Dr Chloe Farahar (they/she) | Aucademy CIC
© Dr Chloe Farahar. Please credit when sharing. For permissions, contact au-cademy@outlook.com
Every year, Neurodiversity Celebration Week arrives with its rainbow banners and its infinity symbols, its acknowledgements of Autistic people, its nods to ADHD and dyslexia. And every year, I find myself returning to the same question: who, exactly, are we celebrating?
I ask this not to diminish what Neurodiversity Celebration Week does well – which is a great deal. Raising awareness of Autistic experience, of attention differences, of dyslexia and dyspraxia and dyscalculia, matters. It reduces stigma. It helps people understand themselves. I have spent a significant portion of my professional and personal life working toward exactly these ends. But I argue that when we celebrate “neurodiversity” and mean only innate, developmental neurodivergence – and when even that is narrowed to autism, ADHD, and dyslexia – we are not celebrating neurodiversity at all. We are celebrating a curated, convenient subset of it.
And the people we are leaving out are, often, the people who need celebration most.
What neurodiversity actually means
Let me be precise about language, because precision here is not pedantry – it is the difference between inclusion and exclusion.
Neurodiversity is a property of groups. It refers to the natural variation in human brains and minds across all of humanity – a population-level phenomenon, not a personal characteristic. It is, as Harvey Blume (1998) elegantly put it, every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. The neurodiversity of humanity is simply biological fact. All of us – every human being – are part of it.
Neurodivergence is a property of individuals. A neurodivergent person is someone whose body-mind works in ways that differ significantly from what society currently considers neurotypical or neuronormative. This is, critically, a socially defined category: it reflects society’s norms, not fixed biological categories. What is considered neurotypical changes. Who is considered neurodivergent changes.
Simply put: neurodiversity is not something a person “has”. And neurodivergence is not a fixed list of approved conditions.
This matters because the moment we fix a list – autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia – we have already begun to exclude. We have begun to decide whose brain counts as “acceptably different”, and whose remains simply ill, disordered, broken.
The two kinds of neurodivergence – and the one we ignore
There is a useful distinction between innate and acquired neurodivergence. Innate neurodivergence is present from birth. Autistic people, Polyennic (ADHD) people, people who experience dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourette’s, synaesthesia – these are forms of innate neurodivergence. They are what we spend most of Neurodiversity Celebration Week discussing.
Acquired neurodivergence refers to brain differences that emerge after birth – through injury, illness, chronic pain, stroke, neurodegenerative processes, or significant life experience. These too are forms of neurodivergence. A person who acquires a traumatic brain injury has a brain that works differently. A person with acquired deafness or vision loss has a brain that has reorganised around that sensory change. A person who has intensively practised meditation for decades has measurably different brain wave patterns and altered sensory processing. A meditating monk is, in a meaningful sense, neurodivergent.
And then there is the group that Neurodiversity Celebration Week most consistently ignores: people whose psychological responses to the world – to trauma, to adversity, to a disordered society – look different from what society considers “normal”. People who hear voices. People who experience what psychiatry labels schizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar, borderline personality disorder, depression, anxiety. People who are, in my framework and the framework I first developed in my chapter in The Neurodiversity Reader (Farahar, 2020), psychologically-divergent, who are under the neurodivergent umbrella.
The case for psychological divergence as neurodivergence
I want to be direct here, because this is where the argument becomes uncomfortable for some – including some within the neurodiversity community itself.
The dominant pathology paradigm – the framework that underpins mainstream psychiatry – holds that psychological and emotional distress equates to illness. That there is one right, normal, healthy brain, and any significant variation from it is disorder. That the person, therefore, is the thing to be treated, changed, altered, managed.
This paradigm does not stand up to scrutiny. As the Chair of the DSM-V task force acknowledged in 2013, definitive biogenetic causes of mental illnesses simply have not been found – not for any mental illness (Kupfer, 2013). The DSM-IV itself stated plainly that its categories were fuzzy, descriptive constructs, not diseases with clear biological boundaries or causes (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). And critically – and this is the finding that transformed my own thinking during my psychology degree – insisting that “mental illness is an illness like any other” paradoxically increases the need for social distance from those so labelled (Corrigan, 2016; Haslam & Kvaale, 2015). The neurobiological “othering” of people in psychological distress has proliferated stigma, not reduced it.
If not illness, then what?
