Neurodiversity Celebration Week
2024 Edition
It’s Neurodiversity Celebration Week 2024, and while we celebrate neurodiversity every day here at Positive Disintegration, we’re happy about this opportunity to raise awareness of neurodivergence.
“Neurodiversity Celebration Week is a worldwide initiative that challenges stereotypes and misconceptions about neurological differences. It aims to transform how neurodivergent individuals are perceived and supported by providing schools, universities, and organisations with the opportunity to recognise the many talents and advantages of being neurodivergent, while creating more inclusive and equitable cultures that celebrate differences and empower every individual.”
Last year, on this occasion, we released Episode 30, Celebrating Neurodiversity, Overexcitabilities, and Giftedness with Katy Higgins Lee, on March 12, 2023, as our offering.
The sheer popularity of that episode has shown us how important this topic is for our listeners. It’s been downloaded more than 3,000 times over the past year. We’re happy to announce that the transcript is now available on the Dabrowski Center website. Here’s an excerpt:
Katy: In the Neurodiversity Movement, they adhere to the social model of disability, which proposes that a person is disabled by society and environment as opposed to being inherently disabled. So, it's using the word disabled as a verb rather than a noun. And that's a very big part of the Movement and of being affirming.
It's also recognizing that all of these neurotypes are just different ways of thinking, experiencing and communicating, they're all completely valid. But it's easier to be certain neurotypes in our society. Again, because if you diverge, it's more inconvenient, it's more challenging for people, and people often don't just automatically accommodate for these differences.
Another aspect of being neurodiversity-affirming is using identity-first language as in saying “autistic person” as opposed to using person-first language, which would be saying a “person with autism.” For ADHD, there isn't a great way to do this. So, many of us just say ADHDer instead of saying person with ADHD.
The reason for that is because we view autism and ADHD, just as we do with giftedness, as being just a part of who we are, part of our identity as opposed to like an illness that's been put on us, right? You wouldn't say a “cancer person,” you say a “person with cancer,” because it's an illness that came along afterwards, that you want to get rid of. Autism and ADHD are not things to get rid of, they're not things to cure, which is another big part of the Neurodiversity Movement: not try to cure autism, not try to cure ADHD, because they are just differences that need support and accommodations as opposed to fixing, curing or trying to make someone fit neurotypical norms.
One last thing I'll say about being neurodiversity-affirming is also not using functioning labels. We wouldn't say that an autistic person is low functioning or high functioning because, for many of us, functioning varies day-to-day depending on the environment and even moment-to-moment. Instead, it's preferred to just describe a person's specific needs in a particular situation, instead of saying that a person is high functioning or low functioning.
When I started telling people that I'm autistic, pretty much every person said, “Oh, but you're very high functioning, aren't you?” I fit what people have historically talked about as being high functioning, because yeah, I'm married, I have kids, I have a job, I have a master's degree. But that way of phrasing it is not neurodiversity-affirming because there are many people that fit that description and can't manage to take care of their basic needs at other times, or they can't speak at certain times—they will completely become non-speaking. So, the idea of functioning labels is not neurodiversity-affirming.
The last two things I’ll say: being trauma-informed is really important and trans-affirming. LGBTQ definitely, but especially trans-affirming. That is something I think is really important to say because there are some people who say they are neurodiversity-affirming, and they have very large followings on social media, but they are transphobic and stating things as facts that are not accurate about trans people and their experience. That is very important because there is such a high crossover between people that are trans being autistic—there's a really high percentage of people that are trans and that are also autistic. So, that's an important part of being neurodiversity affirming as well.”
Katy will join us as a presenter at the 2024 Dabrowski Congress for a session titled Beyond Unmasking: Positive Disintegration and Identification of Neurodivergence. She’ll also present a session with
(Ep. 37: Self-Directed Education) called Giftedness as Neurodivergence, Not Functioning Label.We’re excited that they’ll join us for in-person sessions here in Denver, which we will be live-streaming to virtual attendees.
Other episodes with guests who will be joining us at the Congress and whose episodes included a discussion of neurodivergence include:
Episode 18: Engaging Transformation with Rachel Fell. Rachel will be presenting on “Supporting Positive Disintegration in Gifted Adults.”
