If you’ve ever had to go through the diagnostic process for any neurodevelopmental condition with your child, you know it’s an incredibly tough road to travel. At the end of it, diagnosis or not, your view about disability may shift if you see your own child being excluded in different parts of their life. But how do you change this? Your answer may be influenced by two different lenses of the disability model – the medical model and the social model.

The medical model of viewing disability places the individual experiencing the disability as the reason for the disability – the need to change and adapt lies on the disabled person in order to better ‘fit into’ the rest of society. Whereas the social model of viewing disability turns this viewpoint the other way – the person experiencing the condition wouldn’t be considered disabled if societal contexts didn’t create any barriers for them.

An offshoot of the social model of disability is the concept of neurodiversity. Neurodiversity is a term that was coined by sociologist Judy Singer and further popularised by journalist Harvey Blume back in 1998. The term ‘neurodiversity’ doesn’t actually refer to any particular disability or diagnosis but rather conceptualizes the variations of the human cognitive experience in a similar fashion to the biodiversity within an environment. In a nutshell, we as a human race experience diversity within our own brains and thus can experience the world differently than each other.

This viewpoint started within the autism rights movement in an effort to shift the view of Autism Spectrum Disorder away from being seen as a medical condition needing to be ‘fixed’, to a more humane view of human brains simply experiencing the world differently.

However you decide to view your child’s disability, finding therapists with similar views will help to support your family in supporting your child to live their best possible life. Indeed, a growing body of research shows that neurodiversity-affirming therapies that aim to celebrate the diversity of disability vs therapies aiming at ‘fixing’ disabilities are best practice in supporting disabled individuals. 

With best wishes,
Sabrina, author of the 2E Corner