♪♪ >> middle and high school students, your opinion matters so that your work be heard with c-span's video competition might be part of the national conversation by creating a documentary answering the question, how does the federal impact your life? ...n before we begin i would like to

thank my department for your support, especially an adult service supervisor and my programminggr partner who is alo doing tech support for us behind the scenes today as well as our public service administrator for her constant support and mentoring. today we are joined by two incredible activists. melody is the founder of the narrow diversity project and also journalist producer and speaker and author of the book we are here for today which is divergent minds thriving in a world that wasn't designed for you. our special guest host today melody is an activist attorney professor and award-winning author and melody is also

written a series of titles. her latest book how an ancient poet changed my life. you should pick up. that's a good one. to the viewers if you have questions during today's discussion, feel free to enter them in the chat and you can also put them in the queue and day at the bottom of the screen to ensure they do not get lost. if you are watching the live stream on facebook today, leave a comment and we will try to get those answered as well and without further ado i will let you take it away. >> thank you so much for having us. i'm so excited to be here to talk about this amazing book in a world that wasn't designed for you because i am a person thriving in a world that wasn't

designed for me. when i saw this book it just screameded out to me. i have bipolar disorder and living in america during what is now thankfully over known as the trump era so that's when the book came out. i want to start off by saying how are you doing, how has that gone for you. >> i'm happy to be here talking with you, chatting with you and thank you to the library for having us. i think i'm doing okay. now we are sort of emerging out of the whole pandemic they use. we have a long way to go but it was an interesting year and i think for many divergent people, the year was mixed. sort of quiet.

it was an interesting time for many of us. i'm really glad that the book reached so many readers. today we are celebrating the paperback and a year ago in march but the book is making its way and i'm so glad. >> i think the work you do that's something i want to start off for those who might not be knowledgeable or interested in the work that you're doing with both. if you could tell us about the processel and how the reader can connect with that as well. a. >> the narrow diversity project started about four years ago in berkeley california, and it was sort of the nexus of personal

and professional. i am a journalist and i was kind of figuring out what was going on with me and my sort of mental makeup. i started getting small groups together to talk about nero diversity and started inviting authors into kind of share their research from different perspectives and angles and it grew. we had a conference and now we are doing a lot of it on instagram and if anyone wants to follow along, then last year at the start of the pandemic before the incident with george floyd, i sat down with my family and i grew up in an interracial family and very multiracial setting like my neighborhood and my school. i was like i think this is an

interesting sort of nexus life, love, friendship so i started reaching out to other writers again like should we talk about this. we are doing that on instagram as well. we have a lot of filmmakers and writers and actors who are unpacking. it's something that doesn't get talked about as much so we are kind of at the beginning of that as well for anyone who wants to check out both of those works, instagram is the place right now. >> thank you. >> we spoke a little bit before in preparation of this and you were talking about the idea of the media representation around disability and divergence and health conditions and as you all know so i just wanted to ask, if

so, who is leading the team and how do you see it getting better because it is still pretty bad. >> i'm so intrigued by the media representation and how mental illness and divergence and disability more broadly how it gets portrayed in the media. i have a long-standing interest in the film and theater and stuff like that so i think you see this with many different groups like marginalized groups what happens is there are stereotypes that are in the public imagination that have to do with social norms and then you see the same stereotypes depicted on screen and it's a constant conversation between what's happening on thest ground and then what's happening in the media so something like

divergence, mental illness disability is no exception, so i've been digging into this research and it turns out film close-ups seem to be more intent on characters that have mental illness, people who are depicted as mentally ill are way more likely to be depicted as violent more so than actual occurrences in real life and so i think it's something we need to work against. your work is an amazing contribution to all of this and i didn't get into that too much in the book. a little bit at the end with resources but the book is all about reframing our conception to what it means to be mentally different. so whether it is autism or adhd

