So this is largely a social commentary, which admittedly is outside of my lane, but it’s a pervasive enough conceit that it’s starting to influence the type and quality of research being produced regarding nervous system function.
I won’t beat around the bush, I hate the term “neurodiversity”. It’s a meaningless and harmful conceit which only serves to infantilize the people it’s supposed to represent.
First, the term itself doesn’t actually represent any particular phenotype, or behavior, or class of behavior other than a hodgepodge of psychiatric definitions. It is quite literally (as all psychiatric definitions require) a signal to all around that this person is “disordered”, that they are defective, that they just don’t werk gud.
And that’s literally the ONLY consistent messaging it provides. It’s a signal to all around that there’s some nebulous “problem” with this person, that we now have to adjust around because this person is almost certainly going to get bent out of shape if I don’t tip toe on egg shells around their “disorder”.
It doesn’t inform me of any specific behavior, it doesn’t inform me of any general interaction requirement. It only tells me that this “disordered” person has needs.
IMO, it’s just the latest iteration in a long line of euphemisms that psychiatry/psychology communities adopt after the underlying toxicity of the “diagnoses” seeps through and consumes the prior concept. Whether you’re a retard, “autistic”, or “neurodiverse”, it all literally means the same thing.
More irritating for me personally, is it presents a dichotomy where none really exists, a “they” vs. “us”, which underlying it is really nothing but survivorship bias in action.
Most “autistic” phenotypes (or “ADHD”, “OCD”, or whater soup you want to use) do not get labelled “neurodiverse” because they are able to adapt their needs, support system, or lifestyle so that it isn’t prohibitive to life functions. This is one of the fundamental flaws of psychiatric descriptions, that most of them require a negative SES impact, something which has very little to do with the underlying “neuro” part of the label.
Even if one prescribes to the conceit that this is ultimately good because it allows the “neurodiverse” to receive the support they need, it’s still a flawed concept because it implies that these supports are discrete, special, and above the requirements that everyone has. It makes the “neurodiverse” different for the sake of establishing a difference.
Look, every single person, anywhere in the world needs “supports”. It does not matter what your phenotype is. And not just supports, but extensive supports, throughout their entire lifetime. The only difference is that the generally offered social supports are designed to support a narrow band of phenotypes, rather than being flexible enough to support all phenotypes.
It’s my opinion that we would absolutely crash the incidence rates of supposed neurological psychiatric conditions if societies simply had a more flexible support system, or at least less rigid and standardized systems in place.
This is the x-factor that we keep missing in the question, why do the incidence rates of these conditions get higher the more psychiatry is applied? Why do more industrialized countries have higher percentages of “neurodiverse” populations? Why can we still not find consistent physiological evidence of these “neurological disorders”?
It’s because the concept of disordered/ordered has driven an obsession toward standardization of social values and behavior in such a way that it continues to narrow the range of supports and socially acceptable behavior, despite the intent being the complete opposite. It’s a python constricting the concept of phenotypically “normal”, squeezing more individuals into “neurodiversity” land.
“Neurodiversity” advances and promotes this concept of “disordered” construction where none genuinely exists.
We all need supports. Requiring supports that aren’t immediately available or less common isn’t a disorder. Implying it is hurts everyone.
Edit: This might be more appropriate in another post, but I have to admit that a large part of my personal bias against the “neurodiversity” construct is that it serves as a mechanism to avoid internalizing the consequences of behavior. Didn’t clean my room? Oh that’s just my “ADHD”. Felt overwhelmed by a task? Oh that’s just my “OCD”.
Underlying “neurodiversity” is the question why can’t I be like “everyone” else? And it provides a convenient place to hang a behavioral hat without actually doing the introspection to examine what exactly that question means to the individual or external social relationships. It internalizes the conceit that the individual’s behavior is inflexible, so the rest of society must be flexible for them. This of course is a ridiculous expectation, as a society of inflexible individuals makes an inflexible society.
It’s frustrating to see people use these labels, which were absolutely never designed to be used in this fashion, as if it were a personal descriptor of identity. It feels like modern astrology, instead of being a Gemini you’re now “ADHD”.
Just as frustrating, there’s no causal relationship for any “neurological” association with nearly ANY psychiatric label. NONE. If there were, it’d no longer be a psychiatric label but considered a syndromic condition and “diagnosable” by that physiological relationship. It’s a pervasive dishonesty which is ruining a good amount of our understanding of nervous system function.
Often, individuals will reply with “well such and such a study” or “such and such lab/researcher” established this correlation. And then when asked if the individual has had the same test to verify that their physiology is consistent with the work in that study, the answer is almost always no. And why not? Well, because there isn’t any one particular cause, even though we just implied there was. It’s pure circular hell extracting any sort of concession here too.
So it’s this entire community of people asserting things about themselves which is completely unverified by empiracle physiological evidence, creating expectations based on that unverified evidence.