There is currently no strict medical definition of neurodivergent, which means we have some control over the word ourselves, which is nice. I’m currently reading “Unmasking Autism” and this section taught me a little bit about what the term might mean.
Almost anyone can be viewed as defective or abnormal under our current medicalized model of mental illness—at least during particularly trying periods of their lives when they are depressed or their coping breaks down. In this way, neurotypicality is more of an oppressive cultural standard than it actually is a privileged identity a person has. Essentially no one lives up to neurotypical standards all of the time, and the rigidity of those standards harms everyone.[42] Much as heteronormativity harms straight and queer folks alike, neurotypicality hurts people no matter their mental health status.
Autism is just one source of neurodiversity in our world. The term neurodiverse refers to the wide spectrum of individuals whose thoughts, emotions, or behaviors have been stigmatized as unhealthy, abnormal, or dangerous. The term was coined in 1999 by sociologist Judy Singer. In her honor’s thesis, Singer wrote about the difficulty of making sense of her daughter’s disabilities, which closely resembled traits her own mother exhibited when Singer was growing up. At the point that Singer was writing, Autism was poorly understood, and adults with Autistic traits, such as Singer’s mother (and Singer herself) rarely received diagnoses. Singer’s daughter seemed to inhabit a space somewhere between Autism, ADHD, and a variety of other disabilities. All three women were difficult to neatly categorize, which only obscured just how marginalized and socially adrift they all were. Just because their challenges couldn’t be easily named didn’t mean they didn’t exist.
“My life as a parent was a battleground for various belief systems,” she writes,[43] “all of which had one thing in common: an inability to come to terms with human variability.” Singer and her family were disabled in a way that no one knew how to name, so she created a name for them: they were neurodiverse, and they suffered because the world demanded they be neurotypical. These terms would be popularized by journalist Harvey Blume and widely adopted by disability advocates a few years later. The label neurodiverse includes everyone from people with ADHD, to Down Syndrome, to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, to Borderline Personality Disorder. It also includes people with brain injuries or strokes, people who have been labeled “low intelligence,” and people who lack any formal diagnosis, but have been pathologized as “crazy” or “incompetent” throughout their lives. As Singer rightly observed, neurodiversity isn’t actually about having a specific, catalogued “defect” that the psychiatric establishment has an explanation for. It’s about being different in a way others struggle to understand or refuse to accept.
But you could just easily subscribe to all of them. That’s not fragmentation.