The Autism Spectrum According to Autistic People

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The Autism Spectrum
According to Autistic People

NeuroClastic

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How safe do/did you feel growing up?

Jorn Bettin April 23, 2024

Initial results from a survey on psychological safety and mental wellbeing indicate that the biggest fears of Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+, and Disabled children – and especially those who also belong to cultural minorities, relate to classmates, parents, and teachers. 97% indicate often or always having anxiety, and 80% indicate often or always feeling depressed. We are committed to gathering further data from as many geographies as possible. The data and lived experience reports will flow into our education courses for teachers, and will inform our advocacy work.

Trust in Human Scale

Jorn Bettin April 16, 2024

Autistic ways of being are part of a culture that deserves the same respect as any other culture. The key element that holds together all the threads, which has been systematically eroded in Westernised societies: the notion of trust, including the role of trustworthy, sacred relationships within the context of ecologies of care beyond the human. If, as a species, we have one responsibility within the planetary ecosystem, it is to recognise that it is time to set the record straight on the toxicity of a culture that normalises and even celebrates competitive and deceptive behaviour.

How unsafe do Autistic and intersectionally marginalised people feel in your presence?

Jorn Bettin April 11, 2024

The biggest fears of Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled people relate to unmet healthcare needs, their work environment, their parents, and disrespect by healthcare professionals. Data from our participatory research shows the large overlap and the intersectionality between Autistic communities, and the LGBTQIA+ and Disabled communities.

Understanding power and de-powering

Jorn Bettin April 7, 2024

The normalisation of social power gradients and powered-up relationships is the terminal disease that plagues all empires. Since we live in the context of the convulsions of dying empires, it is important to understand the cultural dynamics that are unfolding.

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Autistic survival tools – Daoist philosophy

Jorn Bettin August 6, 2023

The writings of Zhuangzi can also be understood as an in-depth exploration of the social model of disability. This turns the book into a tool for understanding and articulating human rights violations that arise from the pathologisation and marginalisation faced by Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people. The topics covered also make it obvious that the paradoxes, cognitive dissonance, and suffering thrown up by powered-up civilisations are as old as the oldest empires, making the Dao De Jing relevant to our era.

Co-creating comprehensible ecologies of care beyond the human

Jorn Bettin July 16, 2023

Unmasked human life is an impossibility beyond human scale. Human wellbeing can only be understood in terms of the health of small, comprehensible ecologies of care. It can neither be understood in terms of an atomised self, which is what much of Western medicine is about, nor in terms of conformance to anonymous cultural norms and expectations, which is what the modern digital sphere of corporations, social media, and big government is all about.

Life is, at bottom, diversity

Jorn Bettin June 29, 2023

Just like a cell, a cultural organism has many critical interdependencies with the outside world; the state of environmental health is deeply entangled with the internal state of health of the cultural organism. Autistic life is incompatible within a society that lives within an Overton window. To understand why, look no further than the way in which Helen Mirra is conceptualizing autistic experience as holotropic. Holotropic people have naturally wide open sensory gates. To participate in/as the immense world without becoming overwhelmed, we holotropes have two central methods: in, by hyperfocusing our attention on one sensory or cognitive path, and as, through synthesising our experience into coherence.

web of life

The evolution of cultural organisms

Jorn Bettin June 9, 2023

Culture may not seem to change much from year to year, but if we look closely in the right places, major changes take place every 5 to 10 years. The toxicity of the industrialised paradigm is not the absence of cultural dynamism, but the systematic channeling of all cultural change into frantic busyness within an established and fundamentally misguided paradigm. For the Neurodiversity Movement this means that engaging exclusively with the pathologising silos of W.E.I.R.D. psychiatry and psychology is a dead end. The futility of cosmetic neurodiversity lite approaches becomes fully visible from a transdisciplinary viewpoint.

The relational nervous system of open knowledge flows between human societies

Jorn Bettin June 2, 2023

In an effort to “be the change”, in the industrial era, many Autists end up being sand in the gears of busyness as usual. Luckily, thanks to the Internet, this is not the end of Autistic people. The open question is how humans will treat each other and our non-human contemporaries on the journey towards being composted and recycled. Experiences may vary depending on the human scale cultures we co-create on the margins.

Autistic survival tools – Daoist philosophy

Jorn Bettin August 6, 2023

The writings of Zhuangzi can also be understood as an in-depth exploration of the social model of disability. This turns the book into a tool for understanding and articulating human rights violations that arise from the pathologisation and marginalisation faced by Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people. The topics covered also make it obvious that the paradoxes, cognitive dissonance, and suffering thrown up by powered-up civilisations are as old as the oldest empires, making the Dao De Jing relevant to our era.

Co-creating comprehensible ecologies of care beyond the human

Jorn Bettin July 16, 2023

Unmasked human life is an impossibility beyond human scale. Human wellbeing can only be understood in terms of the health of small, comprehensible ecologies of care. It can neither be understood in terms of an atomised self, which is what much of Western medicine is about, nor in terms of conformance to anonymous cultural norms and expectations, which is what the modern digital sphere of corporations, social media, and big government is all about.

Life is, at bottom, diversity

Jorn Bettin June 29, 2023

Just like a cell, a cultural organism has many critical interdependencies with the outside world; the state of environmental health is deeply entangled with the internal state of health of the cultural organism. Autistic life is incompatible within a society that lives within an Overton window. To understand why, look no further than the way in which Helen Mirra is conceptualizing autistic experience as holotropic. Holotropic people have naturally wide open sensory gates. To participate in/as the immense world without becoming overwhelmed, we holotropes have two central methods: in, by hyperfocusing our attention on one sensory or cognitive path, and as, through synthesising our experience into coherence.

web of life

The evolution of cultural organisms

Jorn Bettin June 9, 2023

Culture may not seem to change much from year to year, but if we look closely in the right places, major changes take place every 5 to 10 years. The toxicity of the industrialised paradigm is not the absence of cultural dynamism, but the systematic channeling of all cultural change into frantic busyness within an established and fundamentally misguided paradigm. For the Neurodiversity Movement this means that engaging exclusively with the pathologising silos of W.E.I.R.D. psychiatry and psychology is a dead end. The futility of cosmetic neurodiversity lite approaches becomes fully visible from a transdisciplinary viewpoint.

The relational nervous system of open knowledge flows between human societies

Jorn Bettin June 2, 2023

In an effort to “be the change”, in the industrial era, many Autists end up being sand in the gears of busyness as usual. Luckily, thanks to the Internet, this is not the end of Autistic people. The open question is how humans will treat each other and our non-human contemporaries on the journey towards being composted and recycled. Experiences may vary depending on the human scale cultures we co-create on the margins.

Questioning if you could be autistic or otherwise neurodivergent?

We compiled a directory of specialists trained to diagnose autism in adults, organized by city.

Go to Directory
autism neurodiversity
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