

Mitzi Waltz

The ‘normal’ child has only existed for about 100 years (Aries, 1962; Burman, 2007).

Two events converged to provide the tools for defining normalcy, and through that act, for defining its opposites: the advent of compulsory schooling, and the mass conscription of young males as cannon fodder for World War I. With some delays and regional variations, similar processes can be observed around the world as concepts of normalcy spread from the US and Europe, sometimes as part of colonial practices, sometimes as part of the spread of economic discourses (whether capitalist, fascist, socialist, or communist) predicated on appeals to modernity.

The first of these processes precipitated a clash between psychiatrists and psychologists in France over who could decide what happened to children who seemed to need help in primary school once every child was required to attend. Alfred Binet, a psychologist, pushed for including more children with different learning profiles in schools than in asylums. To locate and address their problems, Binet developed the first test of intelligence in 1905, the Binet–Simon test, later Americanised and further expanded as the Stanford–Binet test (Nicolas, Andrieu, Croizet, Sanitoso, & Burman, 2013). However, Binet’s actions served as much to create an expanded professional role for the burgeoning profession of (educational) psychology as to protect children from being educationally excluded and/or institutionalised.

The second process revealed a high percentage of recruits who deviated from military expectations, or who later required treatment for ‘shell shock’ (post-traumatic stress disorder). This necessitated tools to formalise expectations by defining the parameters of ‘normalcy’: intelligence tests for adults, personality inventories, and so on. As Capshew (1999, p. 143) notes, ‘personnel work, ranging from the initial selection of soldiers to the rehabilitation of combat casualties, was at the centre of psychologists’ wartime efforts.’ This focus was maintained after the war, both in the military’s concept of modern weapons as ‘man-machine systems’ (ibid., p. 144) and in the burgeoning field of industrial psychology (van de Water, 1997).

Veterans of military psychology became the leaders of post-war applied psychology in the US (Capshew, 1999), including both industrial psychology and efforts aimed at individuals, families, and communities. These experts built on their wartime and post-war experience by founding the university programmes that cemented psychology as a graduate profession and established the norms it used to justify labelling and treatment. They led the professional organisations and edited the journals; many of their names feature prominently in early efforts to create all kinds of diagnostic and treatment guidelines.

But underneath both of these developments it was the mass unrest that marked the Industrial Revolution and the boom–bust cycles that drive capitalism that gave the figure of the ‘normal’ child its central place in medicine, social work, education, and parenting. Binet himself used the language of the ‘social threat’ posed by children who were excluded from schooling, positing a future of either being a social burden or part of the criminal class (Nicolas et al., op. cit.). The personality inventories that first appeared in the US and Europe during World War I to keep soldiers who might fall apart on duty away from heavy weaponry were soon thereafter put into service to identify the ‘maladjusted’ worker who might be tempted to join a union or subvert corporate goals (Gibby & Zickar, 2008). From their earliest years these tests included questions that could have been designed to weed out people on the autism spectrum, had autism then existed as a diagnostic category – for example, ‘Do you get tired of people easily?’ (ibid.) Psychologists advising industry suggested that problems with workplace agitation could be solved by getting rid of ‘deviant’ personalities in the workplace: Doncaster Humm (1943, cited in Gibby & Zickar, 2008, p. 167) suggested that the suspiciously exact figure of 80 per cent of employees causing problems in the workplace had personalities with a ‘quirk or unusual feature’. Through such pronouncements, a diversity of neurological types became something to be feared, avoided, and potentially medicalised.

Humm’s contribution to the burgeoning science of classifying ‘deviant’ personality types was the Humm–Wadsworth Temperament Scale (HWTS), which was developed to bring personality testing to a new market, the American workplace. Shaken by incidents of workplace violence, such as the 1934 murder of a supervisor by an employee (Hemsath, 1939), large employers flocked to add such tests to their pre-employment screening processes. The HWTS was heavily marketed to employers, and eventually became the inspiration for the personality inventories used most commonly today: the Meyers–Briggs Type Indicator and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (Lussier, 2018).

Humm based his 318-question survey on the work of noted eugenics advocate Aaron Rosanoff, who claimed that human personality traits could be classified as hysteroid, manic, depressive, autistic, paranoid, or epileptoid (1921). According to Rosanoff, these traits exist in all people to some degree, so the key factor in achieving normalcy was the degree of self-mastery found in an individual: the ability to damp down expression of these deviant impulses (ibid.).

Rosanoff’s categorisation system was based on such dubious pseudoscientific work as word-association exercises with hundreds of subjects (‘normal’ students and workers, ‘abnormal’ state hospital patients), with an implicit assumption that what was most typical was also most desirable, and also no attention to issues like educational level or English proficiency (Kent & Rosanoff, 1910). In 1921, he was one of the first to describe an ‘autistic personality type’ (citing the definitions of Emil Kraepelin and August Hoch). At this point, ‘autism’ was typically used as a descriptor of specific avoidance behaviours in persons with schizophrenia, following the lead of Eugen Bleuler, but in this article Rosanoff pioneered by additionally identifying it with behaviours seen in persons functional enough to be in employment as well as with the diagnosis of dementia praecox (schizophrenia) (ibid.) An examination of early twentieth-century records substantiates that many individuals who would today be seen as having autism were given this label in the pre-Kanner years (Waltz & Shattock, 2004).

