this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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Autism

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I personally dislike calling myself neurodivergent (lemmy.ca)
submitted 21 hours ago by floralmortal@lemmy.ca to c/autism@lemmy.world
33 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I have several disorders which are located inside of the brain (which obviously includes autism, hence me posting here). I dislike calling myself "neurodivergent" for many reasons. For one, people use this term as a replacement word for autism, and I have many conditions besides autism.

For example, I'll see posts saying, "neurodivergent people sre more likely to do XYZ." There are so many disorders which fall under the neurodivergent umbrella that it isn't humanly possible for neurodivergent people to be more likely to say or do something than other folks; just say autistic in this context.

I also find that my personal experience gets watered down by calling myself neurodivergent; it feels like a modern version of being called special. I have several conditions which fall under different categories; psychiatric, neurological, and neurodevelopmental. To call all of that just neurodivergent is not very specific and doesn't tell a person what my needs are (plus, they'll just assume I'm autistic).

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[โ€“] disregardable@lemmy.zip 21 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I like neurodivergent because it centers the issue that peoples' brains function differently. It's not a choice. It's not stupidity. I'm not just weird for no reason. My brain cells send signals differently from other peoples'. The issue is that regular people don't understand regardless of which word you use.

[โ€“] Kacarott@aussie.zone 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

My problem with this, is it sort of divides people into "normal" brains, and "not normal" brains. But there is no such thing as "normal" brains. Everyone's brains work differently. I think labels / diagnosis are important in cases where a person's brain is different enough in a particular way that it becomes a problem (for them, or for interacting in society, or whatever), but in these cases I think the value of the label is to communicate in which way the person suffers a problem, so that people can be aware of it. It seems strange to me, to have a label which essentially means "I suffer from some kind of problem related to how my brain works, but I'm not going to tell you which problem".

Edit: after reading other comments, I've realised that one place that neurodivergent makes sense as a label, is for building a community of people who share the experience of facing problems in life due to how their brain works. That's of course, very valid.