The question of rights and advocacy for individuals with Tourette Syndrome and other developmental disorders, is not really just a matter of pleading for special treatment that others don't enjoy. I see the frequent denial of opportunities and non-recognition of their abilities, that people with TS often experience as a form of passive bullying. They are frequently disregarded as suitable candidates for many professional roles. Their lives would be so much easier to negotiate if they were treated and accepted like other people and not always seen as different or a special case and subsequently side-lined.
It is interesting that the autism 'community' have achieved much greater acceptance and awareness. This is, I feel, due partly to acknowledgment by medical professionals and neuro-scientists of autism (a relatively 'new' disorder) as an interesting or 'cool' field to pursue and specialise in. Few doctors, have an acceptable or credible understanding of TS. Little interest is shown, despite it being a well-described disorder with a greater body of information regarding it's possible neuro-physiology and many well-documented patient symptom profiles. Perhaps it's also due to TS being a bit of a tricky disorder when it comes to classical psychoanalytic approaches. I've met psychiatrists and psychologists who have a very confused and inaccurate picture of TS and are very resistant to adopting a neurological perspective of developmental disorders. Despite published evidence and a wealth of patient medical histories, profound misconceptions are prevalent and erroneous diagnoses are frequently made. It was originally determined to be a psychological disorder that arose as a consequence of severely 'repressed anger' which leads to a psychopathology that manifests itself in the symptoms of TS. Considerable risks lie in this tendency for psychiatric diagnoses or diagnosing a plethora of subjectively-derived psychiatric 'comorbidites'.
Acceptance of an assumed psychological aetiology was, and still is, resisted by people with autism and their advocates, who have had to dispel the psychoanalytical legacy of Dr Bettelheim (and others of the Freudian school), whose assertion it was that autism was a disorder caused by inadequate nurturing by cold, unloving parents (the refrigerator mother concept) and that it was an expression of the deepest childhood 'psychic trauma'. Autism like Tourette Syndrome is a neuro-developmental disorder. Some of the psychiatric mythology of TS was dismantled and dispelled by a psychiatrist (Dr Shapiro) who helped establish it's neurological pathophysiology initially by showing that dopamine-antagonists such as Haloperidol could help reduce the severity of tics and other symptoms.
