I Stopped Reading After Chapter One

How Women and Neurodivergent People Keep Being Diagnosed for Systemic Failure

Author’s Note

I’m writing this as someone who has been trained to read texts closely—and who has also learned to listen to the moment when reading itself becomes harmful.

This essay began when I stopped after chapter one of a 1965 psychiatry text. That stoppage wasn’t rejection of history or scholarship; it was recognition. The patterns on the page were not finished artifacts. They were still alive.

My aim here is not to condemn individual clinicians, nor to romanticize suffering, nor to retroactively diagnose the past. It is to examine how systems of meaning, power, and care have repeatedly failed people whose nervous systems, perceptions, and refusals did not conform—and to ask what genuine repair would require now.

If you are a clinician, researcher, or student, I hope this invites reflection rather than defensiveness.
If you are autistic, neurodivergent, traumatized, or have been harmed by psychiatry, I hope this feels like recognition rather than explanation.
If you are none of these, …