or bipolar, how can we take ownership of that narrative again and change the public conversation? >> one of the things i wanted to bring up, i read the book on kindle. at the ending there's this pressing moment where you talk about the field of medicine needs an overhaul this is on page 212 experiencing loneliness on the rise, more people become ill and thus put in the position of meeting because then you have people's social lives but doctors are getting burned out and also need support and others to turn to without being people opening up about their internal lives i nothing will change and you go on and talk about connection and the importance of

that and i thought it was present in terms of you didn't know that it was coming out. that was part of having read it initially that i found comforting in terms of the reminder and i found that there was a lot of this was spiritually connected. we are healthier and more connected and so having been disconnected for so long, how do you see that evolving? >> you mean how we are going to emerge from the pandemic? >> narrow divergent people have been good at this in terms of being familiar with a kind of disconnect that may be people who don't have that kind of make

up or are not quite familiar with being that connected and being forced to be because the society we are living in a world that wasn't built for us and structured for us and in some ways i found personally it wasn't quite as hard on me as it may have been on some more typical people because for them it was a shock. i've experienced this. i've been here. nice to meet you. there are lessons people have been able to teach for those going through a pandemic for whom it was a shock and i know you've had such a great response to the book and now that the paperback is out have you heard from people like me that are incredibly grateful this came out because i know it wasn't great for you but it came out at the perfect moment because i think it helped not just those

of us dealing with the divergence but a lot of people were thrown into this kind of loneliness and disconnectedness inadvertently and had no control over that. about how the women are being left out and research providing the narrow diversity, it's interesting i don't know if the pandemic is allowing more people to dive into this material because like you were saying, so many of us live this way anyways and are sort of outside all the time. like yourself, i am a writer and in my head i'm always thinking

and that's kind of normal for me. so, yes. but i do think what you're saying about people who are not divergent are finding much more understanding about their family members, their colleagues, their kids, their parents. i'm hearing from a lot of people who are saying tears streaming down their faces because in hindsight they are realizing one of their parents may no longer be alive had xyz and it's such an experience to be able to put a name to that. and then in terms of how we are going to emerge in this pandemic period, i do hope that all of us are able to take some of the

lessons and things we've learned around what it means to live more quiet or not be rushing around in this kind of aggressive state all the time, which i think many divergent people are. i wrote something in the book and couldn't believe how it captured this moment. i'm going to paraphrase my own quote what i learned from i look forward to this day when what is considered -- obviously we didn't anticipate this happening in the context of a pandemic that i think many it's a hit in

the sensory world for many people and becomes the global norm. what is labeled as sensory ailments hold promise for the traumatized world in desperate needo of repair so meditating about these topics for the last several years in a way that the pandemic did forge this quieting down but not in the way that we wanted it all so perhaps it has people thinking. >> you know this concept of how we need to start reconsidering.

how do they make up at least 20% of the population and begin to tshift the concept of normal disorder or mentally ill, perhaps we were talking about humanity as a whole rather than a set of divergent individuals given that so many go undiagnosed. i feel like that different context you are speaking for so many people. understanding that concept, what door doesce that open? >> i have been thinking about this a lot lately. i think it's interesting because

the deeper you get into the diversity researchh were talking with people and interviewing people, i don't know if it's just me because that's my world and i just do everything in that of color.hat kind it actually becomes more difficult to see neuro typicality to be honest because also the more you talk to people and people open up with you and kind of take off their mask you start realizing some of these things are very universal.

imagine if it was more open would we be at the point we don't even need this terminology of normal or abnormal or divergent, so i think we will get there some way so a lot of us who are activists and writers are in the early thinking at the beginning and then towards the end you say the identification truly embrace them and i almost

didn't need them anymore you are providing an outlet and in the book not just your experience but all of the research based on your ability to hyperfocus, i'm grateful for your ability because you managed to put all this material together in a way that wasn't easily digestible. this idea of labels and how much is liberating and when does it

stop and no longer necessary and how that's been in terms of how the readers have responded. >> thank you for finding that threat and it's so cool to hear how it designates with you and everyone watching and listening. i tend to describe this as the label is the entry points and entryways. entryways to empowerment, liberation, knowledge, being informed. i talk about that in the book about the real importance of the knowledge and information. then you kind of absorb it and so i think for many divergent people who are discovering aspects of themselves and may be jumping into the advocacy and

activism, it's something very exciting. once it gets integrated into your life and all aspects of your life like your family and work and a sense of identity you just don't -- it's something that doesn't even need to be said because it is a part of you and people know it and it's worded like integration so it's not to say those things are not important and i think everyone had their own journey and i do encourage people to just do what works for them. i think some people continue on.

they continue living their lives and have a different perspective and shift about how they see themselves so for me personally it was a journey of learning about the movement and this kind of approach. then learning about how women were left out of the research on autism and adhd and focusing on this trade of sensitivity and how it was so prevalent

certainly the book coming out their healing is kind of a relief for them and now it's been a year andw i think it's awesome seeing how people respond and everyone has a different story to the book. for themselves or their parents or siblings. i hear from a lot of therapists who are saying that it's impacting their practice and they recommend it to their which is exciting because we want to see change in the therapeutic industry and then it's also allowed me to kind of move on to other things. i'm a journalist and we've got the project going so no matter what i do in my life and professionally the neuro diversity work is such a huge

part but it gets integrated into whatever i do now and that's exciting for people to know. you will have different periods of discovery and integration a d that's okay for this to become part of your larger story and you're not going to leave it behind. some people feel like they have to kind of keep sticking with thisis one movement or somethin. a. >> in that definition of what you saw in the diagnosis and that label and what it means early on once you write about it, you are public.

you are already out helping other people and again i saw myself in this book so much and i'mm so grateful to what you did because it wasn't just the best book i read in allau of 2020. and i'm so grateful to you for it because it wasn't just that the book. it's every one you cited in the book. other books you cite and you dig into that research in a way that is much easier to get a broad descendents of what is happening in the movement that i've been on for so long and yet have never seen a book like this, so that's partly why i was so

grateful. into the experiences that it can be i recall you naming that a lot of the mindfulness and internal awareness are not acceptable and are curious about new approaches i don't focus on meditation a lot in the book and i am a movement person and i think you are too, i think the type of meditation are like tai chi. and i love to dance and run so for me, all of that is far more healing than just planting myself and sitting i will

encourage people to not feel like they have to stay inside or what they think meditation is supposed to be because we know so many mainstream things don't work for us and so that's what i was going to say. >> moving is my meditation so i'm not staying still at all. another question misses a lot of teachers professionals and parents tend to tell me i'm wrong when i speak about my own experience because they learned it a different way or the research says something else. how would you suggest responding in those situations and how can i help people understand all thw research doesn't.

it sometimes feels like myself [inaudible] >> that makes sense and i hear that all the time. in the beginning of a lot of this especially representation of women and girls this is where ii think it's important to take the narrative into your own hands for once. second, i don't believe the formal diagnosis is necessary or even important to be honest. if we are working with a medical industry that is based on research that is literally 30-years-old and takes off 20 to 30-years-old for the research to get integrated into practice, then how can you let those people tell you who you are or who you aren't.

so that's huge and youou will fd many people out there who are self identified. as i write in the book i didn't go the form of that diagnostic route. it depends on your particular situation. what helps you integrate your label? do you have recommendations for someone beginning the process of integrating. you want to go first?

>> people saying there's a moment when i told my husband like you can leave. if i could leave me right now i would and him saying you were crazy from day one, this is a new development for you and now you have a label for it but you are a different person. a. >> what helped me integrate it. i remember the day that this research was popping up in my feed of all places about how women were being left out in the research on autism and adhd and read some things and this captured me to a tv. like how come i never heard of this and so there's those initial moments of zero my gosh and being a very serious person,

journalist and writer then you've got that threat of okay let me dive into this. what is this all about so there's that initial period of discovery. i think one step at a time like absorbing information then slowly opening up to family and friends, then getting more serious. for me that's how the book was born. divergent mind totally came out of this whole process of discovery. and then you just get more and more comfortable. as you are open like we were saying a few minutes ago, it becomes integrated into your life and so the more that you can stay grounded in your own knowledge of who you are and present that to the world and

