What Is Neurodiversity?

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Neurodiversity has helped many people feel less pathologized and more understood.

However, replacing disorder with neurotypes leaves the assumptions of the medical model intact.

The language of neurotypes has transformed descriptions into identities.

Relational, developmental, and social explanations can be eclipsed by neurocentric thinking.

Over the past decade, the neurodiversity movement has transformed the mental health discourse. Originally developed as a challenge to pathologizing narratives around such psychiatric diagnoses as autism and ADHD, its “umbrella” has come to cover an increasingly large and diverse portion of the population. While the neurodiversity paradigm contains a range of different perspectives, its mainstream form is characterized by the claim that the experiences and patterns of behavior falling under its umbrella are best understood as expressions of neurological difference, a natural part of human variation, as opposed to representing some sort of dysfunction, disorder, or disease process as psychiatry has long held.

In certain respects, this shift has been valuable: it has challenged stigma associated with the experiences and behaviors that come under such diagnostic labels; it has also promoted an expansion and acceptance of human difference more generally; and, finally, it has called into question the central psychiatric premise that psychological distress and impairment are properly thought of as “medical disorders.” Perhaps most impactfully, the language of neurodiversity has provided a sense of dignity and community for some, as well as a common language that provides a way of interpreting and articulating their struggles and having those struggles recognized by others.

Despite these contributions, however, there are important reasons to question the neurodiversity paradigm. At a time, now, where it dominates mental health discourse and has a significant say in how many people understand their own minds, it has gone far beyond a non-pathologizing recategorization of a very small sub-group of people.

Chief among these reasons is that while it presents itself as a critique of—and departure from—the medical model, it nevertheless retains its cardinal assumption: the belief that psychological distress and impairment are best explained in terms of individual, internal factors, and in the case of such diagnoses as ADHD and autism, that such processes are reducible to neurology. This is in direct contrast to accounts that emphasize social and relational explanations of psychological distress.

From Disorder to Neurotype

Where psychiatry, directly or indirectly, locates the source of distress or impairment in a disordered brain (i.e., neurodevelopmental disorder), neurodiversity theory tends to locate it in a differently wired........

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