Neurodivergent: the trendy label for brains that depart from the norm

Paloma was told that her highly intelligent daughter was neurodivergent. Shortly afterwards, it was suggested that her hypersensitive son might also fall into that category. This sounded mysterious to Paloma, even slightly exclusive. The news in both cases was delivered to her during meetings with the psycho-pedagogy team at the school where she takes her children. Paloma then told her psychologist, who provided further food for thought: with two children like this, it was most likely that she, as the mother, was also neurodivergent.But it’s not just among professionals that this label is liberally applied. At 20, Elvira is a brilliant university student. She gets excellent grades and is a fast thinker. Years ago, she was diagnosed with ADHD. No expert has yet hinted that she is neurodivergent, although she wonders if the label fits. She says that is how many of her friends describe themselves. They have been told as much by a specialist, or have simply identified with posts on social media. “It’s a word we use frequently,” she confirms.Halfway between a euphemism and a minority struggle, the concept of neurodivergence is in fashion. It is sweeping the internet and bookstores. It is the focus of events and a thousand conversations about the heterogeneity of the human mind. It has already become commonplace; another sociolinguistic trend on the rise in psychology, another neologism that is here to stay, especially for the younger generations. Inclusion policies of companies and institutions are taking it on board. But as the bubble grows, a fundamental question has surfaced: does the label help or hinder individuals with an unusual brain? Like so many ideas with a fragile scientific base and strong popular pull, the label originated in the U.S. and has gone viral on a global scale. As a concept, it was coined by two autistic women: Judy Singer, who began talking about neurodiversity at the end of the 1990s, and Kassiane Asasumasu, who at the beginning of the century came up with the term neurodivergence.In theory, Singer and Asasumasu were talking about different things, which has caused confusion. Singer stated the obvious: each brain is unique. In our neurological systems, no two brains are identical. Singer added that it was time to stop considering our differences from a medical perspective. Asasumasu went further: within a diverse spectrum, there are people who are not neurotypical and fall outside the norm in terms of cognitive processes. These people would be the neurodivergent ones. In short, we are all neurodiverse, but only some of us are neurodivergent. Today, these concepts overlap. The neurodiversity movement — so-called by activists — is supposed to defend neurodivergent people; it is an apparent contradiction that has contributed to confusing an already slippery field of study: vague in its definition, plagued by demands that often clash, and with science and ideology in a permanent tug-of-war.But Singer and Asasumasu did share one goal: that autism stop being viewed in pathological terms. Originally, the labels neurodiverse and neurodivergent arose to refer to people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Singer and Asasumasu wanted the disorder taken out of the equation. “The message was clear: we don’t want a cure, but rights and integration; we don’t have a mental illness, but an atypical condition in neurodevelopment,” explains Francisco Ortega, from the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, who has followed the movement since its beginnings. Ortega adds, “It has spread massively, partly because autistic people, who are often socially challenged, are very active on the internet, where they feel comfortable.” The message started getting through to other communities which bought into the basic premise: where there used to be illness, there is now simply difference.Currently, no one knows exactly where the limits of divergence lie regarding neurological issues. Nor what such a concept means or indeed implies. Besides ASD and ADHD, the term also covers Tourette’s syndrome and dyslexia. Some, such as the Cleveland Clinic, extend the term to Down syndrome, OCD, bipolar disorder and social anxiety. These conditions may have genetic roots or could simply be due to nurture and circumstances. Intellectual disability and psychiatric diagnosis coincide. The illness — as it is contemplated by the scientific community — and the simply different now coexist. Neuro PrideThe British researcher Nancy Doyle’s data suggests the label applies to a third of the population. In her opinion, the term refers above all to spiky profiles: people who excel in certain areas and have difficulties in others. That, according to Doyle, would apply to approximately half of neurodivergent people. The paradigm would be Sheldon Cooper from the sitcom The Big Bang Theory: an autistic person with a high IQ. Doyle admits that “it seems that everyone is neurodivergent nowadays” and that this open-ended application, added to the “identity element, could distort the movement.” Without clear limits or diagnostic requirements, nothing prevents someone from perceiving themselves as neurodivergent. Even if they clearly have a very ordinary brain.The tension between identity — there is already Neuro Pride Day, on June 16 — and actual illness has generated the main controversy around neurodiversity. On the one hand, there are the most radical members of the movement, most of them people with highly functional ASD. At the other end of the spectrum, there are families with autistic children “who reproach these activists, some of whom are going to university while their children cannot speak, bang their heads against the wall or have urinary incontinence,” says Ortega. In these cases, he says, they are more concerned about finding treatments than with neuro pride.Alfonso Troisi, who published a scientific article on the illness vs divergence debate in 2025, goes further by warning of a certain glamorization surrounding divergence. “There’s something cool about considering yourself neurodivergent, as if you were special, different from others. Nobody wants to be schizophrenic, but bipolar may not sound so bad. Van Gogh was bipolar!” Both Troisi and Ortega have known cases of people who, without any indication of ASD or Tourette’s syndrome, insisted on claiming such diagnoses.With the unorthodox as a banner for battling the stigma of mental illness, there are those who warn that the fight to normalize neurodiversity could, paradoxically, undermine the rights of some demographics. Ortega says that Steve Silberman, an expert who published Neurotribes, pointed out that if autistic people were no longer classified as disabled, they would lose protection. Troisi, meanwhile, draws a parallel with the so-called deaf movement: “In the United States, there are people who advocate for deafness to cease to be considered an illness and become the trait that unites a cultural minority.”For Doyle, these controversies — almost always nurtured by digital polarization — take us away from the main goal of the movement which is to make life a little easier for people who do not have a standard mind; to ease the problematic aspect of cognitive anomalies due to “rigid education systems, inflexible work environments and overwhelming public places.” Doyle encourages us to rethink how we study, work and live so that “these divergences are less disabling.” According to Doyle, the U.K. has been at the forefront of creating neuro-inclusive spaces. For example, decompression rooms with low-intensity visual and auditory stimuli in companies. And autistic-friendly movie and theater sessions in which it is not frowned upon for people to move around or make noise. “We need more studies on what type of interventions are most beneficial,” she explains.According to Alfonso Troisi, these changes to the environment, which are necessarily limited, should be accompanied by a reflection on what we consider acceptable; a judgment that is “always a construct influenced by ethical and cultural values.” Often the challenge of integration has less to do with the neurological itself, and more to do with certain behaviors that we label as strange, extravagant or even reprehensible, he argues. “Society can be very repressive if you do something that the majority does not like,” he concludes.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition