In the works: Love light and gaslight: Ableism in Spirituality and holistic well-being culture

This is an expansion of my EPQ project on this topic,

The spiritual community is very subtle in its ways of gaslighting disabled people and attempting to strip us of our disabled identity, but once you notice it, you can't unsee it. It's simple; acknowledging oppression contrasts too much with their light and positivity branding, so they try to change the narrative by instead telling us that we are aliens that are simply longing to go home, that our struggles are the karma of our past life's transgressions, or that we simply must lack spiritual strength and need to pay for their programme. This planet is our home, we are just made to feel unwelcome, but sure, blame the victim /s.

Let us start with my speciality, autism. Due to a lack of accurate public knowledge on ASD and stigmatization, a trend emerged in the mid 1990s promoted by self-proclaimed spiritual gurus and pop-psychology mental health info-graphs: the ‘Highly Sensitive Person’, or HSP. This is regarded by the autistic community as an attempt to re-brand autism and strip autistic people of their cultural identity as disabled. Multitudes of online personality quizzes and social media trends have gained popularity that essentially romanticize ASD experiences, giving it a new whimsical name, detailing how hard life can be when you are gifted with this 'superpower', all whilst trying to invalidate it as a disabled identity, gaslighting both diagnosed and undiagnosed autistic people.