What do I think of neurodiversity? Let me explain why the term is now meaningless

Dr Jess explains the true origin of ‘neurodiversity’ and the way it is being misused all over the world

“What do you think about ‘neurodivergence’?”

This must be the question I am asked most at the moment.

Thousands of professionals are seeking answers about what they are seeing every single day: the rapid increase in children being labelled ‘neurodivergent’ and the massive wave of adults self-identifying as ‘neurodivergent’. The parents desperate to have their kids diagnosed.

I am a psychologist, but I am anti-pathology. I don’t believe in mental disorders. I don’t believe in deficit language about humans and the mind. I believe it is used to harm and oppress us.

But what most of you don’t know, is that my position was shared by the woman who coined the terms ‘neurodiversity’ and ‘neurodivergence’. Dr Judy Singer wanted to abolish ‘disorder’ language too.

This article is going to explain the true origins of the concept of ‘neurodiversity’ and how it has been bastardised, twisted and pulled back under the psychiatric umbrella in order to harm and oppress everyone - when it was meant to protect everyone.

Dr Judy Singer is a famous Australian Sociologist. She is anti-pathology, and she was searching for ways to write about people’s different mental states without using language such as ‘disorder’ or ‘mental illness’. She is the woman responsible for the term ‘neurodiversity’.

The term ‘neurodiversity’ did not come from neuroscience, from psychiatry or from psychology - it came from one woman, a sociologist, who was looking for a political term to challenge deficit model thinking around mental states. It wasn’t a set of studies, there were no brain scans, no investigations into who was ‘wired differently’ - it was a conceptual and theoretical idea that Dr Judy Singer had. At the time, it wasn’t very successful, and her ideas about ‘neurodiversity’ were not picked up until much later when it was mentioned in Wired.

In fact, lots of people don’t know that Dr Singer actually came up with the term ‘neurodiversity’ in an undergrad essay she wrote over 30 years ago.

Dr Singer argued that everyone was neurodiverse. She argued that there was no typical brain per se. She clearly states throughout her work that autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and dyspraxia were just part of the endless variations of the human brain and mind - and that none of them constituted ‘disorders’. Much like me, her focus was on creating an approach that could challenge the ‘disorder’ language of psychiatry.

Simply put, Dr Judy Singer created the term on purpose to argue that ‘neurodiversity’ was simply a spectrum of how unique and individual all our brains are, and that there is no one typical way of thinking or processing anything.

“I knew what I was doing,” she states in the 2023 interview of her in The Guardian. “‘Neuro’ was a reference to the rise of neuroscience. ‘Diversity’ is a political term; it originated with the black American civil rights movement. ‘Biodiversity’ is really a political term, too. As a word, ‘neurodiversity’ describes the whole of humanity. But the neurodiversity movement is a political movement for people who want their human rights.”

This quote from the interview last year is absolutely vital in our understanding of her true intentions, and the way this term is being misused and misunderstood.

She deliberately created the term to be as political as possible, and argued that everyone was neurodiverse.

In the interview for The Guardian, she goes on to say that she created the term to cause an ‘identity politics movement’.

“I thought, ‘We need an umbrella term for a movement.’ And I also perceived that this was going to be the last great identity politics movement to come out of the 20th century.”

And my my my, she got what she wished for!

Or did she?

Neurodiversity is a political term, meant to cause an ‘identity politics’ movement - it’s not a scientific term. It is not based on any scientific evidence that there are ‘types’ of brains. There are thousands of posts and resources online which claim that some people are ‘neurodiverse’ whilst everyone else is ‘neurotypical’ which is frankly, nonsense.

There is no standard or accepted definition of ‘neurotypicality’. There is no scan. No test. No proof. No frameworks or guidance. No norms or standards.

If there is no such thing as ‘neurotypicality’ then there is no such thing as ‘neurodivergence’ that diverges from that typical brain type.

