neurodiversity paradigm.

All the information had to be reinterpreted from an entirely new perspective. It wasn’t just that questions had new answers—the questions themselves were different.

A new conceptual framework was slowly beginning to emerge, and by the late 1990s a crucial piece of this framework’s vocabulary had been provided by the emergence of the term neurodiversity. Implicit in this juicy new word was an idea that the discourse in the autistic community had been groping its way toward all along: the idea that just as human

That’s a true paradigm shift: a shift in our fundamental assumptions; a radical shift in perspective that requires us to redefine our terms, recalibrate our language, rephrase our questions, reinterpret our data, and completely rethink our basic concepts and approaches.

pathology paradigm, in which autism is framed as a form of medical pathology—a “disorder” or “condition”—and the fact that this pathology paradigm consistently results in autistic people being stigmatized, dehumanized, abused, harmed, and traumatized by professionals and often by their own families.

A paradigm is a set of fundamental assumptions or principles, a mindset or frame of reference that shapes how one thinks about and talks about a given subject. A paradigm shapes the ways in which one interprets information, and determines what sort of questions one asks and how one asks them. A paradigm is a lens through which one views reality.

other questions, that had never been asked because they would have seemed like nonsense under the old paradigm, suddenly became meaningful.

pathology paradigm.