Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism
Podcast Transcript

Chris Browne:

Hello and welcome to episode 69 of Radicals in Conversation, the monthly podcast from Pluto Press, one of the world’s leading independent radical publishers. I’m your host, Chris Browne. Happy New Year to you all, wherever you might be. It’s great to be back with our first episode of 2024 and a conversation with an author whose book was published just a couple of months ago, but which is already making waves.

That book is Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. And it’s my great pleasure to be joined on the show today by Robert Chapman. Robert is a Neurodivergent philosopher writing on neurodiversity theory, madness and disability. They have taught at King’s College London, The University of Bristol, Sheffield Hallam and Durham University, where they are currently an assistant professor in critical Neurodiversity Studies. They also blog at Psychology Today and Critical Neurodiversity.

Awareness around and diagnoses of neurodiversity have exploded in recent years. But as Robert argues, we’re still missing a wider understanding of how we got here and why. Empire of Normality explores the rich histories of the neurodiversity and disability movements, as well as how our understanding of mental and physical health and disability have been profoundly shaped by the development of capitalism.

This is Robert Chapman on Radicals in Conversation.

Robert, thank you very much for taking the time to come on the show today. It’s really exciting to talk to you, discuss your new book, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism, which was published in November 2023. So very recently. It’s a fantastic book. I just finished reading it the other day. And yeah, I suppose you start off in the preface or the introduction with a little bit about your own sort of personal story I suppose. So by way of introduction, could you yeah, tell us a little bit about yourself and maybe share some of the personal story in connection with you know, the subject matter of the book?

Robert Chapman:

Yeah. Thanks for having me on and for the introduction. Really, the book came out of and this is what I talk about in the intro or the first part of the intro, two different kind of ongoing commitments in my work, in activism and in research, but also which relate closely to my life and experience. And I guess I thought it was helpful just to briefly explain that, to make it more concrete.

So on the one hand, there’s just experience of economic hardship and all the various issues that arise around that. When I was young, I mean, we lived in poverty basically for a lot of the time. And then there was homelessness and then I was in foster care and all the sorts of problems that come with that. And then when my life was going a bit better later, I had the great privilege to go to uni. I studied philosophy and that’s where I, among many other things, I discovered like Karl Marx and the Marxian tradition, along with lots of other things like feminism and all these frameworks which helped me make sense of my life and all the problems I saw around me as well. And the Marxian kind of framework was the most helpful for me for making sense of my own class position and my experiences. And that was something I just kind of, I guess, internalized at quite a young age. And then – and when I say Marxian tradition, I mean not just Marx, but the much broader tradition of like the Frankfurt School of Critical theory, Marxist feminism and so on.

But at the same time I’m autistic, I had lots of struggles at school. I just couldn’t process anything going on at all. And because I was poor, my teachers just were like, Oh, well, they’re just stupid. We’ll just give up on them, basically, as so many other autistic people experience. And I became interested in like the politics of kind of mental health as I thought of it at the time. And I found there were two main kind of traditions out there.

There was like a mainstream psychiatry, which was like, you know, these are kind of mainly biological problems. It may be in your brain or whatever, and they’re medical problems that we need to develop medicine to fix them. And that could be kind of psychological or biological. And I didn’t find that very helpful because the message that kind of gave is just like you are inherently broken and sort of beyond fixing and you’re just fundamentally flawed and subnormal, basically.

And it kind of de-politicized my experience in important ways. And then there was this other tradition, that kind of anti-psychiatry tradition, which was much more like, Oh, these are just labels, they’re just made up like they’re not real disabilities and things like that. And I found that was equally unhelpful. Ultimately, I was kind of tempted by it for a while when I was a teenager and I kind of got into it for a bit, but I started to think of it as quite reactionary after a while. Reinforced a sort of disability shame, this sort of denial, because I am actually a disabled person.

I can’t do many of the things that you’re expected to do. That’s what, that’s what it means to be disabled. So these were both unhelpful for me. And then I came across the neurodiversity movement and this was a much more helpful way of thinking about things for me. So the basic idea with neurodiversity, it rejects a medical model of disability.

It says these are not just individual medical problems, but it acknowledges the reality of disability. It says like, we are disabled, like autistic people are disabled, people with ADHD are disabled and so on. But it uses a kind of social and politicized model of disability. It says disability is something that always happens in a context. It’s not something that just purely arises from your body or your mind.

People are only disabled if the world is set up in a way which disables them ultimately, and also things like discrimination and shame and stigma and things like this are political too, so it understands disabled people as an oppressed class. So I found the neurodiversity approach really helpful and decided to work on that. I ended up doing a Ph.D. and then I went on to teach about neurodiversity, and this was really exciting.

It was like neurodiversity when I first came across it over a decade ago now, was a much smaller movement. It was mostly like online blogs and then some activists and a few small organizations. Now it’s a really mainstream thing. You hear about neurodiversity in The Guardian and on TV all the time and stuff like this. Most people know that word neurodiversity, I think now, and related words like neurotypical. And I guess what I wanted to do was to kind of establish it as a legitimate academic field of theory, or help do that because lots of people, lots of us have been trying to do that. So I went into philosophy doing that because people, philosophers were dismissing it a lot of the time, they were saying, Oh, this is just some activist stuff. That’s not something we should take seriously, right? So I was doing that. But some of the tension that arose for me really was the neurodiversity movement, because it arose really in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it arose in a kind of era of, right, the Soviet Union had fallen and people weren’t taking Marxism very seriously. And that was not really seen as a viable way of understanding the world or politics.

