Neurodiversity is essentially the radical notion that not everyone has a brain that works the same way. The concept of neurodiversity originated in the autistic rights movement, possibly because autism is one of the easiest-to-see examples of “not broken, just different,” but it applies much more widely.
Some people have brains that work better than other people’s– they might be able to grasp mathematical concepts much more easily or easily visualize complex three-dimensional shapes. Some people have brains that work less well than other people’s– they might feel sad constantly for no reason or constantly hate themselves. Some people’s brains work better in some ways and worse in other ways– ADD has benefits (multitasking like whoa!) and downsides (“where did I put my keys again?”). Some people’s brains aren’t better or worse at all, just different– for instance, autistic people or trans people.
The problem for all these groups is that society is set up for the norm. People assume that neurodivergent people work the way everyone else does, and that when they object to a food or physical touch or a room they’re just being fussy and need to learn to put up with it. Schools and workplaces are often very reluctant to offer accommodations that will help people do their work because it would be “special treatment.” Friends, family, or romantic partners of neurodivergent people are often complemented about how brave and strong they are for putting up with neurodivergent people. Lots of people think of neurodivergent people as monsters, with “awwww so inspirational” condescension, or as neurotypical people who are just pretending to be neurodivergent. All of this creates a lot of unnecessary trouble for neurodivergent people.
Here’s the thing: people are different. Different people have different needs. For instance, I need people not to yell at me, I need classes that move relatively fast, I need to have directions written down instead of told to me verbally, and I need specific training about how to deal with my emotions. As long as these needs are met, I’m fully capable of talking about things I did wrong, not getting bored, following directions, and not exploding into a sobbing pile of “I AM THE WORST PERSON ALIVE.” My needs are not any less real because they are different.
People’s refusal to acknowledge neurodivergence hurts people. Neurodivergent people are very often told that they’re lazy or broken instead of being taught coping mechanisms for their neurodivergence. Even when they’re taught coping mechanisms, they’re often not about having a happy and functional life while neurodivergent, but about how to pretend to be normal so you don’t threaten or upset people.
Incidentally, that also provides a neat solution to the whole “but we are overmedicating people and medicalizing ordinary variation!” problem. Medicalizing ordinary variation is only a problem if you think the purpose of treatment is to make people normal. So you have one side going, “We’re fine with you turning those people normal, they’re really weird! But some of those people you’re diagnosing with things are practically normal already. We don’t want everyone to be totally the same, just same enough that we don’t feel threatened or have to change anything to accommodate them.” And the other side goes, “Yes, but if we try to make all the people normal, then we get more money! Braindrugs for everyone!”
Telling people their experiences are real, helping them find people who are like them, teaching them coping mechanisms for their neurodivergence (which may include medication, but doesn’t always), helping them find accommodations… all of those are good things which the mental health system could do. Sometimes it even does them.
Finally, one of the big mistakes people make with the neurodivergence model is that they assume that because a lot of the trouble that comes from being neurodivergent comes from lack of accommodation, ableism, stigma, and other badnesses, therefore all the trouble that comes from being neurodivergent comes from those things. For some people, this is true.
On the other hand, there are lots of neurodivergences that lead to people hurting themselves or others, losing touch with consensus reality, or being unable to function in everyday life even with accommodations, and those pretty much suck balls. (Those are the ones I call “mental illness,” usually.) It is okay to acknowledge that some ways people are different suck; it’s not okay to treat people worse because of it.
Thing of Things 
Interesting read! One of my best friends is on the autism spectrum, and in her case, it’s very clearly “not broken, just different.” She never seems to think of it as a mental illness, and I know I don’t. It’s more like (at least from what I’ve seen) being someone who’s colorblind but has perfect pitch– different perspective, different strengths and weaknesses, does best in a particular environment/job (which, lbr, so does EVERYONE to a degree).
