Ms Tara O'Donnell-Killen:

It is interesting because I noticed that Inclusion Ireland said the same thing, that they also envision that we move away from the charity model and embrace a human rights-based model.

The neuro-affirmative model is different in that it does not view a neurodivergent person as less than a non-neurodivergent person. Initially, the idea in the medical model is that there is a particular way to be human and a particular type of brain; something happened to that brain which made it or that person, disordered; and now we need to fix the problem inside the person or accommodate them within society a little. The human rights-based model moves away from that entirely and says that, just like biodiversity on the whole planet, we also have neurodiversity and differences in brains and we need that. We need different perspectives and different ways of processing information for us all to succeed as a species. Rather than seeing a minority population as being disordered and needing to be fixed, we actually need to accommodate them. We need to recognise that we are all part of this; we built society for one particular type and the way we do it needs to be changed now. We need to recognise we made a mistake when we did not know any better at the time. However, now we do and we need to move forward and embrace the thoughts, perspectives and ideas of neurodivergent people.