What Is This Indigo Phenomenon About?

[DuckRabbit]

For example, when I "came out" to one of my friends (not a super close friend) with my diagnosis she suggested that I was not autistic and, instead, was an Indigo child. This, of course, felt demeaning and inappropriate.

I wonder if your friend was tapping into the negative stereotypes of Asperger's/autism and was trying to 'de-pathologise' it by calling it something neutral like "Indigo child"?

I can understand the motivation of authors like Doreen Virtue to want to de-pathologise individuals who are socially 'different' or 'eccentric', by giving them more positive labels. She argues that to conflate autism with ‘being spiritually gifted’ is to pathologise the spiritually gifted, making problems out of their quietness or abnormal speaking patterns, for example. But admittedly this then creates the other risk of idealising or romanticising this category. We seem to want to polarise our categories instead of holding the 'pros' and 'cons' in our minds at the same time.

The ideal may be to have value-neutral labels - AS without the 'social connotations', if you like - but do you think this could ever be possible? i.e., coming out to a friend with a AS diagnosis and the friend reacts neutrally/ goes on as before? I know the label 'geek' has changed from negative to positive over the years - not so much when applied to children, but applied to adults, especially those who've made a lot of money from IT pursuits (e.g., 'computer geek' - assisted by 'cool' movies like 'The Social Network'). I wonder if the same could happen to the AS label?

 

[BIMOG]

Дети Индиго (Indigo Children) performing Прекрасное Далёко(Wonderful Future)