"Everyone is claiming to be neurodivergent nowadays"

6 min read

I think most people saying this don't remember what life was like before social media. (Or weren't born yet)

So, I'm going to paint the picture.

It was the early 90s.

We were still using corded house phones to talk to people we couldn't see in person.

And even then, we didn't talk to people we didn't know personally.

Our social circles were small and limited to the places we spent time in physically.

There was no internet.

Outside of school, we learned most of what we knew through the newspaper, radio, books, and magazines.

When it came to medical conditions, our main, if not only source of knowledge was our family doctor.

Again, we didn't have the internet.

If we had medical questions, we asked our doctor.

The vast majority of people only knew about neurodevelopmental conditions (like autism and ADHD) based on what we saw with our own eyes...

And we only noticed it in the first place when we saw behavior that seemed highly "unusual" or that was considered wildly "inappropriate."

If a person's behavior was only a little different, it didn't even register to us.

And what we thought we knew about people who were noticeably "odd," was often a gross misunderstanding of what was actually going on because everything we "knew" was constructed through gossip.

It was basically a really toxic game of telephone, where people would whisper about someone's "weird" behaviors and everyone would speculate about what the person had.

But unlike an actual game of telephone, the original source wasn't perfect at the start only to become distorted as the information was repeated and became farther removed from it.

The original source was sloppy from the start.

Because it was based on wildly incomplete and often misunderstood information that was printed in the DSM at the time.

And, back then, most of the neurodevelopmental conditions in the DSM were conceptualized based on exclusively observable traits identified in young white boys (the only population rigorously being studied at the time).

That's literally all the knowledge we had available back then.

So even the best doctors and practitioners were limited to that information.

To be clear, trained practitioners did NOT understand neurodevelopmental conditions or any condition we consider "neurodivergent" today, the way they understand them now.

So even in the best case scenario... as in, a wealthy white family having access to the best autism specialists in the country... that family would NOT have received an autism diagnosis for a high masking autistic child (especially if that child was a girl).

And that's IF they even thought to pursue one. Which, would almost certainly not have been the case.

And that's best case scenario.

Now think about the average case scenario.

Or... let's look at my personal experience so we can talk about this with crystal clarity.

I'm white. Female. My family was "poor" growing up, but my parents were well educated.

My mom was a highly skilled (absolutely brilliant) pediatric occupational therapist.

To get even more specific, my mom was highly specialized in working with autistic children.

My mom knew I was different. She knew I needed a lot of extra support and accommodations. And she knew I needed her to advocate for me. And she did. Every. Single. Day.

But back then, in spite of her being a literal specialist working with autistic children... she simply didn't know I was autistic.

And guess what else she didn't know...

She didn't know that she, herself, was neurodivergent. (I will not disclose her diagnoses, but there is more than one.)

She simply couldn't.

Because that's the environment we were living in back then when it came to science, psychology, and educational awareness about brain wiring differences.

Fast-forward 10-15 years...

Now we're in the early to mid 2000s.

The birth of social media as we know it today.

Guess who STILL had no idea we were neurodivergent.

Both of us.

It wasn't until a full 15 years after THAT when we finally started to discover that we had brain wiring differences.

And we are not special cases here.

We represent MILLIONS of people who didn't have access to the information and knowledge we have access to now because it LITERALLY DIDN'T EXIST YET.

"Everyone is claiming to be neurodivergent nowadays" is a wildly inaccurate statement that ignores all relevant context regarding WHY so many people are talking about being neurodivergent "all of a sudden."

And it's not even close to "everyone" by the way.

This is not a "sudden" explosion of new people becoming neurodivergent.

And it's not millions of people, out of the blue, deciding to lie about having struggles they don't really have.

It's science catching up.

It's medical systems catching up.

It's knowledge systems catching up.

It's educational systems catching up.

It's social systems catching up.

What exploded was the TECHNOLOGY. Not the neurodivergence.

The technology has given us instantaneous access to information and PEOPLE that we could not have even IMAGINED in the 90s.

There could not be a more clear, rational, and reasonable explanation for why this is happening.

IF you are putting all the pieces together in this way.

And, honestly, I don't blame people for not being able to do this.

The type of thinking required to see all of these elements individually, while simultaneously seeing them as part of a bigger picture... and then piecing them all together in this way is not how most brains work.

And that's ok.

I can't and won't expect brains to do things they aren't built to do just like I don't want people expecting my brain to operate differently than it does.

Because, at the end of the day, accepting and celebrating all brains for what they *can* do rather than judging and punishing them for what they can't, is the exact thing I fight for every day on this platform.

So, I'm here offering this perspective...

And I sincerely hope it brings us all a little bit closer to truly understanding each other. In spite of our differences.