The term “neurodivergent” implies that there’s nothing wrong with you if you have ADHD–you’re just special and different. But my ADHD is an illness that requires treatment.

I think the term is perfectly valid when applied to autism, as autism is not, to the best of my knowledge, a mental illness so much as a difference in processing.

As someone with both ADHD and autism, I want to touch on a perspective I think might be missing here (if others have commented similarly, excuse me for being a parrot). Both definitionally and experientially, autism and ADHD are both disabilities. Both come with strengths; autism makes me really good at learning patterns which helps with language learning, for example, and ADHD helps me have a large amount of focus however controlled on a specific topic. Yet, both are still disabling.

Autistic people constantly are confused by allistic (read: not autistic) people in their communication style as well as the overreliance on things like body language to convey meaning. Autistic people also deal with sensory overload issues.

ADHD people struggle to focus on tasks no matter how much they want to focus on them.

I could include more examples, but that’s not the purpose of this comment. This could also be stemming from my autistic perspective where when I, specifically, use the word “neurodivergent,” I use it to mean a collection of disabilities such as autism, ADHD, and OCD, and that’s it. I simply view it as a label much like what the label of “queer” is today despite its troubled history.

Right out the gate, I don’t like the ‘superpower’ narratives or the ‘something we should get rid of entirely’ ones myself for both ADHD and autism, as someone with both.

but that doesn’t mean ADHD isn’t ultimately a disorder that some people need to treat with medication and therapy.

First off, I agree that therapy can be big. The difference with ADHD coping methods is that I’ve found the ones have therapists recommended me generally helpful or well-intentioned neutral, while the vast majority of the autism ‘coping methods’ I’ve gotten have ranged from unhelpful to legitimately harmful.

Second is the medication point; some people don’t want or need medication, and that’s fine. Some others might not have a choice either way. I don’t have as many options there when it comes to ADHD because of anxiety and vice versa, so I might never have the option of having my ADHD mostly or completely treated through medication.

I mostly feel like it’s up to the individual. I kind of see the term as a net neutral and quite situational. I’ve found reading through the replies here to be quite interesting!

I like neurodivergent in the same way I like queer.

It’s got a real punk feeling; I don’t into fit in to your normalised perception of reality, I don’t need to and I relish not fitting into this narrow definition of what it is to be.

adhd is a neurodevelopmental thing and to my knowledge that’s just what neurodivergence means

I don’t think the term “neurodivergent” implies there’s nothing wrong with you and you don’t need treatment. Neurodivergent is also used to describe bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and schizoaffective disorder. The term means that there is a structural difference in how the brain deveops in comparison to neurotypical people, as opposed to a “chemical imbalance” as is often used to describe mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety, which you can be born with but you can also develop due to trauma.

Honestly, I liked the term a lot when I heard it. With competition like ‘learning disability’ and ‘a bit on the spectrum’, it was like a breath of fresh air. If it makes people who don’t have ADHD less likely to bully kids at school, then it may be worth the inaccuracy.

Plus, it hits the point that you can’t make broad assumptions about people with ADHD. Some people need medication/ therapy. Some people have coping strategies that reduce or eliminate the need for either. A lot of people are still trying to figure things out.

My friend uses “neurospicy”

I always that of neurorivergent as “my brain works different”. That applies to autism as well as ADHD. I don’t think the fact that there is medication for it is important. People with autism struggle just like people with ADHD. Not just because people don’t understand them but also because they don’t understand people. I have a friend with autism and I have ADHD. We both struggle because of our brains.

I think your analogy of autism “being bad” because society discourages autistic traits applies better to ADHD.

We would have been the ones to survive in a hunter-gatherer society. Our brains are wired to pay attention to more stuff simultaneously, which would have kept us alive when predators were a threat to us. Society discourages distraction now, which is why we feel forced to conform to that.

I’m not sure if there is a “official” definition of neurodivergence, but everyone differs in the way they brain works. It’s not a great term since on the face of it, it could apply to nearly everyone. But I think of it as anything that makes your brain diverge from the commonly accepted average.

I hope my point makes sense.

The term “neurodivergent” implies that there’s nothing wrong with you if you have ADHD–you’re just special and different.

I think that’s definitely something you’ve inferred but is not necessary implied.

For me, it perfectly describes a wide range of neurodivergent conditions such as ADHD, ASD, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, et al. It describes a threshold that makes those different from neuro-diversity to where that person has a disorder that impacts their daily life.

Conversely, I feel that the term ‘neurotypical’ implies that theres nothing wrong with that person when those who are NT, tend to not say what they mean, talk in riddles and hold some very strange assumed opinions about things as well as considering themselves to be normative, very much to the detriment of those they think are outside the parameters they set in their minds.

“Mental illness” is really the only other option

That would imply there is a cure, which there absolutely is not, and that there is a normative ‘well’ condition.

