We never know the number of undiagnosed, many may be just capable of pretending but suffering.
Neurodivergent doesn’t mean a failure at communication. That is a very reductive view of such a broad statement. Adding to that the concept of Neurodivergent covers a massive range of things. Someone who is ADHD faces different problems than someone with depression. So nearly everyone may be neurodivergent in some form but the average of communication falls within range of how we do now.
That’s not what he’s saying. He’s referring to neurotypicality as just being the standard that won a standards war, as in a format war like VHS vs Betamax or HD-DVD vs Blu-ray.
Yes, that’s reflected in the comment you referred to.
edit: I mean responded to
Yeah honestly I don’t really understand what OP is trying to say.
I think what OP is communicating is this:
There are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of different mental models. There is a single mental model that is neither good nor bad that appears to to cover the largest number of living human beings on the planet. Because this covers the largest number of humans, it holds the title of the standard by which all other mental models are judged. It is the baseline. “Neuro” being “of the nerves” and typical" meaning “common”. It is, by definition, neurotypical.
So OP continues the thought with: Consider instead of the mental model that is today’s “neurotypical”, that some other mental model was shared by the largest number of living humans. Would that other mental model, which could be drastically different, be called the “neurotypical”.
The answer, clearly, is: Yes. Simply the definition of the term defines it so.
typical NT
Neurotypical does mean pretty much exactly that, with only the clarification that while communication is significant, it extends beyond that.
That’s a lot of why the terminology “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent” exists in the first place - because at this point, it doesn’t even pretend to be an objective measure of mental health, but simply a pair of labels with which to describe the degrees to which people do or do not accord to current societal standards.
For example - posit a society in which it has become socially acceptable and even expected, when you meet someone, to punch them in the face.
If one were to ask a person how they feel about punching other people in the face, it’s fairly obvious that the objectively psychologically sound view is that that’s a thing they would not and likely could not do.
But to actually act in that way - to be unwilling or even unable to do it in a society in which it’s the norm and thus the expected and sanctioned behavior - would be “neurodivergent.” The conclusion would be that one must suffer from some psychological or physiological affliction that makes it so that one is unwilling or unable to act in a way that accords with expected behavior or societal norms. That one is “neurodivergent” instead of “neurotypical.”
You could make definitions of neurotypical and neurodivergent that were based purely on statistical descriptions of the brain. It wouldn’t have to map onto culture at all. It’s not behaviorally or situationally divergent. It’s neurally divergent.
Behaviour is a translation of underlying brain structure, functions and neuronal networks in a given environmental setting. I don’t think that you can just classify into “neurodivergent” and “neurotypical” only based on pure brain anatomy. We are all humans, so everyone has a human brain with slight individual variations. However, functional differences may occur more often and can be distinctive between groups (which network is more recruited for a certain type of task). These functional differences can translate in variations of performance and adaptation in a given setting. Functional brain imaging is generally used to explore and to search for explanations of observed behaviours, but is rarely used to classify or diagnose people. So, behavioural observations remain the main criteria for classification. “Neurotypical” and “neurodivergent” are however more of a social construction than a statistical.
True, but only due to lack of technology. It’s just not economically feasible to be using fmri (I understand the distinction between structural and functional here), and not technologically feasible to be using neural mapping to characterize people.
But the term neurodivergent implies neurons, not behavior.
If we insist on keeping behavior as the definition and not just the indicator we use to detect the differences, we should start referring to these as philosophical or behavioral divergence, because we have no good reason to assume differences in behavior are only or even mostly a function of neurological differences.
Neurodivergent people are not a homogenous group. You can be neurodivergent in different ways and it influences communication in different ways. It is improbable that one of the neurodivergent subgroups is frequent enough to turn out to be an overall majority. But you’re not talking about majority, so what portion of the population would it have to be?
I’ve accepted that everyone’s mentally ill to a degree, we just pretend to be “normal”
Neurodivergence doesn’t necessarily need to mean mentally ill
Neurodivergent =/= mentally ill
Yeah, I’m pretty sure the whole point of that term is to convey the idea that those people aren’t broken, they’re just different from typical people. And in a society dominated by those with what are now “neurodivergent” minds, they’d be the typical “normal” people.
Funnily though, the very definition of many of the disorders specifically state that they are a significant departure from the norm that cause some kind of life impairment.
So what we’re really saying is, stop treating us like shit and using words that describe us and turning them into derogatory words.
Except, it’s human nature to not be very accepting of people we see as different from us. So I guess we’ll just keep playing these stupid semantic games.
And in a way there is no “normal” to begin with. No one describes or thinks of themselves as “normal” when asked. Everyone in some way or another wishes they could just be Normal. “Normal” is what everyone else is, but not who any one specific person is - it’s generally unachievable in a literal sense.
That’s why I prefer to use average.
Or even easier…typical.
Or, the norm… normal
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In many ways, being able to pretend is the definition. The normal is a game that works for many people, a shared arrangement that keeps the lights on. But the normal has now grown for millennia and it’s become a personality of its own, and that personality views the myriad personalities as threats to itself. Hence we don’t just follow protocol to trade and handle tasks, we follow it in every moment of our lives, and we can only safely express the non-common part, the insane part, when we’re out away from the group.
These days the operations protocol refuses to coexist with the personal styles, except it strictly defined containers where variation is permitted and encouraged.
Actually “normal” conceptually has not been around for millenia, it’s origin is actually only roughly three to four hundred years old and came about during the period where societies started industrializing and jobs began having more specific requirements for whom they hired. Prior to that there wasn’t really any idea of what a “normal” person was. Differently abled people were quite regular as losing function to injury, infection or disease was very common and not really seen as creating a different class of person. There’s evidence of people who had pretty impairing birth defects like fused limbs who were obviously soldiers or hard labourers given their physical development. Personal mental oddities in the absence of the field of psychology categorizing things were just chalked up to being the way that person was and the way people were was myriad.