the people around you. what suggestions do you have for gaining accommodations that works and more importantly advocating the doctors on what the diversity is really like. it's not like one page on the textbook but far more complex than what they read in the textbook for instance. >> i think accommodations are an interesting topic. in the book i focus on the topic a lot because it's such an important site and place of agency. you're in the world, and acting with other people, you take care of yourself and your family.or

so, margo@verizon now and everyone should look her up. where to sit in the office and having headphones. it's the communication that happens. making sure that your boss and colleagues understand you and where so that to me seems like the really important piece because then you will feel able to be yourself and ask for what you need and another thing i talk about in the book and elsewhere is the importance of acceptance.

you will be able to do your work better and feel better so again i think that communication piece is important and i would love to see schools and universities and workplaces have just really introductory neuro- diversity training for everyone. i don't think it requires that much. people need to be educated and out there. so i definitely recommend that and. i think the more of us that are in different industries the better that becomes. the disabilities they don't want to go to the disability resource center and say this is my disability. can you provide this accommodation and the stigma of

whatever that is for instance and i think they find other professors are providing accommodations but don't necessarily have to go that specificic route to get to those accommodations. but there's another question here from sarah who asked what is your vision for evolving treatment support for the diverse community? >> everyone knows the word treatment is a little tricky. here in california, grace is

great and makes sure that there are no that there's no food in the office, for example, so people's senses are not getting overwhelmed. she keeps the lights very low and makes sure the ventilation isn't allowed. she's very attentive to what would feel therapeutic and again for adults it's important. a lot of the conversation is on kids. it's encouraging now that we are seeing the adult population. so i feel like they find their hodgepodge of wellness and have to put something together.

it sounds like we both like dance and movement and that helps us feel grounded and regulated and that sort of thing. i spend a lot of time in nature going on walks and hikes. something i'm cautious of that i want everyone to know there is an element where people want to

pin everything to trauma and say you're havingy this and this needs to be looked at and i disagree and think that's quite horrible and there's kind of a resistance because they've been trained to see things through the trauma so i think that's dangerous and so i want to caution people that it's a bit extremist and something we want to push against. i start off by looking at the history of psychiatry and psychology one team to pin everything on the aspect of one's existence and that's what we really want to get away from

and it's also why i feel so strongly that individuals can put together their own narratives or pieces that they find helpful and healing and not the kind of submit to one. research, the stuff that is so frequently path all the joys and we learn to do and i hear doctors sometimes say things like don't google it and i don't think it's the right place but read a book. it's so therapeutic and i think people forget that.

what is therapeutic in terms of being a writer is part of finding that narrative for your yourself as well. >> i was just talking with steve silverman the other day and talking about my journey and i was saying how writing this book was kind of like an investigative b journey so this was my chance to dive in and it was a simultaneous process like i am on this journey of life discovery.

it's a real hope for other people to find their own sort of healing journey. >> if i could jump in and this is a question for both of you do you have what has been on my reading list for a while, do you have any other recommendations of books people can read that are up-to-date and reflect more accurately the experience of being neuro divergent and like a psychological textbook or something more scientific? >> do you have a few in mind? >> you can go to the twitter feed and find a list that's put together and i'm not just saying

that. on twitter i do things like shout out other books and at the top of my twitter i put together a list and a lot of people seem to appreciate it. these are books that came out in 2020 alone all written by neuro divergent authors and that's what we love to see. it needs to be in the realm of psychology but there is an academic and a virtual reality expert on there. i think she wrote the book doing harm and her book is all about gender bias in medicine and that

focuses on auto immune issues but it's just a really important work and then i always recommend nick walker. he's done a lot of pieces around terminology and changing our perspective in psychology. i always welcome the tribes and i list several in this book. i'm always muted. you can pick one to start and i will look through.