Rosanoff’s assumption was that a stable norm existed, and any personality type that deviated from that norm was to a lesser or greater degree pathological. Crucially, his descriptions of the six ‘abnormal’ types all included information about how these issues presented during childhood. ‘Normal’ personalities, on the other hand, were characterised by ‘inhibition, emotional control, a superior durability of mind, rational balance and nervous stability’ (Rosanoff, 1921, p. 422). While he went on to note that some degree of ‘abnormal’ traits may be necessary for greatness (for example, ‘How much in science and other fields, in which great concentration of mental energy on special tasks is required, is due to the inclination, peculiar to autistic personality, to exclude every diverting influence, every extraneous interest?’ [p. 424], an early variation on the ‘we’re all a little bit autistic’ discourse that will be familiar to modern scholars in critical autism studies), at the same time he valorised typicality and self-control. In his view, a person whose word-association responses were more than 50 per cent original rather than typical was likely in need of psychiatric care and control, and certainly not a good choice as an employee (Kent & Rosanoff, 1910).

And who was primarily responsible for children, who Rosanoff acknowledged as displaying and then (usually) growing out of traits that would be seen as problematic in adults? Parents, of course. The military and employers could only recognise the constellation of personality types that presented for entry, whereas parents were quickly positioned as controlling the efficacy of the production line.

The child as product

Peter Stearns maps the trajectory of constructing the child as particularly vulnerable and in need of scientifically based guidance especially well (Stearns, 2004). He points out key developments like the rise of magazines aimed at anxious parents in the 1920s, in response to the growing discourse about parental culpability for maladjustment and mental ill health, and the ever-changing list of things to be worried about that emerged over the ensuing decades. Stearns also places these developments squarely within the framework of rapid, challenging socioeconomic change: change that required the production of new, but still standardised, kinds of people.

Modern industry (like modern warfare) demanded adults who could be slotted into industrial processes as a standardised component. So, while early forms of testing for mental health difficulties, brain injury, and intellectual ability had been developed in the nineteenth century, their lack of standardisation was a stumbling block that prevented widespread use (Bondy, 1974). Once this hurdle had been overcome, however, tests were still often employed much too late to serve the military–industrial complex effectively. Thought among professionals soon quite logically turned to the issue of prevention: not merely recognising and excluding the abnormal adult but preventing abnormality in adults by intervening in childhood.

And so, the ‘normal’ child was constructed as an aspirational production goal for parents. This was done through a variety of processes, each offering services and products for its own target group of parents. The Child Guidance movement, for example, was a concerted effort to bring an end to the twin problems of juvenile delinquency and (future) workplace maladjustment. It can be seen as the child-focused variant of the Mental Hygiene field, which sought to prevent mental ill health, drug and alcohol abuse, and social unrest in adults through application of psychology and psychiatry. Despite its name, the focus of the Child Guidance movement was actually mothers rather than children.

Parental concerns were increasingly shaped by developments in psychology and psychiatry during this period. First the Child Guidance movement brought psychiatry from the private offices of elite practitioners to inner-city clinics (Jones, 1999). Alongside these ‘child-saving’ activities, which tended to be aimed squarely at working-class and poor families, came an army of experts who marketed their wares to middle-class mothers. Proponents like Ernest and Gladys Groves stated that most ordinary mothering was ‘’pathological’: it did not produce children who became the kinds of adults who were in demand, and so a radical rethink was needed, with experts like the Groveses advising mothers on how best to carry out their duties (Waltz, 2016).

Compulsory schooling provided fertile ground for theorists, researchers, and practitioners to explore both familial and non-familial production strategies –but it also acted in turn to further constrain the figure of childhood normalcy. As Stearns writes, ‘the very successes achieved in improving children’s lives led to an escalation in what came to be seen as the minimal standard for children’s well-being’ (Stearns, 2004, p. 2). These standards were more frequently than not laid at the doorstep of parents, who were expected to provide guidance in both academic and social performance.

Of course, this push for standardisation was also closely entwined with eugenics, a pseudoscience then in ascendance throughout the Western world and beyond. So, while on the one hand children were assessed in Child Guidance clinics and mothers were given ‘scientific’ child-rearing advice, some forms of aberrance were instead addressed with removal to institutional care, forced sterilisation, or euthanasia (and not only in Nazi Germany, where this process predated the Holocaust to come). The approach taken often depended more on which service was seen as appropriate for the family in question, and there was a clear class dimension to this, with middle- and upper-class families somewhat more likely to receive clinical help, while incarceration and/or eugenic solutions (typically targeted birth control programmes, segregation via institutionalisation, and sterilisation) were more often recommended for lower-class families and those from ethnic minorities (American Eugenics Society, 1936; Mazumdar, 1992).

Indeed, by the 1930s eugenicists were publicly declaring that about 10 per cent of the population was responsible for most of its social problems, and publishing lists of exactly wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Curing neurodivergence/eugenics
• PART II: Neurodivergent wellbeing
• PART III: Cross-neurotype communication
• PART IV: Neurodiversity at work
• PART V: Challenging brain-bound cognition
• PART VI: Moving forwards
• Index