I am certain that somewhere in the world there are neurotypical people who get involved in conversations about neurodivergence. But I’m not sure if I’ve ever met one.
For instance, think about the person who says “oh, come on, ADHD isn’t a real thing. They’re just medicating ordinary life behavior these days. Not being able to concentrate on things that require sustained mental effort? Blurting out answers before the questions are finished? Constantly making careless mistakes? Having difficulty remaining seated? Come on, everyone does that.”
There are two explanations for this. First, they may be genuinely confused about the difference between people with ADHD and people without ADHD, and need someone to explain to them that while it is perfectly normal behavior to lose your debit card sometimes, people with ADHD may forget it constantly.
Second, they might have ADHD.
In fact, they might have a lot of trouble from their ADHD. They have no access to medications or therapy or advice from other ADHD people about how to cope. They probably struggle with internalized ableism and self-hate because of their inability to do what other people do easily. They don’t even have the comfort of knowing that when things are hard for them, there’s a reason, and it’s not just because they’re worse than everyone else.
It seems to me that going “ugh, neurotypicals” is completely ignoring the possibility of this second category– and keeping us from making compassionate responses.
For another example, think about the famous “why don’t you treat your depression with yoga?” There’s a reason everyone laughed at this Hyperbole and a Half comic:
Because we have all met that lady, and she is an asshole!
But the thing is… yoga does have antidepressant effects. In my experience, when people recommend exercise as a depression treatment, they’re people who were depressed, started exercising, and felt less depressed. They’re not neurotypicals who have no idea what depressed people are suffering: they’re formerly depressed people who are falling victim to the typical mind fallacy and assuming that everyone else’s depression is fixable with exercise too.
The reason this is important is that you suffer from the typical mind fallacy too.
“Ugh! Those neurotypicals say that Prozac turns you into a zombie! That’s not how antidepressants work!” Except that antidepressants do have emotional blunting and numbness as common side effects, and a lot of the people who are really passionate about Prozac turning you into a zombie are people who, well, took Prozac and turned into zombies.
If you’re upset about people telling you to do yoga when it doesn’t work, you really shouldn’t tell people to take Prozac when it doesn’t work.
Another very common debate is about whether neurodivergent people should take it easy on themselves. One side says, “Those neurotypicals don’t understand that a lot of things that come easily to them are difficult for us. You know what? Sometimes I can’t get out of bed! Sometimes it is an achievement for me to wash a single dish, or have a five-minute phone call with a friend! I refuse to be ashamed of this, and I refuse to stop celebrating my small achievements. And I shouldn’t have to do things that make me want to kill myself, or have panic attacks, or experience flashbacks. If you can’t cut me some slack when you know how much harder everything is for me, you’re being an ableist dickbag.”
The other side says, “Those neurotypicals are only interested in supporting people as long as their illnesses are ‘cute’. I can’t actually stay in bed all day, because I would lose my job! “Cut us some slack” is a great thing to advocate for, until you realize that some of the things my mental illness wants me to do are hurtful to people around me. And I feel a lot better about myself when I make myself do things that I don’t want to do or even feel like I can’t do. I can’t believe that we are letting neurotypical people romanticizing mental illness and making excuses for why they should go easy on themselves get in the way of letting actual neurodivergent people recover.”
There are neurodivergent people on all sides of these debates. And that doesn’t mean that everyone’s opinions are okay– “ADHD isn’t real!” is a hurtful idea that causes direct harm to people with ADHD. But it does mean that we shouldn’t assume that people’s opinions come from ignorance. We should assume that they’re informed by their own experience, which may be very different from our own, and look for the truth inside their positions. We should acknowledge that neurodivergence is complicated and things that work well for one person will not work well for another. And we should be cautious to make sure that we’re not being the Yoga Lady for someone else.
Thing of Things 
We should assume that they’re informed by their own experience, which may be very different from our own, and look for the truth inside their positions.
I don’t know if many folks even use their own experiences anymore to form an opinion and defend that to the death forevermore. As a whole we seem to have lost most of even the modicum of critical thinking we did have. I blame Facebook and Twitter and the like for the less than even soundbite analysis the big news folks had used in the not to distant past to shape our views.
For example. If it is said that as he doesn’t exist and if you have not this affliction or know of no one who does then that lack of knowledge is not experience really but lack of exposure and certainly didn’t do any research at all before forming it.