I, on the other hand, have depression. And the only thing that makes it survivable for me, let alone something I can have a happy and fulfilling life despite, is treating it VERY MUCH on the medical model, not only with drugs (which I take), but in how I think about it. Because my depressive cycles have a nasty habit of being like this:
Depression: No, Vivs, you can’t go running this morning! Or finish your writing project, or send work emails! You must laze around scrolling through tumblr trying not to cry! Bwahahaha!
Me: *fights this, wins some loses some, feels a little better in a few days*
Depression, a few days later: Vivs, you really let something as weak as ME stop you from being productive? You lazy blob, I’m just the excuse you use for your own weakness!
Me, pre-diagnosis/medical model/drugs: Oh…. ok. I do kinda suck.
Me, post diagnosis/medical model/zoloft: Don’t be ridiculous! If I’d been in bed with the stomach flu, I wouldn’t beat myself up for that! Of course I’ll need rest and be less productive while ill! And you, depression, are nothing but the stomach flu of the brain!
Of course, the fact that depression literally sabotages your ability to feel joy is SUCH a significant impairment that accomodating it STILL LEAVES YOU CRIPPLINGLY SAD. So it might be a bit different than the others.
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Is autism / Asperger’s even considered to fall into the category of “mental illness”? I always categorized it under “neurological disorder” (and considered this a distinct category). Pretty tangential to your point, but I’ve been curious about this lately and meaning to ask.
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It’s not a mental illness, you’re correct. It’s more in the same category as Down Syndrome (Down’s Syndrome? I need to read more usage guidelines.) and various intellectual and other developmental disabilities.
In practice, if an autistic activist brings that point up after people call mentally ill people dangerous, the rest of zir coalition will often get ticked off, because the autistic and mental illness communities work together a lot, and mentioning how autism is not a mental illness in that context basically constitutes hurting part of your own side to help a subset of your side.
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You’re right– sorry if that came across as ignorant! I’m still pretty new to a lot of the framework, and have a lot to learn.
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Here’s a question up for discussion: What is the correct way to socialize folks who are not high functioning?
At my elementary school we had a rotating schedule so that every kid in the class would have dedicated play times with the autistic kids. I hated these because they were obligations and I was trapped in a room with someone I couldn’t communicate with while being made to feel guilty because I hated it so much.
You can probably guess that I’m not in favor of this model. I don’t get along with anyone who I can’t hold a conversation with (one of the reasons I don’t want kids) and exposure didn’t do a thing to fix that; if anything, it’s left me with a lifelong chip on my shoulder.
So my honest question here is, what can be/is being done that’s more useful for everyone involved?
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That sounds like an extremely terrible approach, unless they had a rotating schedule so that every kid would have dedicated play times with every other kid, in which case it merely strikes me as a very terrible approach.
I’m not sure what the right way is, but I’m pretty damn certain that’s not it.
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No, we didn’t have a general rotating schedule for playtime; in fact, the rotation for spending time with autistic students was part of our chores rotation. After a while I started cheating and moving my placard into a different space to get out of it.
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That sounds exceedingly fucked-up conceptually, and highly unlikely to be useful in practice. Leaving aside the detrimental effects on the more neurotypical students’ attitude toward autistics, what exactly were the autistic kids supposed to be getting out of this? If they were had poor but existent language skills, I suppose it could theoretically be an opportunity to practice social conversation, but it sounds from your description like they were entirely non-verbal.
I’m having a really hard time figuring out what, if anything, the actual point of this exercise was supposed to be, assuming there was one beyond “doing something.”
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@Osberend
They weren’t entirely non-verbal, just very difficult to talk to. When prompted they’d say something, but it usually wasn’t anything I could respond to.
As for the point, it was a very progressive school in the area of the country that invented progressivism. We talked a lot about diversity and tolerance, and how important it was to get to know people who were different from you and treat them just the same. I imagine the school was trying to get my comfortable with people with cognitive disabilities as well as give the students with those disabilities the opportunity to socialize with everyone. I’m honestly sympathetic to the school for trying, even if it backfired hard.
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As someone who is better at passing for NT, I did a fair amount of work with one of my (more-impaired?) autistic peers (mostly participating in script practice and adding words to a communication device), and now that I see that student in a non-speech context, we’re acquaintances.
