(Warning: long screed tangent to the article.)

To be fair, Superman locks himself in a closet because his powers are too scary, but yeah, this is totally a different case.

There's this trope that people with mental illnesses—like John Nash, or Rain Man, or Sheldon Cooper, or all of these people who can paint perfect landscapes because they're on the autism spectrum or have brain trauma—are more advanced than people who aren't. And yeah, these people can do things that the rest of us would have a much harder time doing. But it also comes with the fact that the world is going to be a much harder place for them. For people who do have brain quirks that they can take advantage of, it can be a really empowering narrative. It can also be harmful for people whose brain quirks don't fit well into a role that's valued by society.

There's a difficult line to find there; what kind of neuroatypical behaviour should or shouldn't be treated? Most people can agree that depression needs to be treated, because it's harmful to the sufferer with no benefit. Or if someone is hearing messages from aliens and running away from home and wandering about alone in altered mental states, it's fairly uncontroversial to put them on antipsychotics, even with the negative side-effects.

But on the other hand, the idea of medicating ADHD kids is massively controversial, because the argument can be made that for many people diagnosed with it are either misdiagnosed, or are just bored or learn differently. But I also know ADHD people who legitimately cannot function if they don't take their medicine. What should be medicated or what shouldn't?

Or here's an even more borderline case: what if someone is convinced that they're hearing messages from the beyond, and decides to spend the next ten years writing a book about how to live at peace with the world? What if the book doesn't make sense? Should they be medicated, because they've clearly broken with reality? Or should they be let alone, because there's a remote outside chance that maybe we're all wrong and they're on to something? Should they see a psychiatrist or a counsellor, who they can talk to and can keep track of how well they're doing? If so, should that person take an authority role, or should they be someone to be worked with to reach a mutually agreeable course of medication (which may be none at all)?

Hence movements centred around neuroatypical people, and this narrative that they're potentially a next stage in human evolution. Certainly, there are plenty of neuroatypical people who have desirable traits because of it that could very well become the norm, but there are also plenty of people whose traits are simply going to be selected against. It's an incredibly attractive narrative for those people, though, because society doesn't tend to value them as people as much as 'neurotypical' people, which is absolutely terrible.

I personally think that there are three big takeaways for this:

1. People are people, and should be valued as such.
2. Not everyone has a special talent that is valued by society, and that's okay. See #1.
3. Medication isn't fire-and-forget. It's something that needs to be constantly re-evaluated and carefully managed.