Neurodivergent also recognizes the overlap of a lot of these conditions, and the fact that the scientific community hasn’t finished researching and disambiguating these things.

Lazy reply cause I’m tired, but could it be that your frustration lies on the neurodiversity movement instead of the term neurodivergent? A lot of your frustrations align with others’ criticisms of the neurodiversity movement, and I’m wondering if - because most people will conflate one with the other - you simply don’t consider yourself part of the neurodiversity movement instead?

I’m asking this because a lot of people here are saying they’re two different things, but if you go on like reddit they will talk about it like they’re the same thing. I want to make it clear that, they’re not, but if they’re being talked about like they are in widespread culture then I can understand your frustration with a term that is associated with something you don’t feel a part of, even if that’s not actually what it means

That’s why “neurodivergence” is used instead of “neurodiversity”.

It’s not that we don’t think ADHD is a disability; it’s that we’re more convinced by the social modal of disability than the “there is just something fundamentally wrong with your brain” modal.

For me, it causes me a LOT of problems, but I think most of those problems are looped around each other and exaggerated by society, and by the resulting secondary, problem-compounding problems that tend to pile up on top of adhd like depression, anxiety, cptsd, low self esteem, poor diet and sleep, and so on and on.

I see it exactly the same way I see autism. Not fundamentally bad, even though it absolutely causes issues. Autistic people, for example, run into heaps and heaps of trouble because of the difficulty they have communicating with more neurotypical people. They might miss subtle social cues and be ostracized, or be very direct to the point of being seen as rude, and get ostracized or fired from jobs and so on.

Meanwhile, off meds, I miss subtle social cues because I can’t always look at someone’s facial expressions and talk at the same time, and maybe there’s a song or an anxiety loop or a previous conversation topic stuck in my head. Or I can’t talk coherently because I think of a whole wordcloud of an answer all at once and can’t pick a linear route through it fast enough. It’s not so different, imo. The reasons are different but the resulting problem is the same, more or less.

And both ADHD and autistic folks experience sensory issues.

I suspect if there were meds that helped autistic folks the way meds can help many adhd folks, people would probably view it more the same way. Or if ADHD meds didn’t exist and we just had to exist without them.

Even as it is, autism is so much more stigmatized than unmedicated ADHD. If ADHD is an illness, and autism is not an illness but is a stigmatized but normal brain difference, why do autistic folks usually seem to have the harder time in the world? Why is society’s shitty response to adhd “ignore it, it doesn’t exist”, while its shitty response for autism is to widely adopt a child abusive “therapy” invented by the guy who invented gay conversion “therapy”?

I get tired of the people insisting we don’t have huge struggles or count for disability help, too. But tbh I also get sick of being told my brain is broken and that my adhd is an illness, because I don’t think mine is. I think it’s just different, albeit in an often very inconvenient way. But I see upsides to it too. I don’t think I would trade-in for a neurotypical brain, to be honest, despite all the problems. I like the creativity and the non-linearity of thought and the outside-the-box thinking and the hyperfocus adventures. I like my neurodivergent friends and the way our socialization works amongst each other. And I do have the meds, which help a lot with the problems.

For my, and my own adhd, it’s both a positive neurodivergence and a disability. Not an either-or.

All that said, I kinda don’t think “neurotypicals” per se actually exist, especially when accounting for the really dramatic plasticity of even adult brains, and the way experiences and thought patterns can and do continually change the structure of the human brain. And ADHD folks share symptoms with a lot of mental illnesses that aren’t considered neurodivergent normally.

Talking about neurodivergence is helpful because it’s a more positive and less medicalized lens for looking at things, in my opinion. I like it. But the neurodivergent/neurotypical binary idea can also become a problem.

Anyways. Different peoples’ experiences with adhd can differ a lot. If you see yours purely as medical disability, that’s a-okay with me, and you don’t have to describe yourself as neurodivergent, but I don’t see mine that way.

Perhaps on all sides of this we could benefit from being more careful not to describe other peoples’ adhd in authoritative tones based on our own. Like, I agree not to call your adhd neurodivergent, and you agree not to call mine an illness? (Tbh I think you did a good job in your post of talking about yourself rather than talking for others.)

/ramble I half-feel like deleting and might later but at this point I’ve committed too much so here you go I guess

Edit: also there’s so much overlap between autism and adhd I’ve heard some talk, sometimes, about whether they might be best classified as two forms of the same thing. shrug The science is still sciencing on this one.

Neurodivergent is a technical term that denotes that your brain is wired outside the norm. It doesn’t actually say anything about if it has a medical diagnosis attached or not.

I found the second part kind of funny because executive function deficit, issues with hypersensitivity, extreme empathy, struggle with impulse control and so on, are all things that people with ASD struggle with.