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“In my experience, when people recommend exercise as a depression treatment, they’re people who were depressed, started exercising, and felt less depressed. They’re not neurotypicals who have no idea what depressed people are suffering: they’re formerly depressed people who are falling victim to the typical mind fallacy and assuming that everyone else’s depression is fixable with exercise too.”
They may also simply be playing the numbers game.
If you know a pill significantly helps , say 70% of people with some condition it isn’t the typical mind fallacy to recommend that pill.
If you know exercise helps some notable portion of people with some condition it isn’t the typical mind fallacy to recommend it either.
If the data available shows something to be a good treatment in a large portion of cases empathy or it’s lack doesn’t need to come into things in any way shape or form.
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Another day, another thing I do turns out to be an ADHD symptom. Thanks, good to know.
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I think you’re conflating “doesn’t suffer from this particular condition” with “is neurotypical”, which I don’t think is the best way to understand this particular phenomenon. Having one disorder doesn’t preclude being ableist and clueless about another. Someone with anorexia is equally likely to say dumb things about ADHD as someone without anorexia.
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I am confused by the title since I don’t see any explicit support for that thesis in the post. If you’re saying “no one I ever talk to about neurodiversity ever lacks any of the symptoms of it, so there’s no such thing as neurotypicality” I would suggest you’re inadvertently filtering out neurotypicals.
Because neurotypicals hate to analyze.
In my experience, anyone who is capable of analyzing an abstract and talking about it lucidly (even if the _quality_ of their analysis may be mediocre or even abysmal) is in a very small minority. The majority of people hate analysis.
It might as well literally be giving them a headache given the way they adamantly and quickly turn conversation away from it.
I don’t know if all neurodiverse people are analytical, but I’m becoming more and more convinced there’s no such thing as a neurotypical who is. (Note : some neurotypicals can learn to analyze, but the fact they dislike the task, even if it’s a topic they like, is still a material difference from using analysis as your go to tool for figuring things out.)
(and I fully concede analysis has many shortcomings: it’s time consuming, if you make a mistake, the mistake tends to REALLY capture you, it’s energy intensive, and it demands a high minimum of data to work with to have much chance of yielding good results.)
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Seems like your claim is an implication that can be disproved by a single counterexample. Let me rephrase your statement:
If there are neurotypicals -> Then they hate analyzing.
So, I (the writer of this comment) would generally be described as neurotypical. If I don’t qualify as “neurotypical”, then there aren’t really such things as neurotypicals, and your statement is vacuously true (and misleading).
If I am a neurotypical, and I like analysis, then your statement is false. And I do like analysis.
So pick one: You’re either correct because there are no neurotypicals, or you’re incorrect about their universal hatred of analysis.
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In fairness to the putatively able-ist… If you live in upper middle class suburbia, you a WILL encounter things that make you wonder about ADHD and depression diagnoses.
I know multiple people who’s parents put them on Prozac when they started acting out as a teenager, and where, in context, it looked an awful lot like the kids were just regular-distressed over things like divorcing parents. In all cases the kids stopped taking Prozac when they got to college, and miraculously haven’t had problems since.
I know even more people with incredibly sketchy diagnoses or attempted diagnoses of ADHD. I know parents who have gone full fledged freak out mode on their schools because the school was pushing them to go out and buy an ADHD diagnoses (yes, you can do this, you just go to the doctor that thinks everything is ADHD instead of the one that thinks nothing is), because the parents were terrified that the school was trying to medicate normal childhood behavior. And this worked out in literally every case- the child got older, never went on Ritalin, and seems to be a fully functional teen or adult.
I have a relative who’s school recommended his parents obtain an autism diagnosis. His parents recommended the school do something anatomically improbable. Twenty some years later, the guy’s a remarkably high ranking member of the military, and literally no one has made that suggestion since. It’s reasonably likely that he would not have done so well in life if the school had been successful in it’s push to get him diagnosed with autism.
The reality is that a lot of people, disproportionately people on the internet, live in communities where things are very… reminiscent of that Seattle rationalists *thing* where you freely modify feelings and behavior with chemicals. But they can’t or don’t just buy them. They go through pharmacists. And a diagnosis operates as the gatekeeping mechanism by which their society deems certain chemical adjustments ok versus not ok.