Episode 25: Experiences Being Profoundly Gifted, Part 1 with Nth Bar-Fields and Joi Lin. Joi is our DC2024 Conference Coordinator.
Episode 27: Through the Neurodivergent Mirror with Dr. Tracy Winter.
Episode 28: Positive Disintegration in Organizations with Kate Arms.
Tracy and Kate will present a session together titled “The Guided and the Guide: An Experiential Lens on the Transition to Autopsychotherapy Through Coaching.”
Episode 29: The Disintegrating Duck was a conversation between Emma and me about giftedness, neurodivergence, and positive disintegration. We’ll be presenting a workshop together at DC2024 called “Walking Your Talk: How to Define and Live Your Values.”
Episode 52: Voice as a Mirror of Inner States with Laura Stavinoha. Laura will join us in Denver from The Netherlands, and shared this video for our YouTube channel. Her session will be on “The Sound of Multilevel Development.”
We first participated in Neurodiversity Celebration Week in 2022, when Emma and I joined Sophia Elliott on the Our Gifted Kids podcast for an episode called Why You Need Dabrowski.
Here are two quotes from that guest appearance:
“So, it’s been eight years, and I can tell you that now, I no longer think of myself as gifted and mentally ill. I see myself from a whole different framework that has, like I said, changed my life, thanks to Dabrowski because I realized that the difficult times I had when I was younger were not signs of mental illness so much as struggles that I have reframed as periods of positive disintegration.” –Chris Wells
“I accidentally fell into a dark night of the soul and this life-changing moment and… I went to Google for answers and typed in something like why does my brain feel like it’s falling apart and stumbled upon positive disintegration quite by accident, and overexcitabilities. I broke down in tears, finding the answer to who I was finally after all this time. And I understood why I had been the way I was as a child and why basically struggled to adult successfully, as I put it.” –Emma Nicholson
Last year, we invited Sophia to join us on Positive Disintegration to continue the conversation on Episode 32: You Are Not Alone!
Here’s an excerpt from Episode 32:
Sophia: It's like the overexcitabilities, you know, they're a bite-sized chunk. You get that instant recognition, especially within the gifted community, but diving deeper into positive disintegration… It's almost like a next level of taboo. It requires people to talk about things that are challenging—our mental health, our own personal journeys, deep dark journeys.
And so, I think there are few opportunities or places where you can go to hear those stories and fewer people willing to share them, which is why I think a really valuable thing to do is gathering around and sharing our stories. And that was certainly the intent of the podcast, Our Gifted Kids, was very much around recognizing that general taboo of giftedness. And feeling that very strong sense of justice and that it's kind of like, oh, this is not okay.
But what we need people to understand—both other parents so that they can self-identify, but also policy makers and educators—is the real impact of giftedness and the very harsh reality that families and kids are going through with giftedness. The challenges around that can be so potentially devastating, and there can be so much harm and trauma done that we need to share that kind of lived experience so that decision makers and educators can see that we really need to do something about this because this is making a big dent in children and families, and to provide the opportunity for parents to recognize it.
That’s been a big part of my journey—within unpacking the giftedness and being autistic and more recently being diagnosed as ADHD—is that necessity of hearing someone else talk about their experience of it and being able to go, “Oh, what? Everyone doesn't do that. That's a thing. Right. Okay. Tell me more about that thing. Cause that's what I do. And I thought that was just fairly typical experience. And now I'm learning that it's not a typical experience. So let's talk more about that.” I think that's hugely important.
For more of our podcast episodes and posts on neurodivergence, visit this link or click the button below.
Finally, I’d like to mention a brand-new blog post from Emma on Tragic Gift called How the Mandalorian Explains Neurodivergence. She says: “This is a little passion piece of pop-culture analysis. I bring two of my favourite topics together and explore how one can be used to explain the other. So let’s talk being neurodivergent, and Mandalorian culture!”
Click here for more on Neurodiversity Celebration Week including a list of events.
Register for the 2024 Dabrowski Congress on Eventbrite.
