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NeuroTribes and the Proper Use of ‘Neurodiversity’

Shannon Des Roches Rosa www.squidalicious.com Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes is a large, densely packed book about autism’s past, present, and future. I found myself overwhelmed by the amount of information contained in each individual paragraph, in considering how much research and synthesis it took to create those paragraphs — and in knowing that NeuroTribes’s information matters so much, while acknowledging my kind of brain can’t possibly retain it all.  It doesn’t surprise me, then, when other people have trouble remembering every important point in NeuroTribes, because the book is an 500-page information tsunami. Due to those info overload risks, however, some of NeuroTribes’s themes need to be repeated more than once or twice for people to get them right.  One theme that needs more emphasis is NeuroTribes’ clarification about neurodiversity: The term is not limited to autistic people who communicate independently, or indeed only to autistic people.  Neurodiversity is the full…