I’m not sure how this would scale, but encouraging some kind of intra-disorder mentoring program where older autistic students work with younger ones could potentially lead to positive outcomes.
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That sounds like a really neat program idea. Organized mentorship in general is something I believe in, and it’s even more important when kids are paired with someone like them who’s a success story.
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This.
I am on the high functioning side of the spectrum and have a son who’s somewhat further on the scale. It is flatly impossible for him to learn “normality” from “normal” people, what he needs is to learn coping tricks from someone who’s learned them the hard way (or possibly the ‘soft’ way, but such people seem few and far between).
Example: Nobody can detect the difference between him making eye contact and him staring at the middle of the persons forehead. The latter is possible to achieve, the former is not realistically so.
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ADHD-PI here, and I can’t say any benefits that come from it are actually being good at multitasking. I just have to, so as to keep up enough stimulation to prevent myself from opening up Hacker News or YouTube. It’s not more efficient, since I have to spend time switching tasks a lot. But if I tried to do things sequentially, I’d just get stuck on some internet time waster.
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Do neurotypical people actually exist?
I mean, selection bias alert, but everyone I know well enough to have shared any metacognition with (and a large number of those I don’t know quite that well) have some amount of neurodivergence from “normal” that is burdensome.
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You list being trans as an example of something that’s neither good nor bad. Is there something in particular that you think is an advantage of being trans?
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Not Ozy, but I’m a trans man.
My position is that if you don’t experience a sense of physical dysphoria then being trans would count as neutral; if you do, it carries a terrible disadvantage that no level of public acceptance could erase. I have had two major surgeries, one – a bilateral oopherectomy – as a result of a cancer threat that stemmed directly from the testosterone that, thanks to the resulting surgery, is no longer in the realm of ‘optional’; I will be sticking a needle into my thigh once a week for the rest of my life because I can no longer produce normal quantities of any kind of sex hormone on my own.
It should be noted that I’m one of the lucky ones because I was able to access medical treatment. As inconvenient as the current state of my body is, I was even more miserable before I transitioned. If I had a choice I would remove that kind of ‘neurodivergence’ from the population entirely on the grounds that it’s needless suffering that can’t be fixed by decreased social stigma.
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But many kinds of brains cause needless suffering that can’t be fixed by decreased social stigma. Introverts, for instance, are typically less happy than extroverts and become happier if they act like extroverts; would you press a “no more introverts” button? How about a “no more low-conscientiousness people” button? “No more worrywarts”?
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Surely there are degrees here. In my view, I have a chronic medical condition that will require treatment for the rest of my life, barring a scientific breakthrough, and I’m generally anti-chronic medical condition.
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@ozymandias: The obvious question would seem to “why not?” What is the positive benefit of having those types of brains (individually or socially) that makes it desirable to continue having them?
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@Osberend
A difference of scale, I’d say. I’m a shy person (not a proper introvert), and my life prospects have suffered as a result, but it’s not comparable with my brain sabotaging me in a way that requires me to amputate parts of my body. I don’t even know that I would choose to cure my shyness if I had the option; it may overall be less advantageous, but I like how it leads me to only develop a few close relationships, giving me time to focus on creative things in private.
I’ll think more on how to articulate the difference.
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@ozymandias
The thing to keep in mind is the difference between values and ability.
A trans person’s desire to have a body and social gender that better matches their mental ideals is a terminal value. It needs no justification. It doesn’t matter how miserable it makes them. It’s a terminal value. Period.
Low-conscientiousness, by contrast, is not a difference in value, it’s a difference in ability. If you increase someone’s conscientiousness you won’t change their values, you just change how good they are at achieving them.
Introversion looks like a combination of different values and different abilities. I think many introverts simply value solitary pursuits more. But many of them also suffer from social anxiety, even in situations where they don’t want to be solitary.
