Your Mind Is Beautiful, Whatever It's Doing

I have always been intensely curious about other minds. I’m bipolar, and at times I experience psychosis. Maybe this curiosity comes with the territory. When I wrote A Mind Apart: Travels in A Neurodiverse World I began asking anyone who would answer the question how they think. Not what they think, but how. We use the term neurodiversity and the term neurotypicality, but what do they really mean?

The richness of the answers astonished me: one person I asked had a mental elevator that stopped at different “floors” for different life areas, like work or family. Others had colors or music associated with thought. One man had a complex inner government that debated his choices. I very quickly abandoned the idea that there was a “typical” consciousness. It’s not a little processor in there or a tidy lawn. It’s a “rain forest,” to borrow an image from brain theorist Gerald Edelman.

I am part of this human variety. I know my inner experiences, and inner imagery, are on the outside of the “normal” bell curve. But I had no onset of psychotic “disorder.” Diaries I kept starting at the age of 11 recall many out-of-consensus beliefs. Some were frightening. Once I believed my food was being poisoned. That belief was painful but eventually ended.

Other experiences enriched. I wrote at 11 that life resembled a play and in it, people existed in clothes “of such complexity and intricacy it dazzles the one who is slow enough to think about it.” I meant this as a metaphor, for the beautiful diversity of other humans. And I believed my mind helped me to slow down.

Evolution has kept those defined as neurodiverse around for a reason. I talked with evolutionary scientist Antonio Preti, who wrote me that “our chance to adapt to new and unprecedented environments depends on genetic variability.” A 2022 CBC radio documentary called “The Myth of Normal” drives home the point, as thinkers like Thomas Armstrong and Steve Silberman agree that we are a neurodiverse species because creativity and adaptation demand it. As Temple Grandin put it, while neurotypical early humans yakked it up, those on the autism spectrum went off and invented the stone spear.

Both these ideas—the diversity of consciousness, and the need for that diversity—challenge the idea that mental differences are somehow a disease or a genetic flaw. I’ve been told by many that I’m brave for admitting I have a psychotic disorder, but they wouldn’t. I’ve been given career advice that I shouldn’t mention it at all. And maybe most grating, that I don’t “seem” like someone like that. But bipolar is a fundamental piece of who I am. Yes, I choose to manage it. And yes, I’ve had times of incredible difficulty. But I don’t have symptoms, I have a life.

When I address groups including psychiatrists, parents, and patients my message is this: You can value yourself (or your patients or family). You can look at these experiences to see what there is to learn, and what you have learned. You can see all of what you’ve lived as part of the beautiful person you are. And still want to feel better. There is no contradiction here.

Recently the news that serotonin is not the mechanism of depression caught a lot of people up short. They’re the kind of people I hear from, who wonder if they’ve been flimflammed. The fact is that how many drugs work is still mysterious. Medicine is still figuring out the mechanism of Tylenol. Antidepressants have a lower success rate than many other common medications. I know people whose lives they’ve saved. I know others who don’t respond to them but just get prescribed higher doses. Medications don’t address trauma, including collective traumas like racism, that are associated with psychiatric diagnoses. While they may be helpful tools, and I use them, they don’t in their core philosophy of sick and well address me.

The psychiatric critic R.D. Laing once said that after he spoke to gatherings of psychiatrists about faults in our concepts of mental illness, many would approach him to say they agreed. But they’d add a comment he paraphrased as, “Ronald, we agree with you, but you shouldn’t talk like this in front of the children.”

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But we neurodiverse are not children.

Some people hesitated to tell me about phenomena like their elevators. Secretly, they worried that they were “a little off.” A student of mine told me recently she didn’t respond to medication and knew she’d never feel good, because her “brain didn’t work right.” I was once almost dropped from a neurodiversity panel because a member argued that “normies” who can value autism could never value those with schizophrenia or bipolar.

It’s become more common to discuss the limitations of the disease model in talking about different mindways. But psychiatry is still practiced on the ground with brief assessments and many prescriptions. It’s time for conversations about neurodiversity to become standard practice in medicine, along with humility about something as complex as the mind.