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   Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 07:26:07 JST Cat Hicks

   @writeblankspace I think your description matches a lot of how I've seen people talk about this. Yet, experiences like PTSD occur in brains, and change how people experience their world, and at least back in the day we were talking about those things like trauma and brain injury as being central to the neurodiversity world, but it seems like tech has defaulted to a mode where these intersections are ignored. For example post traumatic growth is a positive thing that could be celebrated

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 07:26:02 JST Cat Hicks

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     • Jens Finkhäuser

     @jens @writeblankspace part of what complicates this for me is there is a lot of emerging evidence that just makes this not such a clean narrative. What if you are born with certain characteristics that mean you develop a certain condition where other people wouldn't? Why privilege the "born with it" narrative when a physical injury can destroy part of your brain, does it really matter if it happened in early development or in an accident?

     Robert Link repeated this.
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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 07:26:02 JST Cat Hicks

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     • Jens Finkhäuser

     @jens @writeblankspace I recognize that these are really overwhelming philosophical questions without a single answer. I think I find it frightening how essentialist and biologically reductive our society can be, and often feel like I want to push against this because at the same time our actual understanding of this biology AND psychology is still SO limited.

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     Jens Finkhäuser (jens@social.finkhaeuser.de)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 07:26:04 JST Jens Finkhäuser

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     @grimalkina @writeblankspace ... with that out of the way (is it?), I think that the nugget of truth in this narrowing of the definition may be like the chicken and egg problem: which came first, the brain shape, or the symptoms?

     I can cautiously get behind a definition that, roughly speaking, states that if brain shape comes first, neurodivergence is an accurate term. And if symptoms (e.g. induced by trauma) comes first, you can find a term that suggests more of an illness.

     But that's...

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     Jens Finkhäuser (jens@social.finkhaeuser.de)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 07:26:05 JST Jens Finkhäuser

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     @grimalkina @writeblankspace ... is to demonstrate that these conditions (whatever you put under the umbrella) are part of the "normal" range of brain function variations, and creating a system that traumatizes people (with a subset of characteristics) is the thing that needs to go.

     It should follow that putting yourself into a pathologizing box isn't really compatible with such advocacy. It is identity politics more than anything, which can help/hinder advocacy .

     So...

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     Jens Finkhäuser (jens@social.finkhaeuser.de)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 07:26:06 JST Jens Finkhäuser

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     @grimalkina @writeblankspace There's a lot of thought gone into the similarities between autism/ADHD and PTSD symptoms, with some folk openly stating that the reason is that living as a neurodivergent person in a neuronormative world causes PTSD.

     I really wouldn't know.

     What it does do is reflect the experience of living with ADHD and autism. And dyslexia, dyscalculia, etc to varying degrees. I can see the attractiveness of the statement.

     The whole point of neurdiversity advocacy, though...