The free, virtual Nova Campfire, “Neurodiversity and Just Societies: Rethinking Difference, Responsibility, and Human Dignity” on Thursday, April 23 explored expanding understandings of neurodiversity and what they mean for building more humane and equitable societies.
Discussions centered around the emerging Neurodiversity Framework, which challenges traditional, deficit-based categorical models of neurological difference and reframes them as natural biological variations along a continuum of human diversity. Encompassing neurocognitive differences from autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and learning differences to mood disorders, schizophrenia, and psychopathy, speakers will discuss new research, clinical practice, and advocacy aimed at dismantling stigma and ensuring more holistic, person-centered support.
We also explored the direct implications for criminal justice systems and how this paradigm challenges assumptions about moral blame, punishment, fixed dangerousness, and culpability of neurodivergent individuals. These long-held assumptions can contribute to forms of dehumanization within legal and cultural institutions. Many conditions—including conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and psychopathy—place individuals on accelerated tracks to justice involvement. Spectrum-based understandings of neurodivergence open new possibilities for early, relational, and remedial intervention.
This Campfire also introduced the Center for Justice and Mental Well-Being at the Nova Institute for Health. The Center recognizes that justice in all its forms is foundational to human flourishing and mental well-being. A broader understanding of neurodiversity can inform new models of health and social and criminal justice that support regulation, agency, and inclusion—such as the Public Health Quarantine Model—which move toward prevention, care, and social responsibility.
See the full event recording below.
Program and Panelists
An introduction from Susan Prescott, director of the Center for Planetary Consciousness and Global Flourishing, and Brian Berman, president and founder of the Nova Institute for Health, followed a general welcome and brief meditation from Rick Scott. Panelists presented for 7-8 minutes, weaving their narrative threads to provide the fabric for discussion that all attendees were invited to contribute to.
Welcome
Professor Brian Berman, MD, is the president and founder of the Nova Institute for Health and professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he was director of the Center for Integrative Medicine. He is one of the most highly funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers in the field of integrative and complementary medicine. A pioneer in the field and founder of the first U.S. academic medical center-based program for integrative medicine in 1991, he received two Bravewell Collaborative awards in leadership and service. He continues to conduct NIH-funded research at University of Maryland and promote a broad vision of health through leadership at Nova Institute for Health.
Neurodiversity, Justice, and Human Dignity: Rethinking Difference and Responsibility
Susan Prescott is director of the Center for Planetary Consciousness and Global Flourishing at the Nova Institute for Health, as well as director of the Nova Network. She is a professor of planetary health at University of Western Australia, editor-in-chief of Challenges—Journal of Planetary Health, and a Scholar at the Nova Institute for Health in Baltimore. She is a pediatrician, immunologist, artist, and award-winning author, internationally recognized for cutting-edge research into early environmental determinants of health and disease. Her global work promotes awareness of the interconnections between personal and planetary health in ways that inspire creative, integrated, and wise approaches, grounded in reciprocity, for social and ecological justice and flourishing futures.
The Neurodiversity Framework: Moving Beyond Deficit-Based Categorical Models in Medicine to Recognize Human Variation
Walid Yassin, DMSc, MMSc, is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and a staff scientist in psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. His research centers on neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders across the lifespan. Leveraging multimodal neuroimaging, advanced behavioral phenotyping, computational modeling, and artificial intelligence, Dr. Yassin investigates brain organization and variability beyond conventional diagnostic boundaries. His work aims to identify objective biomarkers, clarify dimensional symptom spectra and transdiagnostic overlap, characterize pharmacologic effects on neural systems, and ultimately inform precision-based risk stratification and targeted therapeutic interventions in disorders of the mind.
He also serves as a research associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Harvard Data Science Initiative, with additional research appointments in radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and in the Division of Newborn Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Beyond “Bad” Kids: Rethinking Morality, Antisocial Behavior, and the Biological Basis of Psychopathy
R. James Richard Blair, PhD, is an internationally recognized neuroscientist studying the brain system’s underlying aggression, empathy, and psychopathy in children and adolescents. His work uses cognitive neuroscience, brain imaging, and developmental psychology to understand how disruptions in emotional processing and empathy contribute to conduct disorders and callous-unemotional traits. Blair’s research challenges simplistic notions of “bad” children, showing instead that aggressive behavior often reflects differences in neurocognitive development that require understanding, early intervention, and targeted support rather than moral condemnation.
He is currently the director of child and adolescent psychiatry research at Virginia Commonwealth University and previously served as director of the Center for Neurobehavioral Research in Children at Boys Town National Research Hospital and chief of the Section on Affective Cognitive Neuroscience at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.
A Culture of Dehumanization: How Societies Normalize Exclusion, Harsh Punishment, or Neglect
Jamie Chapman, PhD, is associate professor of sociology at Westminster College (Pennsylvania) in the Department of Criminal Justice Studies and Sociology and the director of the All-College Honors Program. She is a medical sociologist with expertise in mental health, the criminal justice system, and the social institution of the family. Her courses include sociology of violence and nonviolence, medical sociology, sociology of the family, and criminology. Her current research includes using Q Methodology to explore the motivations for people to indulge in true crime media. Her previous research explored the lived experiences of frontline mental health workers working in incarcerated settings, incarcerated students’ perceptions of college classes, and registered nurses’ experiences of work-family spillover.
She also offers courses through the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program®–an internationally recognized education program with a mission to “create opportunities for people inside and outside of prison to have transformative learning experiences that emphasize collaboration and dialogue, inviting them to take leadership in addressing vital issues of social justice.” These courses uniquely pair traditional college students with incarcerated students and take place inside a prison setting, where they facilitate dialogue across differences.
Beyond Moral Blame: Rethinking Criminal Justice in the Context of Neurodiversity
Gregg D. Caruso is a professor of ethics and director of the Patrick J. Waide Center for Applied Ethics at Fairfield University, an honorary professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, and co-director of the Justice Without Retribution Network at the University of Aberdeen. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Center for Mental Well-Being and Justice at the Nova Institute for Health. His research focuses on free will, moral responsibility, criminal punishment, business ethics, philosophy of law, moral psychology, philosophy of mind, neurolaw, and applied issues in moral, legal, and political philosophy. His books include Neurolaw (2024); Moral Responsibility Reconsidered (with Derk Pereboom, 2022); Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice (2021), and more.
Introducing the Nova Center for Justice and Mental Well-Being
Alan C. Logan, MSc, ND, is an award-winning author and historian of health sciences whose work examines the biopsychosocial roots of mental health challenges and their links to criminal justice involvement. He serves as director of the Nova Center for Justice and Mental Well-Being. With more than 100 scientific publications and over 7,000 Google Scholar citations, his research spans forensic psychology, systemic inflammation, the gut–brain axis, and the “legalome” — the intersection of neuromicrobiology and justice systems. Educated in Northern Ireland and the United States, he holds degrees in criminal justice and forensic psychology and earned his graduate degree in health sciences in Toronto. He has also held invited faculty roles at Harvard Medical School’s Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine.
