I’d like you to know you’re not alone, though that knowledge doesn’t help. Some people don’t seem to understand that not everyone is like them–and I feel as if I’m verging into commentary on neurotypicals of which I’m entirely ignorant and uncomfortable about.

I’ve seen it as a term written on the internet and I understand it’s a label for the normative response in a given population. The term makes me resoundingly uncomfortable, because there’s an innate belief there: neurotypical can only exist if there’s an antithesis. I don’t think anyone can prove there exists a neurotypical brain.

I’d been severely isolated during critical developmental-years which I believe created a bias towards isolationist behaviour as an adult. People are already incredibly isolated in industrial-societies and I think that’s abnormal and is a cause of ill-health. An abnormal degree of isolation is normalised producing ill health for the whole population and if that’s true how useful a tool is the label “neurotypical”?

I perceive a lot of “neurotypical” behaviour as a result of authoritarian capitalist-societies and its needs. The need to monitor time and create uniformity are artificial needs of industrial-nations, not a natural phenomenon of the human condition. I think it’s wholly abnormal to have children sit at desks quietly and attentive, yet this is framed as “normal” behaviour and demanded of all citizens typically. This is public-education in an industrious society.

People’s inability to conform to those artificial demands creates an entirely artificial distinction: neurotypical and non-neurotypical. Those that can wrangle themselves into a passing conformity and those that resoundingly can not. That’s how I perceive that sort of language and it makes me uncomfortable when writing about myself or what I think ‘normal’ is.

I don’t have a good reference for what ‘normal’ should be as I know my upbringing was exceptionally isolationist and abusive, but what if that is the nominal normal in industrial-societies? I don’t know and it’s something I can’t really know and I’m skeptical of people who claim to know.

I’ve tried to explain what I perceive to be debilitating “executive-dysfunction” to psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses and allied health professionals yet I’m met with blank gazes and asinine remarks. “Well if you really wanted to you would do it.”

I would have been humiliated had I any self-respect left. It was only after a suicide attempt that I could even talk about the severity of my dysfunction with others. I genuinely thought they were learned people who could render assistance. They’re just people. People who lie; people who don’t believe your statements; people who don’t understand; people who will gaslight you; people who are seeing you just because it’s their “job”. Mental-health practitioners are awful. They treat and speak to you as if you were an imbecile, especially if you present autistically.

The same psychiatrist that told me he can’t prescribe stimulants after I requested them is now prescribing me stimulants, only a year after the request and his bald-faced lie (we both knew it was a lie at that time, but I had no option but to acquiesce and pretend that his lie was true). After he’d run out of ideas and imaginary disorders. Every other drug he prescribed either did nothing that I could perceive or only had negative effects. It’s one thing to read about tardive dyskinesia and it’s another to experience it. You created a year of exacerbated misery for me, because you think it’s appropriate to conduct psychiatry from an office where you meet your patient months apart for less than an hour. Fuck you. You’re a disinterested practitioner and the whole industry operates under malpractice. I’m glad general doctors are authorised to prescribe stimulants now.

You are your only advocate unfortunately. People won’t understand the misery, shame and distress that we suffer.