as small as a world and as large as alone

7:15am March 12, 2014

karalianne:

yourfavisneuroatypical:

thegamingmuse:

astaraelweeps replied to your post: weepingrock asked:Anxiety disorde…

the wikipedia page for the word neurotypical pretty much says it exactly like that, the fact that the word came out of the autistic community means non-autistic people don’t get to decide how it gets used and defined and it’s not okay to appropriate

if that’s the case, then we as a group I think need a new word that defines all mental illnesses and disorders since I do not think it is okay to call people with mental illnesses neurotypical, because their experiences and their life is going to be changed and defined by being depressed or anxious and they aren’t going to live the way that an actual neurotypical person would

i do not want to be appropriative or speak over someone here.  but i definitely don’t feel comfortable saying that people with depression are neurotypical because it’s not the same experience at all.  

i could just change this blog to a new title?  something that included mental illnesses and neuroatypicality without bringing up all these questions about it?  though i’m not certain what just yet

wrong blog. oops.

Um. Maybe someone should ask sherlocksflataffect since they’re one of the people who came up with the word. I’m pretty sure they don’t think people who have anxiety or depression should be excluded.

And I do stand by my statement earlier that neurotransmitters that don’t work properly or aren’t being produced enough or are being over-produced count as being neuroatypical. Especially since half the reason why ADHD brains don’t work as expected is that our brains don’t use dopamine effectively or we simply don’t produce enough of it to begin with, and that makes our frontal lobes not work as expected. Like, neurotransmitters are implicated in ADHD. They aren’t everything to do with ADHD, but they are a huge part of it.

On top of that, studies have shown that severe depression actually does change how the brain works and some of the structures in the brain. So are those people neuroatypical but people who eventually recover from depression are neurotypical? That just seems like nit-picking to me and it’s not like you can tell who’s who just by looking at them anyway.

Also, autistic people have coined “allistic” to mean anyone who isn’t autistic, so I’m not sure why we need yet another word?

No they’re not one of the people who came up with the word.  They’re one of the people who came up with neurodivergent (a lot of us started using it at the same time, so I think it sort of was thought up by a lot of people simultaneously), but they did not come up with neurotypical, neurotypical was on the scene long before they were.

Anyway this is all a complete misuse of the word ‘appropriative’ and it’s really pissing me off.  Autistic people who don’t like the fact that 'neurotypical’ means 'neurologically typical’ and not just 'nonautistic’, just have to deal with it, FFS.  They don’t get any special claim on the word.  Especially because none of the people who say these things, to my knowledge, were even around when they came up with the word.  I wasn’t even around when they came up with the word, and my involvement in the autistic community predates pretty much everyone here including the person who supposedly came up with the word (but, actually, didn’t).

Anyway, long story short I wish people wouldn’t trivialize appropriation by using the word 'appropriative’ in contexts like this one.  Real appropriation involves things like having integral elements of your culture that outsiders can’t use, stolen by outsiders who have no right to it.  It’s a really horrible thing.  And this isn’t it.

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