And the main kind of approach, the dominant approach for political activism was like a liberal reformist identity politics approach, right? And because I think the neurodiversity movement arose in that era, it just kind of adopted that dominant approach. So it’s a kind of liberal reformist identity politics, at least primarily. But most of the neurodiversity movement was in that kind of tradition. And I guess for me, there was a tension because I had this more Marxist understanding of class. For me, that was a more helpful and more correct understanding than a identity politics way of thinking about class. But then I had this neurodiversity analysis and I found that really helpful for my own life and lots of other people very clearly do as well.

But it was coming from a different approach. So there was some kind of tension between these two. So yeah, the book kind of came out very slowly over many years of trying to bring these together. I’ve ran a blog called Critical Neurodiversity for about ten years now, which was me just trying to apply bits of critical theory to thinking about neurodiversity.

And it wasn’t actually Marxist, but it was much broader; I was using Foucault and Adorno and all these various thinkers, but in the end for the book I’ve drawn the kind of Marxian approach and the neurodiversity approach together to develop this what I call neurodivergent Marxism. So that’s the kind of background of my own life and how these interests arose. And how I’ve tried to bring them together in the book in a way which I hope will be helpful for other people to be thinking about developing a better theory, a kind of consciousness of neurodivergence, a historical consciousness and class consciousness and ultimately for our praxis too.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, brilliant. No that’s all great. I mean, you’ve touched on a lot of things that we’ll come back to in the course of this conversation. I mean, you’ve mentioned the orientation of the Neurodivergent movement has been towards kind of reform, you know, sort of a liberal framework which has seen, I guess, some results since, you know, 2012, the last sort of ten years or so has moved things forward and there have been some achievements in society.

Could you speak a little bit to, you know, how the movement has changed things and I guess then why there’s kind of an inbuilt limitations of what it could achieve within that sort of framework?

Robert Chapman:

So this is really important and I want to be clear straight off that I’m not just like completely dismissive of this approach or anything. I think it’s been really successful, in fact. And I guess the point I want to raise is, or the kind of provocation I want to raise for other people in the movement, is that even though this has been successful in many ways, that it might have reached the limit of the kind of success it can have.

And in fact, we need to go further. But yeah, the success has actually been significant in many ways. And it’s worth talking about the basic tactic people use and the basic strategy. So we already have at least – it’s different in different states, but we have disability rights legislation in many states. Here in the UK, certainly, and there are also kind of international laws and so forth. These are relatively recent, still kind of 1990s, early 2000s. And they really arose out of the disabled persons movement, which was mostly people with physical disabilities. They were made with that in mind primarily and things like ADHD and, so, all the kind of psychiatric diagnoses basically were not really thought of in a disability framework. They were thought of as mental disorders, slightly different. So people weren’t using, like drawing on this legislation to demand accommodations and things like that.

So what the neurodiversity proponents have done, and I think quite successfully, is reinterpret things which were considered individual medical pathologies into disabilities and then draw on that existing legislation to begin demanding changes, as well as make demands perhaps for new legislation and so on. So instead of, say, like just being ashamed that you’re an autistic person or someone with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or something like that and hiding it, you might actually be able to go to work and kind of say, Actually, I’ve got rights. I can, I’ve got a right to, say, in the UK, we have a right to reasonable accommodations. And if something’s, you know, hard for you as a disabled person and stopping you working or stopping your access, you can have an accommodation. At least legally you should. And this has been one powerful tool. People are doing this more and as people are doing that, there has been a slight, you know, there’s more kind of like neurodiversity pride and autistic pride and stuff like this, pushing back against shame and stigma and denial.

And this has all been important and we see much more general changes as well. Right? So just out in the world you see all sorts of things. So like if you go to airports now, they often have a sensory room for autistic people who will struggle in the kind of intense sensory environment of the airport. Then in supermarkets, you have kind of autism hours where they dim the lights and turn the music down and stuff like that. So again, for people who struggle with the sensory environment will be able to go at that time. These are important changes and yet there are pretty significant limits as well. The way I think about this is from a Marxian perspective, Neurodivergent oppression doesn’t just stem from like negative views of us and just a lack of rights, but from the deeper structures of society, from the rise of capitalism, from how capitalism kind of orders us into hierarchies and ranks us in relation to our productivity and sees some of us as subnormal and some of us as normal, and some of us are super normal.

There’s various intersections there as well. This very much intertwined with the history of colonialism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy and so on. And I do think there’s some room for kind of wiggling around, getting like, reducing stigma a bit within this system. And as I say, we’ve done that a little bit, but I think ultimately you can only go so far.

And the kind of thing I was thinking about is, for instance, when we look at the statistics from what we know at least of how many neurodivergent people are incarcerated in prisons, for instance. So there was a study from last year which found in the UK about 25% of people incarcerated in prisons have ADHD. One study from 2012, I think in Chelmsford prison, found that about 50% of the inmates there had dyslexia or related learning disability, similar kind of very high levels of other forms of neurodivergence and that’s before we even get to like, you know, things like deaths in police custody and police violence and things like that for neurodivergent people, which are, again, as far as we know, are much higher than the general population. We have a kind of very clear, I think, to my mind, at least, a school to prison pipeline for neurodivergent people. All these people, of course, theoretically have rights, but they’re still stuck in carceral systems. And many neurodivergent people especially multiply marginalized, especially if you’re Black, working class and neurodivergent you are much more likely to end up in a carceral system still than not.

So often, the people who benefit from the rights reformist based approach tend to be the more privileged kind of people anyway. This kind of indicates to me or indicates to me, and this is the kind of case I make in the book, that we need to attend to the deeper structures of society rather than just rights and reforms.

At the same time, something I’ve been increasingly concerned about, not just me, but many neurodiversity activists, is the co-option of neurodiversity. As it’s become more mainstream, you’ve had this huge co-option of, sometimes people call it ‘neurodiversity light’. People in existing positions of power sort of rebrands as neurodiversity proponents, they slightly change their language and vocabularies and things like that.

