a glossary

attention differences

paying attention, keeping attention, using attention, and expressing attention in different ways to the consensus reality and/or conventions of my current social context.

autistic experience

literally, the experience of being “autistic,” whatever “autistic” might mean to the individuals who use the term. This term is used instead of “autistic”. or ”I have autism”, or, “I have ASD”, “I am ASD”, “I am AudiHD”. I like it cause it seems broad to me and isn’t connected to the identity “autistic,” – which I do also use but in particular ways. I never use “I have autism/ASD,” etc. These are invalid medical terms. I place myself amongst the autistic population by saying I use mouth words, have selective mutism, have some support needs, and am disabled.

biopsychosocial

"This model is both a philosophy of clinical care and a practical clinical guide. Philosophically, it is a way of understanding how suffering, disease, and illness are affected by multiple levels of organization, from the societal to the molecular. At the practical level, it is a way of understanding the patient’s subjective experience as an essential contributor to accurate diagnosis, health outcomes, and humane care." (source)

CPTSD

Complex-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a contested diagnostic term used to describe the emotional and mental distress some people experience after being harmed. It arose out of the institution of Western-Anglo psychology trying to make sense of people who weren’t soldiers but seemed to be experiencing PTSD.

Here’s an example of the conversation around the use and validity of the diagnosis. Cultural concepts of distress and complex PTSD: Future directions for research and treatment

degeneracy

"The classical example is the genetic code. Multiple codons can encode for a single amino acid. This is genetic degeneracy. In neuroscience, it means that multiple pathways, often structurally distinct, can produce the same functional output." (source)

monotropic

"Having a mind that focuses “more energy (resources) on a smaller number of things at any one time. This has been likened to having tunnels of attention where monotropic people become so highly engaged in their specific interest that they may not notice what is happening outside of that space but equally could be hyper-vigilant within that attention tunnel.”

phonological blindness

“difficulty segmenting, blending and manipulating the phonemes that they hear in spoken words (Rayner et al., 2012). In reading, deficient phonological representations impede grapheme-phoneme translation and efficient word recognition (more here on word recognition- Griffiths and Snowling, 2002), with phonological deficits also impacting negatively on verbal short-term memory and naming”

Read a lot more from this source about the disputed diagnosis of dyslexia and what the impairment of phonological use is here.

PTSD

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a contested diagnostic term used to describe the emotional and mental distress some people experience after being harmed. It arose out of the institution of Western-Anglo psychology trying to make sense of soldiers in distress, what had been called “shell shock”.

Here’s an example from the conversation contesting its use and offering other ways to understand harm to individuals and groups and the meanings made out of suffering. Decolonising emotional well-being and mental health in development: African feminist innovations.