After Normal

Description

Five years ago, David Gray-Hammond’s The New Normal asked what “normal” would mean for Autistic people once the pandemic was over. His answer was that normal had been the crisis all along. After Normal is that book, revised, expanded and grown in new directions. Its essays revisit cure culture, functioning labels, the double empathy problem, autism research and the Autistic community, and carry them into a world of revived “epidemic” rhetoric, overdiagnosis panics and a new Mental Health Act. Eight new chapters set out the ideas David has developed since: the Ecosystemic Model of Distress, the Chaotic Self, the Autistic rhizome, the burnout–psychosis cycle, carcerative care, and Autistic substance use. Angry, tender and practical, After Normal asks a different question. Not how we get back to normal, but what we grow instead.