(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.

> There's a difficult line to find there; what kind of neuroatypical behaviour should or shouldn't be treated?

Does it cause you to pose a risk of harm to other people or yourself? If yes then treatment is strongly suggested and sometimes forced.

Does it interfere with your day to day life? Does it stop you from living an independant life or from being part of society (usually defined on your terms, not someone elses)? If yes then treatment is offered and the plan should be to help you achieve what you realistically want.

> There's this trope that people with mental illnesses—like John Nash, or Rain Man, or Sheldon Cooper,

A minor point but only one of those people has a mental illness. John Nash has a psychosis type mental illness. The fictional character Sheldon Cooper will probably be thought to have Asperger's Syndrome by most of the audience (although the writers haven't declared any diagnosis and shift between others). Asperger's isn't a mental illness, it's (in the US) a learning disability (learning difficulty in the UK). Rain Man probably has Autism which again is a learning disability (in US and UK).

> 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)?

You've posed this as if it's some big question but it really isn't. At least, in England. Maybe it used to be different or it's different over there. People who hear voices are provided support for that if they want it, but medication is reserved for times when the voices are intrusive or distressing. Anti-psychotic medication isn't fun and has considerable side effects.

The following is from personal experience.

I think the most useful, helpful thing for mainstream society to do is not to treat "neuroatypicality" as a unified category. And I say this as a very neuroatypical person.

But the thing is, when you get to the tails of the normal distributions for various cognitive and neurological functions, most of the individuals you find are cognitively and neurologically uneven. We may be significantly higher-functioning in one aspect, while being average in most other aspects, and sometimes lower-functioning in one or another aspect. The biggest mistake mainstream society makes is treating cognitive functioning as a uniform, one-dimensional spectrum from low-functioning (autistic people, low-IQ people, the "mentally ill", etc.) to very high functioning (so-called "geniuses" and "very well-balanced" people).

I'll use myself as an example. The educational system simply never knew what the bloody hell to do with a small child who obviously suffered from nasty emotional disturbances, which were at least partially due to parental violence, and who obviously had difficulty interacting with others, and yet who simultaneously tested at the 98th percentile of intelligence and obviously wanted to make friends. "Gifted and talented" classes were designed for kids who were just as gifted in their self-organization as in their ability to read, write, and do maths, and who also cooperated easily with adults and wanted to work within the system. "Special education" was designed for the intellectually weak, the especially violent, and those utterly unable to direct themselves. I didn't fit into any category the system had.

So I only started getting a really decent education when I entered university, where I was, pretty much for the first time, allowed to take mostly smart-kid classes and allowed to socialize without being branded as the dangerous idiot first thing. It worked great: I learned how to make friends and graduated with a solid circle of them, and I managed honors in computer science. Admittedly: I now wish I'd been able to weedle out the opportunities and privileges those Good Little Children got, since in adulthood I'm seeing just how much they were able to accomplish while I was having to push to be treated as a non-moron, but oh well.

Weirdly enough, other than a post-undergrad bout of depression that apparently happens to everyone (but which nobody is ever told about...), the post-school world of work and research has been a pretty great experience!

And here's the freakish thing: among the very... anything - the very intelligent, the very creative, the very emotional - none of this story has turned out all that unusual! I attend lesswrong.com meet-ups sometimes and find that pretty much everyone else there has stories just like mine.

TL;DR: Society thinks that cognitive functioning ranges from "really great" to "really bad", with each particular aspect of mental functioning co-varying along a single dimension. This is approximately correct for middling cases - a person who's average all-around will usually be roughly the same level of average in each particular - but almost entirely wrong for people at the tails.