But really they’re just kind of upholding the dominant system and how it operates. And probably many of them very well-meaning, of course. Right. But that’s, you know, still they’re doing what they’re doing. And this can be like psychologists or teachers, people in these kind of like social reproduction and health kind of services, but can be politicians and so forth. So Matt Hancock, who was a conservative health secretary and in my view, responsible for great suffering on behalf of neurodivergent and disabled people,

Part of his rebranding has been to, you know, he’s like left politics, but he’s like now the head of a neurodiversity charity. He has dyslexic himself, so he neurodivergent. But I don’t think he has the… his actions don’t suggest that he has the interests of neurodivergent people. You know, that’s not that’s not what he’s fighting for. Quite the opposite, in fact.

And so we have this kind of mass co-option. I think liberal neurodiversity is much more open to that. And you also have businesses kind of trying to employ neurodivergent people increasingly, but only so far as it can, kind of mine us for profit in various ways. And again, that will leave lots of neurodivergent people behind, people with more complex disabilities, people who are multiply marginalized and so forth.

So these are the various kind of worries I have that the dominant approach. Part of them are inherent to that approach, and part of them are kind of at this current political moment. I think we’ve got this huge energy from the neurodiversity movement. Clearly, you know that there are many of us, there are many tens of thousands, perhaps millions of us, and it’s growing all the time.

But I think to direct this energy towards something liberatory, we have to develop a more radical politics to avoid this kind of neoliberal co-option of diversity, basically.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s really interesting to hear the phrase elite capture coming up in the book. Obviously Pluto published, co-published, a book on elite capture in a different context, looking at race. But it’s interesting to see that same paradigm kind of here. And I think you talk about neuro-Thatcherism, the idea of like that economic mining of neurodiversity kind of that we’ve witnessed.

It feels like the burgeoning of neurodiversity awareness and activism has been in large part down to, you know, the internet, kind of in the ‘90s, but even more so now with the rise of platforms of like TikTok and Instagram. You know, it feels like even though, you know, I’m not neurodivergent, but I see a lot of content coming up produced by, you know, people on these platforms having conversations about neurodiversity, autism, ADHD.

I mean, what do you make of this trend? Like how would you characterize the kind of content that you’re coming across on these platforms – if you’re on them, I suppose? And do you see a kernel of like a liberatory politics within what you’ve been seeing?

Robert Chapman:

Yeah, this is really important. And I, I certainly see a kind of a potential of liberatory politics. But it could, as these things always can, they can always go the other way too. But there’s been a lot of kind of scare about this like increase in self-diagnosis is a big thing right. So people are not necessarily just ending up in psychiatric services and getting a diagnosis, but are talking to their friends.

They’re going on social media and they’re learning about ADHD or autism or whatever else. And they’re saying, Hey, I’ve got very similar problems, too. Maybe I’m part of this group of people. And it’s interesting because there’s been a huge scare about this. People were kind of like, Oh, it’s social contagion. Oh, it’s really terrible. These people are self diagnosing, it’s overdiagnosed and stuff like that.

And I’m very skeptical about those narratives. And these are mostly coming from the political right. They’re kind of in the right wing papers and stuff like that. I think what they see as social contagion and the very concept of social contagion here is an interesting one because it’s kind of pathologizing people recognizing the fact that they’re disabled. It’s, you know, contagion is a kind of pathologizing term.

But I think of this more as a kind of nascent consciousness raising, it’s a bit like, you know, workers connecting together in industrial England in the industrial revolution, kind of going, Hey, you know, my working conditions are really bad and so are yours. And maybe there’s like something that connects us. Maybe we’re part of a group. That group is like the working class, right?

Maybe we can start to build a shared understanding of this and recognize this. So I think there’s, I think of it more as is a kind of nascent consciousness raising, at least in many cases. And so I’m quite hopeful about this. I think it’s really interesting. Now, of course, whether that turns out to turn into something like a class consciousness, which is in the kind of service of a more liberatory politics, that might not happen.

Whether that happens depends on what kind of understanding we do collectively build. So that’s why, again, why we’ve got to fight for a more radical politics and build a shared understanding. So if they’re just adopting a kind of neoliberal neurodiversity perspective, which some probably are, you know, then it won’t turn into a kind of liberatory politics. But I’m pretty hopeful. You know, I think we’ve got to be hopeful.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, absolutely. In the book’s subtitle, you have Neurodiversity and Capitalism. So, I mean, this book is very much drawing the links together between capitalism and neurodiversity. And a large part of the book is is historical in scope. I mean, a number of the chapters are detailing the history of both the development of capitalism, I suppose, and also the development of our conceptualizations of, you know, bodily and mental health and disorder and disability and so on.

So that’s clearly quite important. This history is clearly important to you in your understanding of how we move forward to building a sort of, you know, praxis and so on. So let’s, let’s dive into a little bit of the history. I think, because it’s really fascinating stuff, particularly if, like me, you haven’t really read a huge amount about this before.

Robert Chapman:

So I mean, for instance, you know, the Industrial revolution, you know, and the increasing mechanization of the labor process, you know, this leads directly to the creation of ideas around able bodiedness and normality and things like that. Could you elaborate on that a little bit? Some of this early history and the dovetailing development of capitalism and our understanding of these ideas?

Sure. Yeah. And it’s worth saying first, actually, just why did I find this history important to begin with? I think lots of kind of history of the neurodiversity movement is like – and this is this is accurate – autistic people and neurodivergent people were able to connect because of the Internet and that allowed us to connect with each other. And now, now we’re a movement.

