How Neurodivergence Leads To Cultural Wealth

And you've developed something called the Neurodivergent Cultural Wealth Framework.

And in it, you set out different principles for us to consider when we're looking at neurodivergent.

And I'm interested to know all about that.

So let's start with what is neurodivergent culture and why is it important?

I like to think of neurodivergent culture as the knowledge that we share as a community, the language that we share, which you can often see in online environments, the strategies we develop for coping, the meanings we make of the lives we lead, and the ways of understanding ourselves and also others like neurotypicals that develop through our neurodivergent lived experience and through people who are neurodivergent communicating with one another and learning from one another.

It doesn't mean necessarily that every neurodivergent person is the same and the culture is not a monolith.

There's a lot of diversity within it.

But culture obviously can hold a lot of enormous variation.

What's important, I think, is that it gives us a way to understand neurodivergent people as knowledge holders and community members and not simply as people with symptoms or deficits, which is the typical presentation of how autism is viewed by neurotypical society.

Right.

What is overlooked when we define neurodivergence from a deficit perspective?

The deficit lens that neurotypical society applies treats us as if we're somehow inferior or defective.

And we fail in adopting that ourselves because we internalize this ableism to see the knowledge that we've developed, the skills of adaptation we've developed as a result of the necessity of trying to survive in a neurotypical world.

the perspective we gain, and the wisdom we come to as a result of our experiences living as neurodivergent people in worlds that are designed for neurotypical people.

A deficit lens can accurately identify real difficulties like executive dysfunction or sensory overwhelm, burnout, our communication differences, or how they're viewed at least as being deficits by neurotypical folks.

But if that's the only lens we use, many of us have used it across our lives, we disappear as people behind this list of impairments.

And we miss what we might have learned, the systems we might have built to cope and to grow and flourish, the patterns that we notice and adapt to, and the communities that we build collectively, as well as the meaning that we make from our experiences as neurodivergent people.

So how is what you've developed, the neurodivergent cultural wealth framework, different then from the deficit-based perspective?

I think the difference lies in the question we ask.

So a deficit perspective will ask what is impaired, what is missing, what is difficult about this person.

And my framework asks another question.

What forms of wealth emerge through the process of living a neurodivergent life? That obviously doesn't cancel the first question, but it invites us to broaden the picture.

My framework treats lived experience as a potential source of expertise rather than just assuming that expertise comes from professionals who observe neurodivergent people from the outside.

This is an invitation to look at life from the inside and to celebrate who we are and who we've become as a matter of necessity and how we've learned to flourish.

I love that.