In English the word “normal” came into being in the tail end of the 17th century and was borrowed off the word for a 90 degree carpenter square to mean “theoretically fit for all kinds of work” . It’s entirely a recent social invention in the grand scheme of things.
Normal is basically the average of everything most people do… so 🤷🏻♂️
A lot of neurodivergent traits seem to be sliders rather than buttons, where it’s only neurodivergent if the slider isn’t in the middle. I sometimes wonder how many people actually have all their sliders in the middle.
That is pretty much the conclusion of Foucaults Madness and Civilization.
…significant potion …?
My bad. fixed!
Mix me up and drink me down
I feel that people with mental disabilities/conditions have latched onto the medical “neurodivergent” term as a political “us against them” label. This can backfire spectacularly.
Disability, mental disorder, retard, etc etc etc
The words used to objectively discuss people who are different seem to always drift towards derogatory uses.
So we shed those labels, come up with new ones… and the cycle continues.
If someone cared to find a citation, I’m sure something exists on google scholar.
I believe it’s known as the lexical treadmill
I’m not so sure. I feel like the term is so broad and vague that it makes it difficult to attack them as a group. Which is presumably the point.
you have people with minor anxiety calling themselves neurodivergent now. the term has sort of lost all meaning. if everyone is neurodivergent, nobody is.
Maybe the experiment that is “normal” was a fad. We didn’t even have a word for it until the 1600’s as physical and mental impairments were much more common and it wasn’t until mass manufacturing and early sciences became a thing that our cultural obsession with uniformity cropped up.
As we built up science changed models. It stopped trying to find easy universal constants and started looking at the just how naturally variable everything is. Like how cancer is actually not a singular diagnosis but a very large family of vaguely related conditions that all operate and respond in very different ways. Curing the entire disease family is fighting a hydra.
We could very easily revert to a pre “normal” society model but instead of that being informed by ignorance it could be through compassionate study.
Though we got a ways to go. A lot of people are very… passionate about holding onto the label of normal and the “right” for others to only be referred to as deviation.
A lot of people are very… passionate about holding onto the label of normal and the “right” for others to only be referred to as deviation
Who tf takes pride in being normal? Hell the term “normie” is a derogative term. No one is bragging about how normal they are and I think this is a made up enemy to make pursuing the normalization of “neurodivergence” a more noble goal.
In reality we have people saying they suffer from “time blindness” and want exceptions to be made because they can’t figure out how to structure their life in a way that allows them to function with the people around them. Everyone has issues, and everyone should figure out ways to minimize how those issues impact their life and the people around them. Instead, we have people submitting to the idea that “I’m neurodivergent there is nothing I can do to improve its just who I am” to excuse their faults.
Often the " bragging about how normal they are" isn’t the way that shakes out. I am thinking more specifically about people who throw tantrums about being called “cis” or “hetero” or “allistic” or even “allosexual” . To a lot of these people they refuse to have any label applied because they figure they should just be assumed the normal and the default and no word should exist that describes their state. To them any descriptive labels are just for “deviations” and being treated on the same footing as a deviation even a little is a threat to the supremacy of normalcy. Often one gets the impression that they want communities of queer or neurotypic people to internally refer to them as “regular people” not so much “normies” as they would probably find that derogatory as well.
Neurodivergence used as an excuse not to improve is just shitty behaviour. For a lot of us knowing our type of Neurodivergence can open doors to figuring out learning styles or work arounds when the something that should work but doesn’t. On the other hand sometimes someone will try to force something that provably has never worked for you and not have a lot of empathy when you try and warn them that what they are trying to do has a history of not shaking out for you like they expect it will. It’s a two way street. Knowledge of your personal weaknesses and workarounds can be frustrating for other people who see it feom the outside as you not doing what they want because of lack of gumption and willingness to “try” when really you are just very tired trying to do this something for other people have recommended over and over and have developed a boundary to explain that for you it’s a fool’s errand to try again. To the other person they have never seen all the attempts you have made before doing it their way so to them it just looks like lazy.
I am thinking more specifically about people who throw tantrums about being called “cis” or “hetero” or “allistic” or even “allosexual” .
You mean people on reddit and twitter? Don’t take their opinions too seriously. Some women don’t like being called cis women, as they feel its a deliberate attempt to redefine what a women is (which to be honest, it kind of is). I have never heard of anyone being called allosexual, nevertheless getting upset about it.
Yeah… I wish I could have that ignorance but trust me. These people exist out in the world and while they are more prevalent in some places than others they use that policing of language and the sort of “normalcy privilege” as a weapon. Take my hometown, right now there is a concerted effort by these people to influence the school board and town council decorum insisting the labels cis/hetero/allosexual and allistic should be treated as slurs and make their usage an offence for which one can be ejected from chambers or have their jobs threatened.
I know a lot of people in my community who have been challenged, even yelled at in public, in person by these people because they were overhead them using cis / het to describe either themselves or others in a private conversation that these people picked up on.
What these movements do is enforce a double standard on queer communities. There is a concerted effort to rob us of the language to refer to other states of being other than ours in ways that are judgement neutral. This often causes queer friendly scholarship to have to mince through ridiculous hoops making it much more difficult to sussinctly explain concepts which otherwise become much more arcane without the ability to use adjectives.
Trying to talk to these “cis is a slur” people it becomes very clear that they do not think there should be a word for them. Their existence is assumed correct, unremarkable and beyond the ability to comment on. Our existence however is controversial and thus deserves a derivative label.