Diversity in values is good (within limits of course, I think everyone can agree it’s a bad thing to have a diversity of views on torturing innocent people who don’t want or deserve it). Diversity in ability is bad. It’s always better for people to achieve more of their values.
Going on to the “button” questions. I am going to assume the “no more X people” button means that no more of these people will be born in the future, not that it murders existing X people:
In cases where a neurodivergences create different values, I would generally not press a button to prevent more of them from being born. I don’t care if someone with different values would be less miserable. The only exception I would make is someone who is so miserable that they rationally and sincerely wish they were never born.
In cases where a neurodivergence has the same values, but different abilities, I would gladly press a button to make sure people born in the future are more able to accomplish their goals in life.
In “package deals” where a neurodivergence combines different values with different abilities, I would not press that button unless the disabilities are so bad they make the person extremely unhappy.
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Well, for most of human history we lacked hormone treatments, but trans folks certainly existed. So that must have sucked.
Myself, I love being trans. I love being on hormones and what they do to me. I love finally feeling “rightness,” cuz I have so many years of “wrongness” to compare. I wish I passed better, but I guess I’m attractive enough to people who like an androgynous look. I have a girlfriend. Plenty of people approach me to flirt. I make it work.
I get harassed a lot. (I mean *A FUCKING LOT LIKE YOU HAVE NO IDEA*!) But somehow I’ve learned to deal. In some ways I even thrive on it. It’s like, the world is against me but my friends are solid and I’m doing it despite the odds. So fuck all you bitches I’m amazing.
I have a metric-fuckton of self-confidence that I didn’t used to have. It helps that I have a really good job.
Furthermore, there is compensation for the harassment. It works like this: I stand out. People think I’m brave. (Which, I am!) They find my confidence and my courage attractive. So in exchange for the persistent douchebags on the train, I get *a lot* of people who are drawn to me.
Okay, so look, it was not easy to get here. I had some hard years. Both leading up to transition, and then the time right after transition while I tried to make it work. I have some cool “firsts”, such as the first person to call me a faggot, the first person to spit on me, the first person to tell me I’m going to hell, the first dude to pull a knife on me, cuz QUEER!, the first man to sexually assault me, the first woman to sexually assault me, the first time I went to an AFAB queer party and discovered the fucked up queer pecking order (hint: masculinity is better, AFAB is better, trans women are shit), the first time I met face-to-face a TERF, on and on. But I learned to deal with it and came out the other side like a million times stronger.
So yeah. If you meet a trans woman, and she is alive, she is stronger than you think. We’re awesome.
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I don’t think you need to justify being trans at all. Transness is a terminal value, not an instrumental one.
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No one asked me to *justify* being trans. They asked if there were pros to being trans. (Which, the cons are obvious.)
And I say yes, there are, but they are subtle.
Myself, if you gave me a magic “do over” button and I could come back as a man or a woman and as cis or trans, I would pick “trans woman” again. (Just maybe next time I could figure it out sooner.)
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Here’s the advantage you get from being trans: If you weren’t trans you wouldn’t be you. You’d be somebody else.
There are two kinds of mental variation: Ability-affecting and Values-Affecting. Ability-affecting mental variations are ones that affect how able you are to achieve your goals. Values-Affecting mental variations affect what your goals are.
Ability-affecting mental variations have advantages and disadvantages. Values-Affecting ones do not. If you did not have a Value-Affecting mental variation you would not have an easier time achieving your goals, you would have different goals. Having your goals changed is always a bad thing, because it means that they are more difficult to attain than before. It does not matter if the new goals are easier to attain. Gaining new goals does not make up for the loss of old ones.
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Maybe I’m bring pedantic, but “otherwise I wouldn’t be me” is true for any possible mind, no? With regards to value affecting variation, changing my values is actually one of the main things I would be interested in changing sometime in the future. It’s actually an important reason I’m a transhumanist. I want whatever values and goals maximize happiness. I hate that I value feeling like I’m better than others sometimes, for example.