Even if there was such thing as neurotypicality, it would only be based on the original assumptions made by and for white, middle class, western straight men - so by that foundational standard, everyone else who doesn’t fit that description would be ‘neurodiverse’.

There are no tests or proof that anyone is ‘neurodiverse’ because there are no tests or proof of what ‘neurotypicality’ would be. But that hasn’t stopped anyone. This buzzword has travelled around the world, and now anyone who thinks or feels ‘different’ in some way, can self-identify as ‘neurodiverse’ as if it’s some form of illness, disease, disorder or disability.

This is the exact opposite of what Dr Singer was hoping to achieve. She was anti-pathology. She was trying to highlight that our brains are diverse and we are all completely different.

She was also, as a sociologist, fascinated by the way the world and our environment puts pressure on us all to think and process in certain ways - and when we can’t do it, we are seen as disordered or incapable. She spoke of social and global pressures. She spoke of the workplace environment.

We did not evolve to sit staring at screens 14 hours a day. Our brains did not evolve to do anything we do today. It is very likely that many of us cannot and will not function as society and capitalistic governments expect us to. The true foundations of ‘neurodiversity’ were not supposed to pathologise anyone - it wasn’t a diagnosis or a label, it was the opposite of those things.

Ultimately, Dr Judy Singer’s concept of ‘neurodiversity’ was twisted and pulled back into psychiatry and disorder. There’s now an entire narrative around ‘neurodiversity’ that argues that those people are categorically different, and disordered, in contrast with ‘the neurotypicals’.

It’s created more divide, which is not what Dr Judy Singer ever intended.

Saying that ‘ADHD is neurodiversity’ is an oxymoron. ADHD is categorised by the APA and the DSM as a ‘mental disorder’. The D in ADHD stands for Disorder. The concept of neurodiversity was that everyone was neurodiverse - and that these differences in all of our thoughts, processing, memory, thinking, feeling, attention, focus, actions and decision making are just part of the massive spectrum of humanity.

What is interesting then, is that the people who self-identify as ‘neurodiverse’ don’t seem to be comfortable with the original position, which is ‘everyone is neurodiverse’. It is now framed as a special category, something that separates them from everyone else, something that even positions them as being disordered, different, or disabled. In this way then, the concept of ‘neurodiversity’ uniting us all in understanding that we are billions of humans with totally different experiences and brains - has failed.

But this isn’t down to Dr Singer - this is down to psychiatry and psychology being able to medicalise and pathologise a term that was supposed to be a social term for an identity politics movement for everyone to move away from deficit language about the mind and mental states.

So what is the point of this language, and where is it leading us now?

Well, it looks to me like we are heading straight for more pathologisation and discrimination of people who think differently - or perceive themselves to think differently. The topic of ‘neurodiversity’ has become something of a buzzword now, and I’m not sure it will ever achieve what Dr Judy Singer was hoping for.

She talked of her frustrations about latter-day understanding of what neurodiversity means in the Guardian interview. She has written many blogs about the fact that it is used as a corporate buzzword, denoting the need to include ‘different kinds of people’ in the workforce. This, she says, sounds reasonable, but it misses a lot of crucial points.

“On my blog, you’ll see that one of my subtitles is something like, ‘I’m not here to make capitalism more efficient; I’m here to make it more humane,’” she says in the interview.

Her blogs argue that her concept of ‘neurodiversity’ is just being exploited by corporations and capitalism - and I must say that I agree with her. There is no effort to look at the fact that we strap humans to a desk for 8-10 hours a day, 5 days a week and then wonder why they become more and more unwell and harmed - so instead we’re giving them new labels: ‘neurodiverse’ and ‘ADHD’.

Companies are selling ‘neurodiversity’ training courses that don’t even begin to understand the true origin or meaning of this term. People are being told they are ‘wired differently’. They are being divided with made-up terms - claiming some people are ‘neurodivergent’ and some people are ‘neurotypical’.

Estimates all over the internet claim that 1 in 5 people are ‘neurodiverse’ which makes absolutely no sense because the concept argues that everyone is neurodiverse.

