Neurodivergence, Social Media, and Self-Diagnosis: What to Know

So let's start there and take a step back.

So we often are hearing the word neurodivergent.

And I think people have a lot of questions around whether that's a diagnosis.

Is it a social term? What do we mean when we say that we're talking about the topic of neurodivergence today?

First of all, I love that you're starting with this question because you're absolutely right.

It is creating a lot of confusion.

And it's not a medical term.

And it's very intentionally not a medical term.

So someone's not diagnosed as neurodivergent.

You might be diagnosed with ADHD or autism or dyslexia.

And a person might choose to identify as neurodivergent.

But it's not a medical term.

It's a sociopolitical term or an identity term, we could also say.

So it really came out of the autistic rights movement and the disability rights movement.

The term was coined back in the early 2000s by an autistic activist, Kassiana Assasomas, And at the time that she coined it, autistic books, we tend to be very literal with our words.

So we notice when words don't make sense.

And at the time, people were talking about you can be autistic or you can be neurotypical.

But that creates a sort of false binary because there's a lot of people who aren't autistic but also aren't neurotypical.

So folks who are, for example, ADHD or dyslexic or have epilepsy, they are neurodivergent in that they diverge from what we might call neuro-normativity, but they're not autistic.

So we needed a word to capture those experiences.

So yeah, really it's kind of capturing that social experience, that socio-political experience of your relationship to neuro-normativity.

I realize that's probably a new word for a lot of folks.

I think maybe a lot of listeners might be used to the concept of like hetero-normativity, the idea that there's spaces and cultural norms that assume a certain way of having a gender or expressing a gender or assume that partnerships are between different sex folks.

So neuro-normativity operates similarly where there's a lot of cultural norms or expectations or the way systems are built that expect a person to process information a certain way.

That includes sensory information or cognitive information or even how we communicate socially.