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There are some values we have that are egosyntonic and some that are egodystonic. It is bad for people’s egosyntonic values to be changed, but good for their egodystonic ones to be. I consider your egosyntonic values to be an important part of personal identity, changing too many of them is the same as killing someone and making a new person to replace them.
It sounds to me like your valuing being better than other people is egodystonic. Most transpeople’s desire to have a different sex/gender than the one they are assigned and a different body than the one nature gave them is egosyntonic.
I can understand and respect that you might personally desire nothing except happiness. But you should understand that not everyone is like you. Most human beings value other things in their lives than happiness. If you truly care about other people you should respect all of their life-goals, not just happiness.
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I learned new words today!
Hm. The thing is that I don’t think I would object at all if I was killed and instantly reincarnated into a new person so long as I thought it would result in an increase in happiness to everyone involved. I think I maybe am just typical minding with regards to feelings about drastic self-modification.
“If you truly care about other people you should respect all of their life-goals, not just happiness.”
My reply to this would probably take up a whole blog post (I should really get around to starting one) but the short reply is that I value people’s happiness, not attainment of their goals. The reasons I respect other people’s wishes even when they seem “bad” is mostly because I don’t trust myself as the arbiter of what will make people happy. That and ethical injunctions.
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I believe that the idea that happiness is the only valuable thing has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point. All the neuroscience seems to point towards people valuing things other than happiness. The idea that happiness is intrinsically valuable, rather than one of many things people want, is an illusion created by the fact that happiness signals and wanting signals are carried on the same neurons.
This is also provable by simple introspection, I can remember times when I was happy about something I didn’t want to be, or desired to feel pain. But I’ve never had an egosyntonic desire that I didn’t want to have, I’m not sure that that’s logically possible. Happiness isn’t always good, but egosyntonically wanting things always is. (Now don’t get me wrong, in the vast majority of circumstances happiness is valuable, circumstances where it isn’t are fairly rare, but you only need one to disprove the inherent value of happiness).
I suppose you could declare that you value the illusion more than the reality, and still value only happiness because that is what your neurons illusorily indicate is the only valuable thing. But that seems like a failure to acknowledge your true values. It’s also kind of sociopathic to assign absolutely no value to the desires of others.
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“The idea that happiness is intrinsically valuable, rather than one of many things people want, is an illusion created by the fact that happiness signals and wanting signals are carried on the same neurons.”
I thought we had reached the opposite conclusion, that liking and wanting were separate systems? Also, I’m not claiming that happiness is the only thing people want. You’re correct in saying that isn’t true. I’m just not sure how wanting something necessarily makes that thing valuable. Maybe you could say that there’s value in the feeling of having your preferences satisfied, but I’m not sure how that’s different from a modified form of hedonism.
“Happiness isn’t always good, but egosyntonically wanting things always is.”
Okay, what makes you say this? Often I see a pattern of people saying “X is valuable” when their only support for that statement is “I desire X” or “the thought of X makes me feel good.” With hedonism, the only leap I need to make is that I can somehow assess the value of subjective mental states. I mean, it may turn out to be false, but then I’m not sure how you can assess the value of anything at all. I really don’t see how any other moral system justifies its knowledge of what is good.
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>>With hedonism, the only leap I need to make is that I can somehow assess the value of subjective mental states.
You are acting as if assessing the value of subjective mental states is somehow less of a leap than assessing the value of desires. It isn’t. The exact same amount of leaping is involved in both instances. What you desire and what you feel are both directly accessible to introspection. Assessing the value of one requires no larger leap than assessing the value of the other.
>>I’m just not sure how wanting something necessarily makes that thing valuable.
It is no larger a leap than saying pleasure is intrinsically valuable or pain is inherently bad. In fact, it’s a smaller leap for me. I’ve always assessed my egosyntonic desires to be valuable. But there have been a couple rare instances where I’ve assigned a negative value to happiness and a positive value to pain (my own happiness and pain, not someone else’s, just to be clear).
>>I thought we had reached the opposite conclusion, that liking and wanting were separate systems?