TikTok is making mega bucks from the ‘neurodiversity’ self-diagnosis videos. Companies are popping up everywhere claiming to be able to diagnose you as ‘neurodiverse’ with autism and ADHD over a 45 minute zoom call for £600.

ADHD medication is the fastest growing industry in psychiatry, worth £10.2Bn in 2020, with projected growth looking utterly wild in the next 5-10 years.

If neurodiversity is a spectrum of all of us, then why do we need to be medicated for it? Why do we need to be ‘diagnosed’?

In the same vein, what is the benefit of pulling as many psychiatric disorders as possible under the umbrella of ‘neurodivergent’? Couldn’t this just be a way to rebrand mental disorders as a ‘neurological difference’ so people begin to see them as scientific and biological again?

And finally, what about the very clear trend of ‘neurodivergence’ being aimed at so-called ‘high functioning’ people with Autism and ADHD? When was the last time you saw anything about autism that discussed the experiences and health of those with such profound autism that they cannot live alone? Cannot feed or dress themselves? Are totally non-verbal? Will be in care homes for their entire lives?

Where has that version of autism been relegated to?

How has the public narrative about autism and ADHD become focussed only on the ‘high functioning’ people, whilst those with profound learning disabilities, co-morbid illnesses, physical disabilities and in need of significant round-the-clock care are erased totally in favour of TikToks about people who can remember registration plates of cars and have done a test online that said they were Autistic? Or the middle class, white, middle aged professionals and academics who have taken some quizzes online and are now identifying as ‘neurodiverse’ and ‘ADHD’ at work so they can access flexible working and better conditions?

Don’t raise your eyebrows. I know you know what I’m talking about. People desperately trying to explain their utter exhaustion, lack of motivation, lack of concentration and focus, struggles with their energy and attention, by scratching around for an ADHD diagnosis instead of looking at their lives, their environments, and their traumas.

Interestingly, Dr Judy Singer is partially responsible for this part, as her work and her concepts of ‘neurodiversity’ were deliberately focussed on what she called ‘high functioning autistics’. She worked in the IT industry for a while, and worked with several other academics who were suggesting that they should focus their concept of ‘neurodiversity’ on ‘high functioning’ people only - which has contributed to those with life-long and life-limiting disabilities being ignored and sidelined in the public discussions of ‘neurodiversity’.

Are those people neurodiverse too? Or are they too ill? Too disabled? Too ‘neurodiverse’ for the high-functioning brand?

Why and how has ‘neurodivergence’ become synonymous with ‘being intelligent’? Is it divergent from the norm to be smart? Are ‘neurotypical’ people a bit stupid? Or do people just want to believe they are smarter than everyone else because they believe their brain works differently from everyone else?

I am sure this article has raised many questions and feelings for lots of you, but as always, we must be committed to open and frank conversations about these things before they are used against us like they always are. We didn’t realise what was happening to us as psychiatry invented more and more mental disorders and medications to sedate us with - but we need to spot the red flags this time.

Neurodiversity is a political identity term. There are no tests. No proofs. No scans. No accepted definitions. No biological norms.

This conversation needs to happen. People need to understand the origins and intentions of this term, and the way it is being twisted and pulled back into ‘disorder’ language.

Are people different? Yes.

Is it likely that we all have different brains and ways of processing the world? Yes.

Is it likely that some of this will be trauma-related? Yes.

Is it likely that everyone’s brain is completely unique? Yes.

Is it likely that our capitalistic hell hole is contributing to our feelings that we must be different or disordered in some way? Yes.

Is dividing people up into ‘neurodiverse’ and ‘neurotypical’ even possible? No.

Is it ethical and safe to do that? No.

Is it reducing stigma? No.

Is it causing social or environmental change? No.

Do we have any tests or ways of knowing who is ‘neurodiverse’? No.

Do people even understand the origins of this term? No.

But I hope this small article has helped provide a different perspective to think about.