And that’s all true. But I guess the question I was interested in is why did this movement need to arise when it did and how can we make sense of that? And I think we need to understand that, to understand what liberation would require, you know, because oppression doesn’t just arise for no reason or out of nowhere. People don’t get angry enough and frustrated enough and suffer enough to organize for no reason, there’s always a much broader context. So I thought it was really helpful to, or would be helpful for the movement to try and develop the kind of broader historical consciousness. And as you say, in relation to the rise of capitalism. So I was drawing on existing histories of disability. There’s lots of interesting stuff on the rise of normalcy, which I was drawing on, although that’s more focused less on psychiatry, it’s more focused on bodily disability and sometimes intelligence to an extent, but less psychiatry.

And I was trying to draw that together with Marxist histories of the rise of capitalism as well as kind of some decolonial thought as well, and trying to bring these together. So the big shift I begin with is really from pre capitalism to capitalism. And one way of thinking about this is how health was conceptualized way back in our most ancient medical texts, not just in Europe but across much of the world.

Even though there are really important differences in each place, the cultural differences and religious differences and various nuances and so forth, often health was conceptualized as a kind of balance or harmony or equilibrium. So I call this health as harmony in the book. And that harmony could be within your own body or mind, but it could also be between you and your community or you and members of your community, and it could also be between you and the environment you live in, in various ways. And I think it made more sense for people to think of health as harmony then, because people in some sense were, you did live in relation to your communities. Communities are really important, more communal conceptions of self and so forth. People were much more attuned to the seasons in various ways, people working in agriculture and so forth.

And their way of thinking was very much tied to their way of life. Then with the rise of capitalism, you shift to this kind of emphasis on wage labor and competition and everyone becomes an individual who’s in competition with everyone else to get work. The capitalists are also in competition with each other to squeeze the most productivity out of their workers that they can, and that they’re always working to find ways to kind of quicken the pace of production and stuff like this.

So with the shift to capitalism, if you break apart these traditional communities where there was much more actual room for disabled people and people were often in some sense less disabled than they are now, this disability has always existed in some way or another, even though we didn’t call it that. But there were certain ways of organizing where the world was less disabling for us.

And in this context, you just get this increased ranking of people, and people become individuals with abilities and limitations who are increasingly measured against each other. And sciences arise to kind of try and track this and states try and make this legible and so forth. The rise of statistics allows this kind of like ordering of populations in all these ways.

And this completely changes how we understand health and health becomes associated with normal functioning rather than balance. So health is much more, you know, you’re an individual, are you normal? Do you fall within the normal functioning of people of your species and sex and age and so forth? And there’s this huge pressure to do that.

And at the same time, we’re kind of being normalized to things like the pace of the factory, right, with the industrial revolution and the shift from people working, say, from their home and with their families more towards going to traveling to the factory to work. This already cuts off loads of people from being included, right? So firstly, you’ve got to get to the factory.

So if you’ve got mobility impairments that’s going to cut you off. Then there’s the pace of the factory, very long hours and very often intensive labor. Before the Industrial Revolution, people tended to work a lot less and have more control over when they worked. So if you’re someone say with chronic fatigue or who has like, you know, periodic depression where you can’t get out of bed or whatever, you would have more space to actually work around that.

But when you’ve got to be there kind of 14 hours a day or something in the factory, there are some people who can do this and some people who can’t. Then capitalism just kind of intensifies from there. So it’s not just the logic of capitalism themselves are deeply neuro normative, more so than any other kind of societal organization we’ve previously had. It’s that capitalism itself continually intensifies. It has to intensify. That’s built into its logics. And as it intensifies, it becomes more and more neuro normative. That’s to say, the normativity of our bodies and minds just continually restricts. There are some ways in some places where it could slightly expand because all sorts of things can happen, right? Where it can expand briefly.

But there’s a general disposition towards the tightening and restricting of neuro normativity where essentially more people become disabled because they fall outside those norms and there’s more discrimination and and more stigma and so forth as well, and more forms of kind of management and social control arise to manage these populations, these populations who fall outside. So that’s the basic shift I tried to detail.

I tried to make it very concrete. I think the concrete understanding of key stages of this shift is really helpful for thinking again what it might mean to be liberated from this and how we might do that.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, definitely. I think you kind of note it towards the end of the book, but you draw out the fact that, you know, because of what you’ve said about capitalism’s tightening of like neuro normativity, you know, the fact that neurodivergence and neuro topicality, if you like, they’re not sort of immutable categories that we hold as individuals, but these things are always permeable and potentially temporary, you know, because we might find ourselves disabled by the increasing pressure from the system, you know, burn out, whatever it might be.

Yeah, I thought that was very clarifying. I mean, you also detail in the book and maybe we’ll come on to some of the later stages of capitalism, you know, the impacts of Fordism and post-Fordism. But, you know, you talk about the, yeah, the history of psychiatry and different understandings of, you know, pathology and a biomedical approach.

And then the Anti-psychiatry movement. One of the villains in the book, if you like, is Francis Galton. Could you tell us a little bit about Francis Galton, why he’s significant? It’s quite funny, actually. I think I saw on Twitter the other day a meme that someone had created of your book cover with a sort of hellscape in which someone was searching for Francis Galton in hell. So I don’t know, maybe say a little bit more about, yeah, who this person is, why they’re relevant to the story of the book.

Robert Chapman:

Good. Yeah. So I was thinking about how we should think about the history of psychiatry and in lots of contemporary histories of psychiatry, the big figure is Emil Kraepelin, who was a German psychiatrist who’s seen as having developed this like classificatory approach where you have different diagnoses, try to map them onto biology. It’s supposed to be a more scientific approach in comparison to maybe Freud or something like that, and this is, that’s the standard story about the history of psychiatry. And if you believe that story, then lots of people think, well, the problem is the Kraepelinian approach where you have like diagnoses and stuff like that. If you think psychiatry is harmful or oppressive and therefore we need to overcome that.

