Neurodiversity, disability, wellbeing

Abstract

Cognitive disability has traditionally been framed through a medical model, which takes individual impairment to be the primary cause of distress and disablement among the disabled. This is often accompanied by the notion that cognitive disability is inherently at odds with living a good life. In recent decades neurodiversity paradigm proponents have contested this, typically, albeit not necessarily, by drawing on various forms of the social model of disability to show that distress and disablement are the product of wider social factors more than individual impairments. Here I argue that the concept of impairment, which is central to both these models, both runs into conceptual problems and contradicts the very concept of neurodiversity. Moreover, neither model manages to strike a nuanced balance between admitting that cognitive disability can be accompanied by varying degrees of individual hardship, and nonetheless recognising that it is compatible with living a good life. I introduce the recently proposed value-neutral model. I argue that this alternative can both avoid the problems just noted and may prove more useful for conceptualising cognitive disability and its relationship with wellbeing.