The evidence points clearly toward one answer: trauma. The variables that correlate most strongly with what we call “mental illness” are not genetic or biological factors, but traumatic experiences – poverty, racism, neglect, assault, bereavement, structural violence (Johnstone & Boyle, 2018; Read et al., 2009). Our brains respond to trauma. They respond in any number of ways – voice-hearing, extreme states of mood, altered perception, withdrawal. These are psychologically-divergent responses to a disordered society. They are not symptoms of illness. They are the brain’s attempts to protect us.
Simply: when we pathologise these responses, we remove responsibility from the traumatising society and place it on the individual whose brain has tried its best. And we exclude that person from the neurodiversity that, by definition, should already include them.
What happens when we exclude psychological divergence from our celebrations
The consequences of this exclusion are not abstract. They are the people who sit in the margins of Neurodiversity Celebration Week and wonder if their kind of different counts. The person who hears voices and sees the Autistic community celebrated but is told their experience is not neurodivergence – it is illness. The person whose depression has left them unable to work, whose anxiety has reshaped every relationship they have, who does not feature in a single infographic about “brain differences”.
In my research – specifically, in my work on Stigmaphrenia©, the neurodiversity play I developed in 2012 and subsequently investigated through my PhD at the University of Kent – I found that when people with psychological divergences encountered the neurodiversity narrative, something shifted. Not just in their understanding of others, but in their understanding of themselves. Actors who took on the roles of psychologically-divergent characters in the play described reframing their own experiences from pathology to neurodivergence. One interviewee described how, before engaging with the neurodiversity narrative, they kept very quiet about their mental health – and how, after, they actively encouraged others to speak about theirs. This is self-stigma reduction. This is the neurodiversity paradigm doing what it is capable of doing, if we let it.
The neurodiversity paradigm – as a social model, not a biological claim – can do this because it does not require a biogenetic cause to grant personhood. It requires only the recognition that human brains and minds vary, that variation is not disorder, and that a person’s divergence from the “norm” is as much a reflection of the norm as it is of the person. Today’s neurodivergent is tomorrow’s neurotypical, as the norms of society shift. That is not a weakness of the framework. That is its extraordinary, liberatory potential.
Who does Neurodiversity Celebration Week need to include?
The full picture of neurodivergent experience – the one this week should celebrate – includes:
Innate neurodivergences (present from birth): Autistic experience; Polyennic/ADHD experience; dyslexia; dyspraxia; dyscalculia; Tourette’s and tic experiences; synaesthesia; congenital deafness; congenital blindness.
Acquired neurodivergences (emerging across the lifespan): traumatic brain injury; stroke; post-traumatic stress; acquired deafness or vision loss; brain changes from chronic pain; neurodegenerative conditions including Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis; changes from intensive practice.
Psychological divergences (responses to a disordered society): voice-hearing; extreme states of mood; anxiety; depression; post-traumatic responding; experiences currently labelled as psychosis, bipolar, borderline personality disorder, and so on.
This is not a case for abandoning support for Autistic people, or for ADHD, or for dyslexia. That support is hard-won and still insufficient. It is a case for expanding the circle of who this week – and this movement – considers worthy of understanding, acceptance, and celebration.
What you can do
Quite simply: this week, look at who you are sharing content about, who you are amplifying, and who you are leaving out. Ask whether your workplace’s neurodiversity event would welcome a person who hears voices. Ask whether your school’s celebration includes the young person in crisis. Ask who benefits from the neurodiversity framework you are promoting – and who it still excludes.
Then expand your circle.
The neurodiversity of humanity is not a curated list. It is all of us.
Dr Chloe Farahar (they/she) is an Autistic researcher, founder of Aucademy CIC, and Programme Manager for Learning Disability and Autism at an NHS Mental Health Trust. Their research on Stigmaphrenia© and the application of the neurodiversity paradigm to psychological divergence was conducted at the University of Kent with Economic and Social Research Council funding.
Key references:
Farahar, C. (2020). Stigmaphrenia: Reducing mental health stigma with a script about neurodiversity. In D. Milton (Ed.), The Neurodiversity Reader. Pavilion Publishing.
Blume, H. (1998). Neurodiversity. The Atlantic.
Johnstone, L., & Boyle, M. (2018). The Power Threat Meaning Framework. British Psychological Society.
Walker, N. (2014). Neurodiversity: Some basic terms and definitions. Neurocosmopolitanism.
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