Liking and wanting are separate systems, but some of the signals for them are transmitted along the same nervous paths. So it is possible to get them confused.
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(Continued here.)
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This definition seems really incomplete without some sort of, “and those differences are ok” qualifier at the end.
After all, even the least-considerate person would agree that a depreressed/adhd/whatever brain works differently than theirs. They’d just say that it works less well.
My objection to the “and those differences are ok” qualifier is that mental disorders are generally defined on the specific traits that create distress. Why would someone seek treatment or accommodation for something that was fine?
So, it’s not the multitasking ability that defines ADHD. Instead the disorder is defined by an inability to regulate attention that becomes so severe that the sufferer has subjective distress or start failing their social roles.
Treatment focus on mitigating stuff that’s causing distress, not on reducing any incidental advantages that occur along side the distress-causing traits.
On the whole, it looks like the position is equivocating between the (entirely true) claim “people can be different without being morally worse” and the (very dubious) claim “mental disorders don’t make people less functional”.
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Yep. Ozy’s post confuses the normative and the descriptive to an unusual degree, even for this topic.
No one would disagree that brains are diverse. The disagreements are over the extent to which that diversity should be accommodated, treated, ignored, accepted, etc.
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Have sometimes-crippling anxiety, can confirm. It sucks balls. There is nothing good about my “neurodivergence.”
I don’t mean to be flippant, though. I fully agree with the rest of your post. Just wanted to complain about my life anonymously on the Internet 😐
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I think something a lot of people miss here is that, in addition to the “whether they cause harm or not” thing, there is also another difference between kinds of neurodivergence, which is difference between personality traits, which could be thought of as part of the person in question, and something like depression or schizophrenic delusions, which could be thought of as happening to the person in question. I know this sounds vague and fuzzy, but basically, imagine you’re a pure patternist (if you’re not already) and are being uploaded, with the changes that would come from removing the symptom in question introduced during uploading as errors. If you would not consider the upload the same person as you, then that is the general idea of what the symptoms in the first category are like.
It gets more confusing because symptoms in both categories are sometimes strongly associated with each other.
But basically, I would say there are four types of neurodivergence that warrant different responses.
Personality trait, non-harmful if accommodated- no reason to do anything, its fine. Attempting to “cure” existing individuals is actively evil, (well, unless they give informed consent in a sustained mode of thought (as opposed to temporary breakdowns) but that is basically the same as with suicide because it basically is death philosophically, and as with suicide special care should be taken to make sure its genuinely what they want).
Personality trait, harmful even if accommodated- “curing” existing individuals is still bad (see above), but it might be a good idea to eugenics it away from future people.
Non-personality trait, harmful even if accommodated- treatment (again, these are general recommendations and if someone really wants to be depressed, let them)
Non-personality trait, non-harmful if accommodated- whatever, doesn’t matter, but if people want to change it there is not need for scrutiny as with personality traits.
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I see where you’re coming from with suicide equivalence, but there has to be a spectrum here. For example, I don’t like mushrooms, which, assuming I have the same qualia as everyone else, should count as a personality trait. However, if someone gave me a drug that makes me love them, leaving everything else intact, I wouldn’t consider this a big deal, leave alone the equivalent of death. After all, humans undergo gradual personality changes all the time – sometimes even on purpose – and if our identity theory doesn’t accommodate for that, we probably need a better identity theory. But of course a drug that would change all my personality traits and memories at the same time indeed does nothing other than killing me.
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Yes, you definitely have a point here.
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Putting the substance of this post aside momentarily, I would like see people stop saying things of the form “X is the radical notion that [insert not actually radical notion here].” As someone said in another thread, this tends to be used to bludgeon people who don’t think radical action is required.
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Would it be the same if we had highly advanced technologies of personality alterations? Currently we can sort of change it a little bit, at the expense of side effects, but basically people have to live with whatever brains they were born with. Eventually, however, we’ll probably reach the level where we can easily rewire humans into whoever they want to be – cheaply, precisely, and probably even with the possibility to switch back and forth. How would we handle this question then?
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