Robert Chapman

Early life and education Chapman was born in 1989 or 1990. During their childhood, they lived in low-income housing in London and, later, elsewhere in England. They struggled with learning problems and dropped out of school at age 15. After living with friends, Chapman became homeless for a time. Due to struggling outside in winter conditions, Chapman entered the foster care system.

During the 2000s, Chapman studied philosophy at the University of Southampton. In 2013, after learning they are autistic, they completed their master's degree and began their doctorate at the University of Essex with a focus on neurodiversity as a theory, developing a concept of autistic thriving. In 2018, they defended their thesis, Autism, Neurodiversity and the Good Life, which was funded by the Shirley Foundation.

Career Chapman has worked at the University of Bristol, King's College London, the University of Essex, and Sheffield Hallam University. In 2023, they were invited as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. In September of that year, they joined the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University as an assistant professor of Critical Neurodiversity Studies. Outside of academic activity, Chapman has also written articles for Psychology Today and Boston Review.

In 2023, Chapman published their first book, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism, which focuses on developing a Marxist perspective on neurodiversity.

Positions

Neurodiversity Chapman defines the neurodiversity movement as a social justice movement that aims to change the way mental disability and neurodevelopmental conditions are observed with the goal of being perceived in a socio-ecological approach to disability. They make frequent references to authors such as Nick Walker and Judy Singer and those authors' proposals for conceptualizing neurodiversity. Much of their work has been on the fundamental concepts of neurodiversity as they pertain to philosophy of science, most notably their development of an ecological model of mental functioning and analysis of the metaphysics of diagnosis. They have also discussed the relationship of neurodiversity to explanatory models of disability, such as the social model of disability and the value-neutral model proposed by philosopher Elizabeth Barnes.

Gerald Roche has argued that Chapman's definition of neurodivergent Marxism is “an intersectional approach to analysing how capitalism produces and maintains multiple forms of oppression, to ensure that new sites of extraction can be constantly identified and exploited in the endless pursuit of capital accumulation.” Awais Aftab has said that Chapman's work “has had a substantial impact on my own thinking, and their writings have consistently forced me, and many others, to rethink long-standing assumptions related to pathology and medical care.” In 2023, Tiago Abreu argued that Chapman's work manages to provide an effective state-of-the-art and historical contextualization of neurodiversity.

Psychiatry In various articles and especially in their book Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism, Chapman has criticized how psychiatrists and the field of psychiatry deal with the issue of mental health and disability. In this book, they build on existing work that urges the need for alternatives to psychiatry and clinical psychology, led by and for neurodivergent people alongside those who identify as mad, psychiatric survivors, and disabled. They also note radical psychiatrists who have influenced their approach, such as Franco Basaglia and Franz Fanon.

Chapman has also critiqued the libertarian right Szaszian tradition, which follows the work of Thomas Szasz, in anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry. In 2022, Chapman said that “a lot of critical psychiatry today is about emphasizing how people with mental health diagnoses are not 'really' disabled–not like 'really' disabled people–because mental health is a political issue rather than a medical issue. For me, however, all issues concerning health and disability are political issues; so, that is a false binary". Sam Fellowes for Philosophy of Medicine described Chapman's discussion of anti-psychiatry as “nuanced and helpful”, providing a balanced view of anti-psychiatry which distinguishes between different ideologies in the tradition, and acknowledges that even those the author opposes raised important issues.

Personal life Chapman is non-binary

Books