Afternoon Comrades.
Today’s topic is going to be one of those that requires nuance and a few disclaimers as I will be writing about neuro-divergence, therapy, and of course, capitalism.
Before we start, a very brief note that the publication schedule here will be changing at the end of the month. Starting in February, the free tier will be receiving one dispatch a week, with the patreons receiving a total of three. I will be reducing the monthly subscription fee to 5USD to make it as accessible for everyone and financially sensible for me. Feel free to hit that button below now, as you get a month’s free trial in any case. This below dispatch is an example of what gets sent out to the patreons.
A lot of what will follow is personal and not academic. I have my feelings about psychology and whilst I understand the need for it, I often struggle with it as a practical tool within the quest for marxist liberation. This exists, absolutely and there are libraries of hugely intelligent marxist psychology available, I simply do not know most of it as my focus has always been a different one. That is one disclaimer. Secondly, I am not against therapy on principle, on the contrary, I benefit(ed) from it and I believe most of us would and should too. However, with all activities, both meta-physical and material in our capitalist reality it pays to try and understand why something exists, whom it serves to asses its material-net positive/ negative results.
I am sure a few other disclaimers will follow but this is also one of these off-the-cuff dispatches that I am writing to see where it follows. Mostly, these dispatches are planned, edited and edited again before I send them out to you, not today.
Definitions
Let’s start with the two words that over the last few words have become more used in our mainstream narrative: neurotypical and neurodivergent.
Initially, the medical term “neurotypical” was exclusively used in the medical community when working with people who were diagnosed with autism, and subsequently, neurotypical meant to include people that were not diagnosed with autism. The terms “neurotypical,” “neurodivergent,” and “neurodiverse” originated as a more comprehensive way to describe autism.
Currently, these terms do not represent formal medical categories. But some people in the autism community and the neurodiversity movement use them to promote acceptance.
People who support the use of terms such as neurotypical and neurodiverse believe that autism doesn’t need a cure. They believe the differences it presents in people should be respected and celebrated. They might use the term “neurotypical” to talk about the ways that individuals who aren’t on the spectrum can lack strengths that those on the spectrum have. For example, neurotypical people may be too focused on material things or go along with social norms that can be hurtful or destructive to themselves or others.
What is neurodiversity?
The term “neurodiversity” refers to a larger category of people with varying neurological differences, as well as neurotypical people. Many people identify as neurodiverse, including people with:
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
Tourette syndrome
depression
dyslexia
intellectual disabilities
schizophrenia
Autistic people, individuals on the spectrum, or those who have other neurological differences are referred to as “neurodivergent.”
The Discourse. Part 1, Background
I woke up this morning and this thought popped into my head:
My first medical diagnosis with ADHD came at 19- prior to that and mostly due to the fact that I was attending an US High School at the time, my behaviour was considered problematic and dealt with by giving a teenager copious amounts of pharmaceutical drugs, legalized amphetamines mostly, and sure, my “performance” became manageable, i.e. I was easier to control. Truthfully, I never gave the diagnosis much thought, I never experienced my ADHD to be so destructive to the expected socialized norms until much later in my life. As in about 2 years ago.
By the time I was 25-26 I had started an agency to sell my work, mostly advertising, design and marketing. It was successful to a a degree, or to be clear, by the expected social norm, but I was not healthy. A few of you know the story, but for those that don’t, very briefly, the stress/expectations/responsibilities were far to big for me, the stress caused severe back damage, I ended up in hospital that ultimately resulted in 6 operations on my spine and here we are today.
My partner at the time, as well as many colleagues in the industry, figured that my inability to handle this stress and not be as successful as they would expect was due to my inability to communicate successfully in conflicts and, in additional, seemingly not being able to build anything for longer than a year. Again, disclaimer, I will get to the terminology shortly, I am using certain words on purpose here. Due to this feedback I sought out therapy and went, twice a week, almost every week for about 10 years. Initially, this therapy focused on conflict management in communication, or, plainly, as I learned a few months into it, how to manipulate people to get what you want through communication. I know, shocking, and this is where the shortly to follow critique will be based on.