But I was interested in actually a kind of a deeper history from behind that. And I argue that the current paradigm we’re in doesn’t come from Kraepelin, he only was one part of expanding it. So I go further back to Francis Galton That’s why he’s important. And here I follow disability historians such as Lennard Davis, who have written about the history of normalcy in the enforcement of normalcy, and count Galton as an important figure in that, even though they haven’t linked that necessarily to the rise of psychiatry so much.

So who is Galton? He’s Charles Darwin’s half cousin. He’s from a very wealthy family. His family are like gun manufacturers and this is like the time that like the British Empire, you know, he knows Darwin and he becomes obsessed with genius at a young age, and he thinks, of course, he’s a genius, right? He’s a white man from a rich family in Britain, in the British Empire.

He has lots of the ideas of the time, which are deeply sort of sexist and racist, of course, as well. And he’s interested in these various new statistical analyses of populations and things like that. And applying them to notions of what he called genius and idiocy. And at the same time, he’s really influenced by his cousin Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

This is really important because it kind of makes biology much more respectable. It gives a kind of actual ground for thinking about biology and in a way which you didn’t really have before. So it would have been incredibly exciting to scientists working at the time in all kinds of ways, and completely changed how we thought about ourselves and the world around us and so on. And what Galton really does is bring together these statistical analyses of populations and kind of notions of normalcy and so forth with Darwin’s theory of evolution to make this idea that there’s kind of like we can have a kind of natural ranking of people in terms of ability, in terms of what he called, you know, genius and idiocy, but then later became like IQ and intelligence and so forth.

Importantly too, it’s worth noting, he also ranked the races. His first book, Hereditary Genius, wasn’t a ranking of individuals, it was a ranking of the races. He puts white people in like Europe and the ancient Greeks at the top and Black people from Africa at the bottom, along with like indigenous Australians and some others. And it’s just this kind of classic, deeply racist white supremacist ranking of the races, right. In his later work, he develops the first kind of psychological laboratory in the sense we have today in London, where he actually invites loads of local people from East London to come in.

He develops all sorts of marketing methods to get them to come in where he tests all their abilities. He builds lots of things for testing their abilities and other biomarkers as well, for instance. So he was the person who proved, you know, fingerprints can identify a person; everyone has an individual fingerprint, among many other things. And he was using all these statistics to generate kind of averages and to rank people from highest to lowest.

So even though he was doing these, like pseudoscientific things, like ranking the races, he was also developing the foundations of what became our research paradigm in psychology and psychometrics and psychiatry. Galton’s also important in his later work – he’s the person who coined eugenics, right? It’s now seen as a pseudoscience. But then it was the science of trying to improve the race at the population level, which again was deeply intertwined with his conceptions of ability and disability of sub-normalcy anyway, and again, was deeply intertwined with the sorts of racist views and views about social class and what I was really interested in pointing out is even though much later eugenics became seen as a pseudoscience and, you know, no reputable scientists would now endorse eugenics explicitly. We have just basically kept Galton’s research paradigm, his kind of basic way of thinking about things, where we think of things in terms of natural selection and functions and different parts of our brains and body have certain functions, and that we can rank these statistically to see how well we’re functioning.

And that with that comes value judgments about who’s more valuable or not. And I was interested partly in how this naturalized the various hierarchies, whether they were racial or cognitive or neurological or of the British Empire, of industrial capitalism, and how it kind of made them seem like natural. These rankings are natural rather than historically and socially produced.

And I also really wanted to draw attention to how Kraepelin was actually influenced by Galton and really just expanded his paradigm. So whereas Galton was focused more on just ability and in intelligence and things like reaction times and stuff like that, Kraepelin was kind of saying, Well, hey, we should apply this to thinking about mental illness and things like what we now call schizophrenia or stuff like that.

And Kraepelin proposed this concept of mass psychiatry and he basically says we need to use these kind of statistical methods and analyses of normality and sub-normalcy across the population at large to go far beyond what we think of psychiatry at the moment, to do things like test people for occupations, for military fitness, to test people in school and stuff like that.

And that’s basically the world we’re living in. We’re living in a world of, you know, this kind of Galtonian ideal of a world where we’re all kind of measured like this and constantly ranked, which constantly naturalizes these actually historically and socially produced hierarchies. And so that’s why Galton is the big baddie and why people are making memes where they search for him in Hell.

Chris Browne:

And I suppose one of the other figures in the book, and I’m not going to pronounce this right, is Thomas Szasz, or how do you say that?

Robert Chapman:

I say Szasz.

Chris Browne:

Szasz. Okay. So another one of the figures in the book is Thomas Szasz, who is, I guess, at the heart of the Anti-psychiatry movement or position, I guess, which comes a little bit later. You know, historically, it sort of emerges, becomes prominent in, I suppose, the 1960s and dethrones the sort of Freudian approach, I guess, to psychiatry. Could you tell us a little bit about the Anti-psychiatry movement and what it was about and I guess why it gained traction at the time and maybe some of the ways in which it was limited or problematic?

Robert Chapman:

Yeah. So first about the term anti-psychiatry people use this in all sorts of different ways. I tend to use it to refer to a movement in the 1960s and ‘70s primarily, although there are kind of remnants of it now and the people influenced by it today, of course. And it was both patient activists and organizations, but it was mainly kind of in an important sense, focused around these big figures you have, Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, Foucault is sometimes associated with it, although I don’t think that’s really correct. And he was he was quite critical of it, actually. But and a few others. And most of these were kind of rogue psychiatrists who had trained in psychiatry. They were psychiatrists, but they recognized lots of problems with the system that functioned as a form of social control in various ways.

And they were critical of it. So they published lots of books, which ended up becoming bestsellers often where they had kind of theoretical analysis of what was wrong with psychiatry and among other things, like the concept of mental illness and diagnoses, all these kinds of things. So it’s worth saying that were very genuine problems at the time, as there are now, that the main thing was that there were huge state asylums then in, say, 1960, which just locked up a great many people. Freudians were actually in charge then.

