I’ve been thinking about Four Thieves Vinegar collective work lately. It’s an inspiring project (at least imho): https://fourthievesvinegar.org/ Social justice meets DIY, design hacking and hardware all towards anti-capitalist access to medical care. But I’ve also been wondering about what it would look like to do this for mental health and neurodivergence. What would it look like if radicals subverted psychometric assessment for the common good in the same way?

I know folx in the community do tend to use open sourced tools like https://embrace-autism.com/ in this kind of way. But what’s the next steps to either (a) develop an instrument that can be authorised for use as a self-certified dx or (b) pry the process out of the hands of monetising forces like Pearson. Truly there are hundreds of thousands of people who are being denied access to legally mandated accommodation and care because they can’t get access to assessment.

Let’s set aside for a moment of course the problems with the notion of “experts” gatekeeping in this way, but hey maybe there’s a hack for that too? Long game I see a lot of promise in the power threat meaning framework (cf https://www.bps.org.uk/member-networks/division-clinical-psychology/power-threat-meaning-framework) but I think we’re a long way off from mainstreaming that approach…

#psychology I’m looking at you here… Anyone want to do a bit of hacking?