Now, this therapy wasn’t done by just any ol’ hack with a degree, no, it was based on one of the world’s leading communications psychologists, who by accident was based in Hamburg and two of his disciples, both professors at the University here, were my “therapists”. To their credit, it took about a year for both of them to understand that I certainly did not need help in regards to communication, but medical help due to severe PTSD going back decades. They helped with that and most of that is actually well-managed these days. Nevertheless, in the course of our sessions it became increasingly clear to me, and again, to their credit, them that their entire construct of “help” was based on the fact that any behaviour outside of the “norm” that is expected, needs treatment. The question of “why”, however, they either wilfully ignored or simply couldn’t see.
A few years down the line I look back at this time in therapy not as a means of helping to address “my problems” but getting me in line to become a productive member of society.
The Discourse. Part 2, Critique
Starting with more disclaimers, yes, some people need therapy. Desperately and my opinion is that it should free for all, easily accessible and those that offer therapy need to be highly trained professionals - whose route towards that professionalism should, of course be, free and accessible for all.
However, neurodivergence set aside for a moment, most of us don’t need therapy, most of us need revolution. Yes, of course I am going to bring Marx into this, you know where you are. The majority of our ills are widely identified using the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which defines it along psychological lines: emotional exhaustion, a feeling of de-personalization and cynicism, and a low sense of personal accomplishment. Accordingly, these “ills” are often framed as a personal problem whose solution should come in the form of self-care. This is where the critique starts: the causes of our stresses are systemic and predominately not medical/individual, and the comparison between recycling your yoghurt cups and ending Climate Extinction to, take Prozac to survive the alienating destruction due to Capitalism needs to be made.
Therapy, especially as the majority of it is aimed at making us into functioning, contributing members of society, absolutely does not address the structural factors that contribute to our stresses in the first place: namely, the destructive nature of Capitalism.
Furthermore, the elephant in the room of course is terminology and how it is used in our context. Who decided what productive means? Who decided what neurotypical is and furthermore, who decided that people that have autism, adhd etc. needed to be helped in the first place.
Easy. The bastards that benefit financially from you being “normal”. “Normal” to them means: easy to quantify, easy to handle, easy to exploit and easy to suppress. Again, it is absolutely vital to our understanding of our shared reality that the construct of reality was man-made, by people whose only interest is the accumulation of wealth. In our industrialized, hyper-connected world any deviation from their “norm” requires resources to align the “un-normal” with their expected levels of productivity/consumption. All in all, all of us are nothing but numbers in an Excel sheet and deviations are erased.
But who in their right mind would want to be “neurotypical” when that means just that: total subversion to the accumulation of capital when the human experience can and is so much more than that? Once we can understand how these “norms” aren’t social in their root, but economic ( granted, a social construct also and luckily so, simply because that means we can change and is not inherent ) then we have to ask whether divergence is something that requires therapy, or help, or requires systemic change of reality to no longer be “bothersome” but simply a reality outside of required binary of capitalism.
To conclude, capitalism requires you to be nothing but a producing/consuming number and the sheer existence of the idea that a divergence exists requires help. Within the context of revolutionary change this is one of the many aspects of commercialized existence that needs to be forgotten. Forgotten as an ill side-effect from the most brutal quantification of the human experience that we call Freedom.
We don’t need Prozac/Ritalin/Therapy etc.- we need a revolution that will once and for all end this man-made construct called capitalism that is going to the death of us all.
That’s what we are here for.
Revolutionary Hugs from the personal side of this newsletter and thank you for your attention, time and support.
Yours,
Steven.
It's important not to overlook the acute, life-threatening suffering that needs emergency attention for the sake of the life and safety of literal physical people. Your personal experience with ADHD and therapy is not at all typical. People who are suffering, whether the cause is brain chemistry or capitalism, will not be saved from a mental health crisis by "revolution". One more suggestion: never tell people they don't need their meds, in any context, for any reason.
As someone who has only been diagnosed with ADHD in their late 30s: you are wrong - we need Ritalin (or in my case Vyvanse) none the less. Way too simplified and neglecting the medical evidence here - as well as individual struggle caused by neurological distinctions - you don’t seem to recognize the privilege you had: being diagnosed at a young age and obviously living somewhere you had access to weekly (!?) therapy. Glad for you, but you don’t seem to have an idea how it feels to live through this without these privileges - you might not even realize that up until a few years ago women with ADHD did not even „exist“. Denying the need or evidence for medication is just naive, in whatever social construct.