2. Against Normativity: Spectral Logics, Mad Knowledge, and Neurodivergent Lives
Hybrid
Meeting ID: 934 2581 8056
Passcode: 496112
Panellists: Protichi Chatterjee, El Dewar, Paz Martínez, Cassandra Lovelock
Chair: Natasha Downs
Protichi Chatterjee | My Schizophrenia as the Spectral Haunting of My Aborted Aunt: Making Room for Alternate Neurodiverse Lives
Abstract: Most discourses within mental illnesses, disorders, and disabilities revolve around Western paradigms of logic, reason, and rationality. Words used within Neurodiversity Studies to recognise altered states of cognition, perception, and affect are also often borrowed from the clinical/medical terminologies such as schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder, autism, etc, that are methodically labelled and categorised in the DSM manual. My paper endeavours to disturb these DSM nomenclatures by introducing, in an autoethnographic turn, the matter of recurrently seeing the ghost of my aborted maternal aunt (my mother’s unborn sister and yet another victim of India’s prevalent female infanticide problem). This is an affliction that I share with my mother, who, while growing up, would continuously be haunted by the spirit of a girl in pigtails. As my – later diagnosed (and labelled) – manic-depressive episodes intensified with increasingly traumatic life-events around me, I, too, began to see the ghost who would not leave me until the psychiatrist’s pills for treating schizophrenia made me severely depressed and suicidal. In an attempt to foreground a different way and method of looking at alternate neurodiverse lives (generationally caused by systemic social violence), I converse with the Vietnamese dance choreographer Ahn Vo’s spectral performance Babylift (2021) that enacts the Vietnamese folk ritualist practices of spirit possession as a way of seeking redressal and justice for their brutally killed and forgotten ancestors during the Vietnam War. Borrowing from Kalpana Ram’s theorisations on southern Indian folk ritualistic practices of spirit possession and demonic/spectral afflictions, I too suggest that my schizophrenia, assumed by my mother and I as a form of spectral haunting, becomes a way of making room, understanding, and yielding our body-mind to forms of witnessing ancestral injustices that surpass the logicality of the Western, whitewashed discourses surrounding logic, rationality, and most importantly, mental health and illness.
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El Dewar | No Insanity Here Please We're Neurodivergent: The Need for Serious Mental Illness within the Neurodivergent Paradigm and Movement
Abstract: Neurodivergence is often seen in the main-stream as an umbrella of often pathologised diagnoses (ADHD, Autism, Tourette's etc.). This limited view of Neurodivergence(s) directly counters the broad-church approach of Neurodivergence (Walker, 2021) and the earliest stages of the Neurodivergent movement and paradigm (Botha, Chapman, Giwa Onaiwu, Kapp, Stannard Ashley, & Walker, 2024). Whilst Walker’s (2021) work discusses a wide range of Neurodivergences from long term LSD use to dedicated meditation, these groups are often removed to perpetuate the status quo. One group frequently excluded from Neurodivergent discussion is Serious Mental Illness (SMI), where SMI is seen as an Other within the discourse.
This separation of Neurodivergence and SMI risks the continuation of SMI being seen through a pathological model (Chapman, 2019) and as a medical problem to be solved rather than a holistic, embodied experience. If SMI is separated from the Neurodiversity paradigm, it bars those with SMI from the all-encompassing Neurodivergent/Neurotypical Paradigm and places them in a third category. This third category is rooted in stigma and deems those with SMI as outside of society and arguably humanity. This separation is further compounded when class, race and gender are taken into account (for example the misdiagnosis of Autism and ADHD within the Black community (Rockwell, Sterling & Mello, 2022). To detach SMI from the Neurodivergent paradigm is to perpetuate the othering and dehumanisation of those with SMI and undermines the principles of Neurodiversity.
This paper draws on academic research and the author’s lived experience as a schizophrenic to discuss SMI as a vital part of the Neurodivergent paradigm - both on a philosophical level and on a societal level. The need for the voice of SMI to be brought forward within the societal Neurodivergent movement will be addressed before a discussion of how wider barriers could be dismantled.
