| The following is from personal experience. I think the most useful, helpful thing for mainstream society to do is not to treat "neuroatypicality" as a unified category. And I say this as a very neuroatypical person. But the thing is, when you get to the tails of the normal distributions for various cognitive and neurological functions, most of the individuals you find are cognitively and neurologically uneven. We may be significantly higher-functioning in one aspect, while being average in most other aspects, and sometimes lower-functioning in one or another aspect. The biggest mistake mainstream society makes is treating cognitive functioning as a uniform, one-dimensional spectrum from low-functioning (autistic people, low-IQ people, the "mentally ill", etc.) to very high functioning (so-called "geniuses" and "very well-balanced" people). I'll use myself as an example. The educational system simply never knew what the bloody hell to do with a small child who obviously suffered from nasty emotional disturbances, which were at least partially due to parental violence, and who obviously had difficulty interacting with others, and yet who simultaneously tested at the 98th percentile of intelligence and obviously wanted to make friends. "Gifted and talented" classes were designed for kids who were just as gifted in their self-organization as in their ability to read, write, and do maths, and who also cooperated easily with adults and wanted to work within the system. "Special education" was designed for the intellectually weak, the especially violent, and those utterly unable to direct themselves. I didn't fit into any category the system had. So I only started getting a really decent education when I entered university, where I was, pretty much for the first time, allowed to take mostly smart-kid classes and allowed to socialize without being branded as the dangerous idiot first thing. It worked great: I learned how to make friends and graduated with a solid circle of them, and I managed honors in computer science. Admittedly: I now wish I'd been able to weedle out the opportunities and privileges those Good Little Children got, since in adulthood I'm seeing just how much they were able to accomplish while I was having to push to be treated as a non-moron, but oh well. Weirdly enough, other than a post-undergrad bout of depression that apparently happens to everyone (but which nobody is ever told about...), the post-school world of work and research has been a pretty great experience! And here's the freakish thing: among the very... anything - the very intelligent, the very creative, the very emotional - none of this story has turned out all that unusual! I attend lesswrong.com meet-ups sometimes and find that pretty much everyone else there has stories just like mine. TL;DR: Society thinks that cognitive functioning ranges from "really great" to "really bad", with each particular aspect of mental functioning co-varying along a single dimension. This is approximately correct for middling cases - a person who's average all-around will usually be roughly the same level of average in each particular - but almost entirely wrong for people at the tails. |