The Problem with Neurodiversity
Whether you embrace or dislike it, the increasingly popular term proves helpful to many yet remains widely misunderstood. Let’s clear things up.
Neurodiversity is all around you. As many as one in five humans are neurodivergent. And they are woefully misunderstood. Many struggle daily in a society saturated with stigmas, muddled in misconceptions, and burdened with unnecessary barriers to anyone whose mind operates outside perceived norms. Many of these people are creative and highly productive. Some emerge to do unfathomably brilliant things. Most just want to be recognized as individuals whose brains work in divergent ways — not better, not worse, just different from what many others deem to be the standard operating system.
Neurodivergent kids, for reasons that often perplex the hell out of them, get shunned and ridiculed by friends and even family. They’re left behind at school by an underfunded, sometimes dysfunctional education system, only to grow up and face harsh, overt discrimination in the work force, with sky-high unemployment rates which, by the way, experts consider bad for business, given the unorthodox but effective thinking skills they miss out on.
Given the stigmas and lack of awareness, many people don’t learn of their own…