>> there is one here. however, it feels like i'm becoming more of a target at work. it doesn't help that my psychiatrist believes in an increasing in drugs as a, quote, six. how do i avoid becoming a target? those are interesting questions. >> it is interesting and i don't have all the information to know what it means to be a target like if we are talking about workplace bullying. if you are able to try different psychiatrists, that would make all the difference and again since a lot of this information

is so new it can be helpful to do your own research. a lot of even medical papers are available online and i know people that literally have to do that. it can actually also be helpful to take divergent mind with you to your office which i've heard of people doing to just be like look there's research behind all of this. you need to know what this is about. so this is a hard question to answer without having all the information but check out the different psychiatrists if possible and in terms of the workplace question, bringing the book to work. >> they have a list where you can put in different psychiatrists and see how much money they take from big pharma.

there's a question about whether you are offering training sessions. it depends on the specific. i certainly will give talks and do events like this and i've offered a few classes. my website is divergent late.com. i heard from someone this morning who wanted to share some of this perspective which is exciting and it's to penetrate

different fields so feel free to reach out to me on my website. >> i am pacing the list right now. you said you are not on twitter so i pasted the medium piece i was referring to. one is melody, any plans on creating a workbook to go along with either of your books and another will you be publishing a pdf of resources with the audiobook for download? >> i will answer that one quick. the audiobook is available. i hadn't thought about putting

pdfs together. the resource section appears in the e-book so that's a great option you can download it on kindle and apple and google books. b all of the resources are out therere it's just a matter of stfinding the right format. in terms of publishing a workbook to go along, divergent mind is an interesting mix. it's a journalistic and practical and has a lot of takeaways and things that you can integrate. what about you, melody? >> we are translating it into

farsi. the original from the book will be up on my website shortly. i would love to do something together and at some point do those trainings. my dream is for you to go to every university. because you think of essential trainings and i've been to the kind of trainings like a white guy giving me diversity training. fine. but i feel like the people who are doing the training to frequently it's one thing to be well-versed and another to identify in relation to race and for me i cannot buy into it if someone isn't from that community. okay you write a lot of books.

to me, what came through is that you live it. don't integrate so much material into one short book to give you all of that so there is this perspective of recognizing. there is legitimate anger like why women are not part of this and other than being pathologist hysterical, there's not the space in order to be like maybe i interpret the world differently. maybee that's not a disorder and i can figure out how to navigate the world that wasn't again built for you.

i saw you doing that over and over again and that's what makes this book so successful and among other things you are talking from thatth perspective not just from the outside. >> thank you. representation is huge and that's also like a why your issue i want to see hollywood and media and film and stories on wider screen that's important. >> you said earlier in case maybe we can get to a couple more questions. >> i can take a few more. >> i also want to say what

melody just said. i know we talked about this before we went live but i loved this book. it might be one of my favorite books of all kind. i never felt so understood and validated before i had this sense that so often happens when you read these books and they are written by professionals in the field that don't have the lived experience. they just have the academic background they know what this is like because when you are divergent and you don't know that you are, there's a tendency to feel lost and misunderstood and you don't know what's going on is so i'm glad you wrote this book and framed it in such a way

that we can acknowledge it's not a deficiency, it is a gift. i was diagnosed autistic at 31 and i had a hard time accepting it at first because everything i read implies it was some kind of a deficit. now i'm very proud of my autism. i'm so glad you wrote this book so other women with that experience don't have a hard time accepting things and they can realize that it makes them more beautiful. >> thank you for sharing that. that's so important and i'm so glad to hear that it resonated with you so much. >> i have a question here this is from anonymous. have q you heard about the fundraiser color the spectrum with jimmy kimmel and a ton of celebrities blowing up autistic

twitter since the organization like autism speaks, so many nonprofits for the neuro communities seem to have a look a lotof controversy and problemd those are typically the most well-known. do you have advice for allies to navigate which organizations are informed by the divergent versus thoseho that are perpetuating te stereotype? >> this tends to happen a lot. like a cause will be taken up and then it gets a little controversial on the fundraising organization or film so again it goes back to what melody and i were talking about, the representation is so huge.

