THE NEURODIVERSITY PARADIGM AND ABOLITION OF PSYCHIATRIC INCARCERATION

Against rising calls to expand carceral psychiatry and increasingly pervasive mischaracterizations of neurodivergence in law, this Note accurately introduces the neurodiversity paradigm to call for the abolition of psychiatric incarceration. This Note challenges empirical narratives that render Neurodivergent people incapable of producing knowledge and holding expertise on their own embodied experiences by rejecting dominant conceptions of "mental illness" as an incompetence-inducing pathology that impairs an underlying "normal cognitive function." Rather, by positioning neurodivergence as integral to and indistinguishable from the self, this Note corrects the longstanding removal of expertise on neurodivergence from Neurodivergent people and misplacement of that expertise within the intersection of medical and legal professions. By severing the assumed causal connection between "mental illness" and legal competence, this Note argues that all people, as the experts on their own self-concept, retain the final and unilateral legal authority to define the support they need in crisis and beyond.