And that was basically because after World War Two, biological psychiatry, which was associated very strongly with eugenics, was like not acceptable anymore. And Freudians in some sense were able to kind of fill that gap because they came from more of a psychosocial approach rather than using this sort of statistical and genetic biological approach. But when they took over the asylums basically and took over basically took over American psychiatry, at least the abuses just carried on much as before.

So nothing actually improved that much. And yeah, people were just locked up and abused and pathologized for all sorts of reasons, usually not, often at least, not clear medical reasons, but kind of social and political ones. So women who were resisting patriarchy would be seen as like hysterical; Black people who were resisting racism would be considered like psychotic and have what some people called a protest psychosis because they were protesting. All these things basically where people were being pathologized for, you know, being outside the norms of the dominant system or resisting it in various ways.

And the reason I focus on Szasz a lot in the book, he was arguably the most influential anti psychiatrist, certainly in America and more broadly. But what I was interested in really is how his ideas and, framing and analysis of the situation has become so influential. It’s become very culturally influential to the extent that people often echo his arguments and ideas without knowing their origin or why he made them.

And the reason I wanted to kind of uncover this and go into it is because even though his ideas now are very popular on the left – or at least fairly popular; you encounter them in lots of leftist spaces – he was coming from a very right wing libertarian view and built them in a sense from that viewpoint, and ultimately to serve the interests of that kind of ideology.

So I really wanted to help make that clear, to challenge some people who might be on the left more generally, but have these kind of what I would call Szaszian views. So Szasz is incredibly interesting. He’s born in the Kingdom of Hungary to a very wealthy family and had a very happy childhood. But then his family were Jewish.

He’s secular himself, but of course, this is a big, big threat from Hitler and then so they fled to America, and that’s where he arrived when he was 18. He studied physics and then medicine, became a psychiatrist. And then in 1960, he published this book called The Myth of Mental Illness. And this is where it really begins. This the idea in here, he argues that mental illness is a myth.

It’s just a metaphor that we’ve forgotten is a metaphor. The argument he makes is that mental illness is not like physical illness. He says physical illness, physical abnormalities are just objective. You can verify them from things like blood tests; that’s just natural. By contrast, mental illness is just a subjective viewpoint of the psychiatrist, which reflects the views of society.

So they’re just pathologizing whatever they don’t like or whatever society doesn’t like. Therefore, he argued, it’s not real illness and psychiatry is a pseudoscience. Similarly, when it came to psychiatric classifications, schizophrenia and so on, again, these are not objective things that we can test with a blood test and things like that, but rather their classification is made up by psychiatrists.

Again, who would say that they’re not real, they’re just labels, it’s a pseudoscience. So that’s the kind of view and I think this catches on widely for many reasons. I mean, firstly, he’s a very good writer and he makes these very clear arguments and I think they’re quite intuitive to many people. And his book sells very well and lots of other people begin adopting these in all sorts of ways.

And it kind of becomes like a kind of countercultural common sense. It’s like the dominant counter-narrative. And I think it’s also very easy to see why this would catch on, because ultimately there were and are, as you say, these really big problems. Right. And especially if you know where all these people are being locked up for all these reasons, if you can kind of say, oh, well, actually it’s a myth, it’s not real, we can resist it.

That’s kind of one way of thinking about how to resist it. And I think a lot of energy was put into that. And some people still have those kinds of views today. So they’ll say, Oh, we don’t deny it because we don’t deny that people are suffering. This is really important, we don’t deny people are suffering. But this is ordinary distress.

It’s not illness, that’s different. They’ll say, you’re suffering. This is the world and people suffer, right? It’s natural to suffer. So that that’s the kind of thought. So what I was really interested in is thinking about his own reasons for coming up with this. And he was actually quite clear about this himself. He didn’t try to hide, but basically, as I said before, he was a kind of hard right libertarian.

He hated kind of socialism,and state provision of any kind. He was reading Hayek, the one of the kind of architects of like neoliberalism way back decades before neoliberalism was implemented. And he basically agreed with Hayek. This kind of view where we’re all just complete individuals, we’ve got complete responsibility, this completely neoliberal worldview. But his main critique of Hayek was he thinks that Hayek didn’t go far enough because Hayek still believes in that people could be mentally ill and Szasz was like, Well, no, we’re complete individuals.

Mental illness is just a way for people to escape their responsibility. Maybe you’re just not very good at dealing with the world, so you call yourself mentally ill. That’s the kind of view he has. It’s interesting. He kind of argues that mental illness was made up – because he thinks it’s made up, he thinks it’s a myth – by people who consider themselves mentally ill just as much as by psychiatrists.

It’s not just a top down thing. He thinks it’s a thing that came from people trying to escape their responsibility. And it’s from within this worldview, which he was already very deeply ingrained in his thinking that he built his critique of psychiatry. He wanted to show that actually it’s not real. We’re just complete individuals. And if you take that seriously and follow Szasz’s argument to its logical conclusions that means there should be nothing like state provision, you know, state support for people suffering.

‘Cause it’s not actually a health condition, right. It’s just distress. And if you are suffering from that and you can’t handle it, you’re just a weak person, basically. And the thought is maybe we need to toughen up a bit or something like that. And this is making us weaker because it’s like it’s not allowing us to become more resilient.

That kind of thing. So it’s coming from this very, very right wing libertarian view. But I was interested in how his ideas kind of became more popular on the left. And I guess I think a big part of that really is that it was the dominant counter-narrative. And as I say, the harms of psychiatry are real. But I also want to challenge that because I don’t actually think it’s liberatory.

You can’t build a liberatory politics from that from a left perspective. So I would like to challenge people on the left who have accepted those ideas or I mean, if someone can build a really liberatory politics out of that I’d be really interested to hear about it. But so far it hasn’t liberated anyone. It hasn’t done much good, and it’s actually done a lot of bad in various ways.

