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As a child, I was frequently scolded for zoning out in class, interrupting conversations and losing just about everything I owned. It wasn’t until adulthood, when I was diagnosed with ADHD, that these “bad habits” began to make sense.
The idea that my brain is wired differently is the foundation of neurodiversity, a relatively new framework for understanding neurodevelopmental conditions like ADHD and autism. “Neurodiversity reflects an awareness that, across humanity, we have many different ways of perceiving and relating to the world that reflect differences in our brain development and brain function,” says Geraldine Dawson at Duke University in North Carolina.
Instead of viewing these differences as problems to be fixed, a neurodiverse approach aims to embrace them, she says.
That seems clear enough. But the concept of neurodiversity has been a source of debate in recent years, particularly in terms of what it means for psychiatrists and neuroscientists, who have long thought in terms of neurodevelopmental “disorders”, and the people they are seeking to help.
“Some people take it that the neurodiversity paradigm is against the medical paradigm,” says Anita Thapar, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University in the UK. “What I have argued in several papers is that both are useful for different purposes.”
What is neurodiversity?
To start from the beginning, the term “neurodiverse” was first coined in the late 1990s by sociologist Judy Singer, who used it when describing people with autism who had no intellectual impairments but struggled with relating to others or had repetitive behaviours.
The idea was to view autism as a difference,…