Some people look around and see an awful lot of what seems to be medically unnecessary, volitional use of mind altering medication. And the diagnosis is what makes that socially acceptable. So they conclude that the diagnosis is BS.
Disclaimer to maybe deflect some possible replies I might get- I understand very well that there are people out there with serious problems that fall under these diagnoses, and that some of them need the medications I’ve discussed. This post is about how someone might have had experiences that encourage cynicism about certain diagnoses. It’s not about claiming that these are the only valid experiences.
Just… over diagnosis seems to be an actual thing.
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“Just… over diagnosis seems to be an actual thing.”
Under-diagnosis is a bigger problem, particularly in poor or working-class communities where not only are resources scarce, the language of mental health isn’t spoken.
“In fact, they might have a lot of trouble from their ADHD. They have no access to medications or therapy or advice from other ADHD people about how to cope. They probably struggle with internalized ableism and self-hate because of their inability to do what other people do easily.”
I think there’s a generational difference, too. Admittedly, I roll my eyes whenever someone online self-diagnoses ADHD, in no small part because things like impatience, poor concentration or poor short-term memory were considered personality flaws, not a diagnosis, when I was a kid. And ADHD gets dumped on because its parameters are wide enough that nearly anyone could claim some of those symptoms some of the time.
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This is my experience too. Certain institutions, particularly schools, have increased the range of social skills people are required to demonstrate. This means that either a. they are diagnosing shy kids as autistic or b. society used to simply accommodate high functioning autistic kids and no longer does.
Either way, I spent a year fighting teachers who insisted my four year old had autism. In the end we just moved him to a different school. Now he’s seventeen and starting his computer science degree next year. I don’t actually see that he has a problem in the right environment, which is true of everyone.
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They don’t even have the comfort of knowing that when things are hard for them, there’s a reason, and it’s not just because they’re worse than everyone else.
While it seems to be clear what you intended, it’s worth noting that based on what you’ve written elsewhere, whether there’s a reason shouldn’t really be relevant. (And indeed “ADHD” is more of a phenomenon-label than an explanation.)
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I’m glad that to see the prevalence of “But everyone has some X!” type responses being discussed and agree that it could come from either a neurotypical or a non-neurotypical source. I expect that it is said by ignorant neurotypical people fairly often. Recently, on admitting that I (and my parents) have long suspected that I have a diagnosable problem with attention and concentration, I was met with a dismissive “Well, if you think about it, everybody basically has ADHD.” (This was from someone I know well who I’m pretty sure does not have a problem with focusing.) I think there’s likely some Fallacy of Gray going on here. That is, nobody’s brain is a perfectly operating machine; everybody has at least occasional difficulties in some of these areas; therefore it’s tempting to assume that the concepts of many mental/neurological disorders are meaningless.
But I admit I’ve been tempted to leap to that kind of “But everybody has some X!” reaction myself. When hearing someone describe what they identify as manic-depressive tendencies in terms of “I can be in an unaccountably blissful mood but one innocuous small event or comment can completely flip that around”, my gut reaction is that I can relate to that; probably everybody can relate to that. The problem is that even when we can find the language to describe these phenomena, it’s much harder to convey the degree, and I really have no idea how intensely someone else may experience those emotions. I do believe that self-over-diagnosis happens from time to time, but I have to keep in mind that when someone describes a mental state that sounds pretty universal to me, there’s a good chance I’m just not getting a measure of the intensity.
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“I am certain that somewhere in the world there are neurotypical people who get involved in conversations about neurodivergence. But I’m not sure if I’ve ever met one.”
You’ve met one – or at least you have, presuming you read this comment
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I don’t know if this is still active, but I just found this and it’s so helpful.
liskantope – to your comment speculating on most people relating to most descriptions of mood disorders,
“I can be in an unaccountably blissful mood but one innocuous small event or comment can completely flip that around”, my gut reaction is that I can relate to that; probably everybody can relate to that.”
I actually can’t relate to that at all. I tend to be relatively chill and happy much of the time, but I don’t ever feel unaccountably blissful, and only around my period do small events flip that around. Maybe that’s because I take meds, but if meds can blunt my experiences, so too can structural differences, neurotransmitter differences, etc.Right?
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