Has “Neurodiversity” Gone Rogue?

On a Movement Undermining its Own Linguistic Innovation

I do my best thinking against the hum of long international flights, normally over the Pacific.

I often melt into airplane seats, my body collapsing, finding rest for more hours at a time than my usual suburban life in Northern California allows. My husband is originally from Nepal and so for the past seventeen years we have been making yearly international treks (to the country, not the peaks — to be clear, we are both urban dwellers).

One day on such a flight, after a stressful couple of years living back in the Bay Area, where I’m originally from, my mind swelled with the wonder of time and drifted to questioning territory. The thoughts went something like this:

“I’m exhausted. Am I alone? No one talks to me about their loneliness or emotional struggles of adulthood. Why is that? We seem to pay so much attention to the outer struggles of identity in regards to work, money, race, sex, sexuality. What about the inner struggles that unite us all? Is this a thing? Inner diversity?”

Naturally for me, when I landed at the Seoul airport, I started googling things like “emotional diversity” and “temperament diversity,” and a day or so later, after arriving in Kathmandu, it didn’t take long for me to stumble upon the term “neurodiversity.”

“Great!” I thought to myself. “People are talking about this. Awesome. Neurological diversity feels close to what I was thinking about. Fantastic.”

But I soon realized that, because of its rapid uptake in one or two specific communities, neurodiversity became, over time — for all intents and purposes — a synonym for autism (or sometimes ADHD).

“Huh?” I thought to myself. “That’s not neurodiversity. That’s just autism. Autism is autism. Neurodiversity is everything — it’s bipolar, anxiety, OCD, dyslexia, all of it.” That’s what the draw was for me, the appeal of having an umbrella term.

After a while I found a few fellow writers publishing smart work on the topic, most notably…