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Animal Scientist and Autism Rights Activist Temple Grandin (204) shares her experience of having autism within her book The Autistic Brain. Grandin explains that the diagnosis of autism was at the mercy of a medical system that’s full of lock-label thinkers (Grandin & Panek, 204). The expression ‘lock-label thinking’ is used within this text to establish that medical professionals and some people in society develop an obsession with identifying what the ‘problem’ is, in order to give it a name. Causing those individuals with the ‘problem’ to become identified by their label instead of themselves as humans. Grandin writes that the label may help some people understand who I am in a general sense [by explaining his behaviour as being] because I’m autistic (Grandin & Panek, 204). However neurodiversity is a movement constructed from the social model, that identifies everybody on the planet as having a different brain, therefore autistic or not, we’re all individuals (Grandin & Panek, 204). Neurodiverisity allows many autistic self-advocates [to] reject that their autism in itself is a disorder. They claim that, apart from differences such as race, gender and sexual orientation, people are also born with different minds (Owen & Stenhammer, 203). Neurodiversity shows that every individual has a set of strengths, talents, abilities and intelligences (Armstrong, 200), yet, by identifying someone with a label, such as branding someone as ‘a person with autism’ it stigmatizes the positive dimensions of people with negative labels (Armstrong, 200). This suggests that the neurodiverse do not fit in to society, due to the limitations of labels (Grandin & Panek, 204).
It may be argued that the medical model labels individuals to appear as if they have an understanding of the disability. A study by Steven Kapp and his co-workers (203) demonstrates that a lack of understanding may cause negative labelling. The study demonstrated that people who have associations with

an autistic person have a better understanding of autism and neurodiversity, than those who do not encounter any interaction with an autistic person. Therefore the people who were aware of neurodiversity endorsed more positive emotions about autism than participants who were not aware of neurodiversity (Kapp, 203). This suggests that individuals within society, who do not have the understanding, disable and seclude autistic people. Due to a lack understanding about autism it creates a negative label and enforces a stigma around an autistic individual, therefore society is disabling them due to the lack of understanding. The autistic spectrum was a development in the late 970s by a medical professional Lorna Wing. Wing’s theory was that autism could be understood in terms of a spectrum’ (Thomas & Boellstorff, 207). The autistic spectrum was used as a definitive identification of understanding autism and highlights the diversity within autism itself. This is to promote neurodiverisity by recognising that all brains are different, and using the autistic spectrum to reduce diagnosis-associated stigma (Thomas & Boellstorff, 207). However, it is argued that the autistic spectrum has fuzzy boundaries (Singer, 207) and the use of the autistic spectrum frames autism in terms of a deficit model (Thomas & Boellstorff, 207) by grouping neurodiverse people into ‘high-functioning’ and ‘low-functioning’ autism, in the understanding that ‘high functioning’ is to be closer to a ‘normal’ or ‘neurotypical’ person in ability, and ‘low functioning’ less so (Thomas & Boellstorff, 207). This function therefore rejects the idea of neurodiversity by continuing to group autistic people within categories within the autistic spectrum as well as instigate a new dichotomy between neurodiverse and neurotypical (Thomas & Boellstorff, 207), The use of the autistic spectrum may clarify that the medical model of disability is [still] the dominant model in autism studies (Woods, 207).