And as I argue in the book, at the kind of systemic level, one of the main functions of it is that it helped ease in the kind of neoliberal cuts and prior to that as well, to mental health services. And in some ways, the asylums were closed and that was good, although that was done in significant part for states to save money.

But lots of the people who were in those asylums, they weren’t liberated. Most of them ended up many homeless, many in… they just went to prison instead, right. Which is kind of what Szasz would have wanted because he thought, you know, you’ve got to take responsibility for your actions, you’ve got to go to prison. But that’s not liberation. That’s just shifting from one kind of carceral system to others.

So it so I’m very skeptical of that. So, yeah, that’s why I was trying to draw attention to that and to differentiate my kind of neurodivergent Marxist approach from that. Because sometimes people think if you, you know, if you’re critical of psychiatry, you’ve got to agree with all that stuff. But I’m going to say, no, we don’t. We shouldn’t agree with that stuff.

In fact, that’s, that’s holding us back.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, No, that’s great. And I guess we’ll come back to the differences then, I guess between the Anti-psychiatry position and a neurodivergent Marxism in just a minute. But you’ve mentioned neoliberalism there and the impact that this had on well, dovetailing with that neoliberal agenda, you know, just yeah, cuts and removing, rolling back state provision for mental health and so on.

I think you note in the book that in the sort of post-Fordist era, in the neoliberal era, autism diagnoses have increased quite dramatically. There’s been a radical expansion of autism diagnoses. So what is it about this phase of capitalism that we’re in now? Why has that led to, you know, an increase in mental disorders of one form or another?

Robert Chapman:

Yes. So as I said earlier, capitalism just does intensify in all these ways and it continues to restrict. But I describe post-Fordism in particular as a mass disabling event in the book. And I really want to, again, this… to make sense of why the neurodiversity movement arose when it did, why all these diagnoses have increased and stuff like that, and why people often find these diagnoses helpful for making sense of their lives, right. Why people are now saying, I am disabled, right?

And I think there are a bunch of things here and part of it is the rise of neoliberalism. There was a kind of mass crushing of the organized working class in the 1970s and 1980s, and you lose kind of all sorts of like protections and kind of the power of unions and stuff like this in all kinds of ways.

And we end up working longer hours with less protections and stuff like that. So part of it’s neoliberalism and just workers losing control and, you know, having worse quality of life, basically. And of course, that’s going to have really significant impacts on mental health and so forth. But one of the other big shifts I really detail is this kind of shift away from manufacturing towards emotional labor and towards a kind of cognitive capitalism.

The production of kind of cognitive commodities or cognition as a part of a knowledge economy. And it’s worth saying all labor, even, you know, even what we call manual labor, has of course, a cognitive component and emotional components. But this shift really in an important sense, tightens the norms of what kind of emotional and cognitive abilities you need to even have a relatively basic entry level job.

So it might be helpful thinking about this just with a concrete example. So one I sometimes use is the example of like a coffee shop barista, right? Often this is kind of seen as like a relatively unskilled job. You can train relatively quickly and so forth. Now I don’t think that but that’s I’m saying, you know, it often is seen like that, the pay isn’t great and so forth.

Lots of students and young people have these jobs. Right. But actually, you need a really specific kind of set of cognitive and emotional capacities to be able to do that. Right. So for a start, you’ve got to like be in a pretty busy place often, which might have bright lights and coffee machines and loads of conversations going on and even to be able to like, hear what your colleagues are saying or hear to take a customer order, you know, you’ve already got to have this very particular sensory profile and that’s going to lock out loads of people who struggle, like myself, who are autistic and struggle with sensory processing, to like hear voices and differentiate between background and foreground noise and so on, not just that, you’ll need capacities like really strong working memory, because someone’s going to be ordering like, you know, five different kinds of latte with different kinds of milk and stuff like this. And even if you’ve just got to hold that for like a few seconds, that’s really hard. I can’t do that.

You’ve got to have that kind of capacity. You’ve got to do emotional labor. You’ve got to be smiling. You’ve got to be happy. Right? You can’t be you can’t be grumpy and this kind of thing. Right. That’s extremely hard and very taxing as well. So you’ve got to have all these kinds of abilities just to be able to do this job, which is which isn’t even paid that much.

And this is a kind of pretty typical job of the kind of services industry, emotional labor era, right, as well. And of course, many of us are just kind of sitting in front of computers as well. We’re constantly typing, kind of you scroll, you read emails and then and then when you finish work, and you do a bit more scrolling in the evening or whatever; you’re scrolling on Twitter or whatever?

And all this time they have these kind of algorithms. All of this is designed, right, to generate profit. You have algorithms directing your attention in some ways and blocking off other ways. There might be advertisements or people are extracting profit from you in all sorts of ways while you’re doing all of this. So it was all of these things I was trying to bring together to show how in the post-Fordist era, which is a very precarious and as I say, neoliberal era anyway, it’s like we don’t have much worker control, we’ve got less money, lower quality of life in certain ways. You add to this all these kind of emotional… restriction of emotional and cognitive norms and sensory norms. We’re constantly bombarded by flashing lights and advertisements and stuff like this. This is just an absolutely hellish place to live. If you fall outside, even slightly outside, those cognitive and sensory and emotional norms. So it’s not just diagnoses like autism which have risen in this period.

It’s all sorts of diagnoses. So that’s why I call it a mass disabling event. I’d say people who… I don’t think there’s a very clear and strict line between disabled and non-disabled, but it’s like things that were, might have been relatively minor disabilities before became much more significant disabilities, and some things which probably wouldn’t have been disabilities at all before became disabilities.