i think people in the wider world need to take that really seriously. so i don't have specific recommendations or anything like that and i have seen a little bit of this on twitter, but again i think it speaks to needing to shift the conversation as much as possible to putting these kind of efforts into the hands of people the twitter community and the neuro divergent community at large is very good at being vocal and expressing the issues as well. i think about this history and

how things eventually come together and get integrated into the world, and it does start with these individual actions and collective actions so i think wect will see it soon. we are reaching a turning point. i think it's been exciting. melody and i connected recently, and there's a lot of other divergent writers and creators and filmmakers and producers. so it's going to keep sort of pushing where more of us get to help design these things i was going to go into another question. >> about masking, you write a bunch about how and i was

interested in the patriarchy and the white supremacy that happened neuro divergent or not i think it happens all the time and especially with women. and i wonder jurist how much further out you can take that. >> that's a great question. for everyone watching or listening, masking the term means a lot in the divergent community where it's like what does a person have to do in order to kindco of get on in the world and what kind of things do we have to hide to kind of appear normal? and it can take a toll on someone after a while and it's that pressure that builds up and a lot of people just end up falling apart or melting down or shutting down and then many of us reach a point where we are

like not going to do this anymore. this isn't working for any. this is something i put in the afterword, the way that what we call the normal activity and whiteness intercepts so what we think of as normal is often dictated by whiteness, so this proper detached closed off kind of like not real energy and way of interacting with people and there'sh many different words fr this, but i find it really important and critical to connect those two because i feel like collectively, the country is reconciling with this.

then we sort of have these. there's this energy why do we expect people to behave a certain way or act a certain way and who decides what's normal and what's not normal. what's behind that patriarchy, white supremacy. so i think that is w an exciting conversation and i am excited for that to be out there more. i'm excited to see where we go with it. the more that creative people integrate these kind of perspectives in their work again in film, media, art even social

media the more these expectations get unpacked, the sooner they will kind of dissolve. >> so on that note, shiloh had a question and i'm not sure since you are not necessarily a filmmaker if you will be able to answer this one but i totally agree with you. about the media representation i absolutely loved so many neuro divergent individuals and the beautiful ideas around a better future for humanity. how would a neuro divergent person with an idea for a sitcom on the truth find out to collaborate with. ..

>> so that is something i'm actively thinking about and excited to follow up on. it will be a gradual process getting to know the industry better, learning like finding people where we can all put our skills together and father heads together what would this look like if we have an incubator or in hollywood they talk about pipeline creators.

how do you make that pathway easier for people to go from story idea to in a writer's room. so for people who are watching or listening so for the reach out if you have experience in this industry and would like to look into that something i have been thinking about a lot. and for anyone who's ready to jump in right now there is fellowship they are so extremely competitive and usually you have to know someone or put in a recommendation that can be a little tricky. >> i want to be respectful of your time maybe one more question and then we can wrap

it up. no pressure. >> i'm not interested in a diagnosis but i want to learn more about myself i don't think i fit into one of these labels but you help me to realize with my experience with anxiety and panic attacks point to my neuro- divergent but i'm not sure about the next step not need work accommodation i have a great work set up but what should i do to figure the neuro- divergence quick. >> that's a great question. what do you need to do? is there anything? it depends on the

individual is mine just wanting to be understood or be seen or to have a name and label for your own self-knowledge and there is a lot out there and then to give you a lot of information and shared stories. or are you c looking for a therapeutic approach for help in your life? certainly some people turned to a therapist or medication. again i encourage every individual to do what works forks them. it sounds like there is something so maybe get clear what you are seeking. do you need help?

if you are just wanting more knowledge for yourself. so it really depends. so the divergent mind is great for someone who just wants to figure stuff out and doesn't need to have an exact medical thing because we are challenging the notion. yes. thank you for all the questions. this was great. >> if you choose to research the origins of critical race theory, you will find the name derek bell law professor bell who died in 2011 was one of the principal originators of this much

discussed subject. november 1982 derek bell appeared on book notes to discuss his book faces at the bottom of the well.