Mental illness being called neurodivergence

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Franky I'm tired of people claiming that their mental illnesses are some kind of neurodivergence. The identitarians seem to always be milling about marginalized communities, looking for new identities to claim as their own, whether they fit the definition or not. It's a social game to them.

If it isn't men claiming to be women or bisexuals claiming to be lesbians, it's people with PTSD claiming to be neurodivergent.

Maybe I will just make up my own term. Go ahead and classify anxiety, depression, and personality disorders with autism, ADHD, and sensory processing disorder. I'm sure that will really help people understand autism (that's sarcasm). Go ahead and try to get people to recognize the strengths of autistic people while lumping those traits in with delusions and phobias.

But what's going to happen when the anxious and depressed neurotypicals recover and fully return to their neurotypical privilege (which they still have while they are depressed and anxious anyways). Is somebody going to create a "temporarily neurodivergent" category for them?

That causes trouble of course, but it's not uncommon for neurodivergent people to get mental illnesses. In fact, we seem to be more at risk of them than NTs. It's very possible that there are depressed neurodivergent people who don't realize they're depressed and think it's just the neurology that's causing problems. The way to fix this, or at least lessen it, is to spread out more information about both different neurologies and mental illnesses.

yes i have a problem with that too,
being lumped in with personality disorders
mind your mind, don't be fooled by guru's who want you to "open your mind" for their tricks

and also how did nt or normal, not have handicapped or ret*d in it
there's plenty of retard-nt's to fill a world with

but yeah as i see it this ship will sink toward: willless and fragile
and a battle for grievance supremacy
but only a "verified" doctor(authority) can tell

(in the meantime all the social workers out the aspies for the more pc-prone sociopaths)

Being male or bisexual are mental illnesses?

I can understand how people with personality disorders might wish to claim neurodivergence. Better to be assumed autistic than to let on their Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Sociopathy or Psychopathy - which they might consider as much an inherent and uncurable part of themselves as AS is to us...
But I wish they wouldn't.
It's hard enough trying to explain the autism spectrum without getting it confused with any of the above.

I wouldn’t get angry about it.

There is a sort of physiological “neurodivergence” in schizophrenia.

That's a valid point, though it sounds more like intentional dishonesty. I think what starchild mentioned is probably more like (misguided) attempts at defining ourselves. Either way, how many of these terms will be used in 100 years?

I guess for me the criteria as to a person with mental illness being neurodivergent would be whether it's a state or trait thing . Does the neurodivergent thinking still remain after the mental illness symptoms are under control?

No, I'm talking about people who know they are depressed or anxious. There are people on Reddit who've been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and PTSD, and they are calling all those conditions neurodivergence. They literally came to the r/neurodiversity section and posted about their diagnoses.

They want to be categorized with people who have neurodevelopmental conditions even though they have not been diagnosed with one. One even started a thread to complain that people were "gatekeeping" neurodivergence because some of us say that mentally ill people aren't neurodivergent.

No, those were examples of people claiming to be things they are not.

I’m sure some folks with “mental illness” are “neurodivergent” as well.....

Possibly, being neurodiverse and having to deal with NTs on a daily basis causes mental illness? I know from personal experience that they drive me crazy at times...

Ok, childhood-onset schizophrenia, sure. But depression? I read somewhere that like 1/3 of the U.S. population has had depression at some point. Imagine 1/3 of a country being neurodivergent...it wouldn't be "divergent" anymore, it would be common and "normal."

Exactly.

And surely one of the criteria for neurodivergence has to be that it's a neurological condition you're born with and there's no "cure" for. Which would definitely remove most mental illnesses, I believe, which tend to develop after childhood and some of which can be successfully treated to recovery (I think?)

Though as I said, personality disorders might be a bit of a grey area - they've found a neurological basis for psychopathy, for example.

I know. But someone just is male, whereas mental illness can be debated.

Also, it sounds like a lot of these people just want to be seen as valid in themselves, instead of being normalized and pathologized. Why is that wrong?

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I have to say that I strongly agree with people who think mental illnesses are just as neurodivergent as developmental disorders. Depression for example is literally a neurological divergence, both on the physical level and (probably) on the neurotransmitter activity level. I have allistic friends who have lifelong anxiety who say, yeah this has disadvantages but it also has advantages (like conscientiousness). People with these conditions think differently and approach situations differently.

Depression and anxiety both cause people distress and sufferers nearly always seek a cure. But autism and ADHD cause people distress and many autistics seek a cure.

There is no authority who can artificially declare that this sort of condition is neurodiversity and this sort of condition is not. It certainly doesn’t seem at all sensible to rely on old definitions set by stuffy white men in ivory towers. We can only see how well a given condition fits the neurodiversity paradigm.

Someone mentioned borderline personality disorder - that’s an absolutely textbook example of something that could be considered neurodivergence. For one thing it is very often confused with autism even by professionals!

Someone else said that it’s possible that “neurotypical” people aren’t even a majority. Yes - the whole concept of the “neurotypical” is flawed. There is not one neurotypical condition, there are only relative neurotypicalities. To a certain extent we could consider someone “neurotypical” if they have a brain which is considered normal in their culture, but that need not be a typical brain at all. It could include autistic brains in some cultures. It could include depressed brains in some cultures. But in our current Western cultures, these brains are not considered normal.

So:

- Mental illnesses are literally neurodivergence.
- Many mental illnesses, including the most common ones, can be effectively understood using the neurodiversity paradigm.

As far as I can see, the only justification for gatekeeping neurodiversity is because the facts make you personally upset - and that’s no reason to gatekeep at all. Try to look at things objectively rather than rejecting new ideas just because you don’t like the sound of them.