And also kind of discrimination against people who fall outside the norms in these ways, increases in all sorts of ways. And it’s not just work as well, it’s the whole ideal of what’s an ideal person changes and of the kind of person who can do well at school or we should produce at school or, you know, who’s a normal child who’s not weird and who gets bullied.

And those kind of things changes in line with these norms. So it’s not just about the workplace, it’s about how the broader logics of post-Fordism kind of changed the normal person and who falls inside and outside of that. So yeah, that’s why I describe it as a mass disabling event and really why I think the neurodiversity movement just had to arise at that point, right?

People were just suffering so much. There had to be a movement.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, that all makes perfect sense. So we’ve already talked a little bit about your kind of vision of a Neurodivergent Marxism, which is, I guess, ultimately what you’re advocating for in the book. Tell us a little bit more about that and how it differs, if it hasn’t already been made explicit through the course of this conversation, how it differs from some of the more kind of rights based or liberal approaches.

And then, you know, I think you also use the phrase in the book, neurodivergent communism. What might we be sort of looking towards in the future?

Robert Chapman:

Good. Yeah. So, so these are slightly different things and neurodivergent Marxism, I begin with that and it’s trying to sort of wed a marxist approach with neurodiversity theory. A big part of this is why I tried to develop a historical understanding. I use a kind of historical and dialectical approach to understand the material conditions that led to the kind of, this contradiction between actual human needs and what we need to thrive and survive and the actual system we live in.

And to think about those contradictions, to think about, you know, how we might overcome them. So it’s partly about the method I’m using, but ultimately this method is for thinking about liberation, and for thinking about praxis too. Now, that said, I am very clear in the book that I don’t set out a bunch of clear policy proposals or something like that.

And really the reason is I see the book as an act of consciousness raising primarily, it’s an attempt at developing a historical consciousness so we can think together about how to organize and how to change our organizing and what liberation might require. But I guess I don’t think that we are at the level of consciousness yet where anyone would just like, know what to do, right?

So I’m very skeptical of anyone who says, they will say they’ve got the answers to that and has got some like practical plan of exactly how to liberate neurodivergent people. And I’m not defeatist about this in any sense. I’m you know, I’m really hopeful. It’s just I don’t think we’re quite at that stage yet. Right. This is why we need neurodivergent Marxism or so I argue.

So I welcome everyone to partake in that, to read revolutionary theory, to get organizing, to bring this into unions more, to collectively organize. We need to move away from a kind of liberal representation politics to mass organizing as a militant neurodivergent Marxist movement. One way of thinking about this is I have this section called Towards Neurodivergent Power. And it’s worth saying I, I didn’t really explicitly clarify this in that much detail, and that’s because I think I want to clarify it in future writings more.

But I was thinking a bit about the shift towards the concept of Black Power in the Black liberation movement in the 1960s. So you have this earlier movement where you have a kind of focus on civil rights like Martin Luther King and so forth, and then you get anti-discrimination rights and stuff like that. But then lots of people find out that that doesn’t equal actual Black liberation.

There’s still white supremacy and so forth. And then you get parties like the Black Panthers. And I think Stokely Carmichael in 1967 says, you know, we need to start talking about Black power. And I guess I’m interested a kind of shift like that in the neurodiversity movement where we could talk about something like Neurodivergent Power and think about our organizing in that sense because, so just me as an individual, I’m disabled, I’ve got a bunch of mental illnesses.

I don’t have that much power. You know, I’m in a relatively privileged position. I can write the book and I got a Ph.D. and those kinds of things right, but still don’t have that much power. But together, collectively, there are hundreds of thousands or millions of us. And that power has to be collective. It has to be about collective organizing.

So that’s the kind of shift I want to think about. As to what that organizing would consist in, I was careful to not commit fully to any particular kind of Marxism, right? So that might there’s like an Italian kind of workerist, autonomist Marxism, and then there’s like Marxist-Leninist vanguardism and stuff like that. I wanted to not commit strongly to any of those in particular because I want this to be like open to people from different traditions to use in different ways.

And again, I don’t know what the answer is going to be. Perhaps it will be a vanguard approach. Perhaps it will be a different approach. But this is something I think we need to really work on together and collectively over the coming years, I guess. And there are two groups of people I really want to convince with this or two main groups.

There’s one is the neurodiversity movement as it currently exists, which as I say, is mostly in the liberal reformist paradigm. You know, I want to challenge people who are within that paradigm to change their organizing and shift towards, more towards the radical left. But I also want to kind of challenge people already on the radical left to change their analysis and their organizing to have neurodiversity as part of that, right.

And I guess I found over many years, sometimes you get these kind of radical left organizations which are really good in loads of ways, where neurodiversity is just dismissed as it’s just this identity politics thing, just a distraction or something like that. But I think the combined power of these groups is phenomenal if we organize properly. So that’s that’s the kind of challenge. I guess it’s worth saying briefly as well, this idea of neurodivergent power as a collective, in liberal neurodiversity, you often get this notion of individual superpowers, right?

Say like, Oh, my autism is not a disability, it’s a superpower. All that means that it’s useful for capital it’s useful for people to extract profit from you, and then they’ll burn you out and spit you out. Right? That’s what capitalism does. It just sort of chews you up and extracts everything from you and then spits you back out.

So I really want to move away from this kind of individual superpower talk, towards collective power and how we could use that for liberation.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. I think that’s probably a really nice place to leave it. We’ve covered a lot of bases, but of course there’s so much more in the book that you go into in greater detail that people can find out more. And yeah, so Robert, thank you very much for your time today. It’s been a real pleasure talking to you.

Robert Chapman:

Thank you very much for having me. It was a really great chat and I hope people enjoy the book.

Chris Browne:

That was Robert Chapman on Radicals and Conversation. We’ll be back next month with another episode of Radicals in Conversation. So until then, thank you for listening and goodbye.