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Paz Martínez | Care of the self and knowledge of mad people
Abstract: I would like to present my research results that seek to rescue the knowledge of self and practices of care of the self, deployed by people who have experienced psychic suffering and self-identify from that place. I take the concept care of the self from Foucault and psychic suffering from Augsburger, an Argentinian researcher, to distance myself from the sanitarist concept of self-care and the psychiatric diagnoses of mental illness. I worked with 10 people who self-identify from many different lenses, which I’d like to present in your space. I employed a qualitative research methodology, through narratives and the creation of images, from first-person discourses. We shared 3 encounters. In the first one, I used an active-interviewing approach and based my script on the Map Maps from the Icarus Project, and we also used a notebook. Then, we had a period for photography creation, for our second encounter, based on photo elicitation. We had a third encounter for closure and reflection. I’m currently working on the results from that fieldwork, which have two main categories: Knowledge of self and Practices of care of the self.
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Cassandra Lovelock | On the pathologisation of mixed-raced identity, neurodivergence and misdiagnosis of personality disorders
Abstract: Pathologisation of the mixed-race experience is inherently tied to the ideas around what it is to be “normal” in western society; from consciousness, individuals arguably begin to internalise the ways in which behaviours, bodies, and minds fit (or do not fit) the socially prescribed blueprint of normal (Foucault 1965; Foucault 1977). With this blueprint of “normality” differing within and between white and racialised communities/cultures, how mixed-race people access and are perceived within “normal” often has significant variation.
It has been illustrated that growing up between cultures as a mixed-race person can have significant impacts on mental health (Morley and Street, 2014) and development of taken for grant “normalities” such as identity and learning/understanding social rules; all things heavily pathologised within psychiatry as, when missing, differing from the “norm.” In this paper I will argue how the pathologisation of, and lack of understanding from psychiatry about the Black mixed-race experience is causing the repeated misdiagnosed with borderline personality disorder (bpd) rather than investigations into neurodivergences such as Autism and ADHD.
The overdiagnosis of severe mental illness (smi) among minority populations (Cheng et al, 2018) and the overdiagnosis of BPD among women (Shaw & Proctor, 2005) is well documented, but the under diagnosis of ADHD and Autism need to be carefully considered within conversations and frameworks around race -particularly given the fact that non-mixed Black children who meet the criteria for a neurodivergent diagnosis such as Autism or ADHD, were up to five times more likely to receive an incorrect diagnosis of a pathologising disorder such as conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder when compared to their White peers (Cameron & Guterman, 2007; Fadus et al., 2020)
This paper draws on academic research and the authors lived experience as Black mixed-race and misdiagnosed with BPD later to be diagnosed with ADHD.
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Speaker Bios:
Protichi Chatterjee: Protichi Chatterjee (She/They) is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Their doctoral project, dealing with conceptualizing a Neurodivergent Gaze within Visual Arts, stems from their lived experiences of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. They are currently attempting (read, struggling) to create a methodology that encapsulates the shifting, unsteady terrain of neurodiverse perception within their thesis by experimenting with creative, theoretical, and autofictional frameworks. They have presented a few papers revolving around neurodivergent world-building and storytelling at Duke University's graduate conference, Cambridge University's CRASSH-sponsored conference - Crip Kid Lit.
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El Dewar: El Dewar (They/Them) is a Neurodivergent, Disabled, Queer academic and community activist. They are CEO of the accessibility and inclusion charity BlueAssist UK Ltd. As an interdisciplinary academic researcher, they are undertaking a PhD in Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam on the Phenomenology of Neurodivergence, their wider work focuses on Neurodivergence, the liminal space between Phenomenology and Post-structural philosophical theory, and Queer theory. They also are passionate about crafting including running their own small sustainable fibre art business.
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Paz Martinez: Hi! I'm Paz (she/her), an autistic woman, trauma survivor, and long covid hauler. I am a mad activist and professor from Chile in South America. I am happily the Mad coordinator at La RedEsfera Latinoamericana por las Culturas Locas, la Diversidad Psicosocial, la Justicia, el Buen Vivir y el Derecho al Delirio and a member of the Leadership&Care Collective at the Antinormality Club. I have a cat named Fritanga (which loosely translates to fried thing), I enjoy reading, offline and silent time, nature and I laugh a lot.
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Cassandra Lovelock: I am a Black mixed-race wheelchair user living with chronic illness and neurodivergence. I am a scholar activist whose work focuses on ethical, community based and lived experience led research, education, and policy making practice within the fields of mental health, neurodivergence, unpaid care, critical disability studies, and race studies.
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Zoom Meeting ID: 934 2581 8056
Passcode: 496112