FOR YOUR INFORMATION
What is neurodivergence? It is not a disease. Neurodivergence is a highly differentiated brain configuration, characterized by a proliferation of cells in specific areas of the human brain.
Welcome!
So you have been told by a doctor, a psychotherapist, or someone in the know that you may be “on the spectrum.” You may have certain sensitivities (to tastes, sights, sounds, touch, or smells); you may have trouble keeping a schedule or completing tasks (ADHD or ADD); you may experience moments of awkwardness in social situations; you may have passions and interests that grab all your attention; you may be resorting to drugs (especially weed) or alcohol to find some relief from the unstoppable flow of thoughts and emotions that curse through your mind… what is going on? Rest assured: you are not crazy, weird, or bad. Not in the least! The words you want to use in describing yourself and the way your brain works are not those. Rather, begin to think of yourself in terms of variations, differences, or diversity of configuration. A machine with 8 gigs of RAM and 12 cores with 6TB of storage is built with a very different configuration than that of a cheap Chromebook laptop. And yet, they are both computers – very differently configured and powered, for sure, but they work in exactly the same way.
What Now?
Follow us on a journey through exploration, understanding, and acceptance of the joys and challenges of being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. You will learn what you can change and what must be accepted; how others who have taken this same journey have lived long, productive, and prosperous lives and how you can do the same; marvel at the possibilities that your greater capacity to feel, sense, and know open up in front of you; appreciate the need to reject quick fixes, chemical addictions, and bad choices that provide, at best, a very temporary relief and create longer-lasting problems; take pride in your ability to make the very best of how you are and who you are.
WHAT IS NEURODIVERGENCE?
The word neurodivergent describes persons whose brain development followed a different pattern, i.e., diverged from the typical. The word neurotypical is widely used as that term that describe persons whose brain underwent a typical neurological development. Neurodivergent is generally not used to describe individuals who have autism spectrum disorders or other developmental disorders. In the 20th century, the words neurotypical, neurodivergent, and neurodiverse came into use as a nonmedical and more comprehensive way to describe the human phenotype (a term that describes the observable characteristics of a human being, including its physical appearance, behavior, and developmental processes).
Neurodivergence is a flexible and dynamic description of the unmeasurable variety of brain configurations that exist within the human population. A stigmatizing conflation is often made between neurodivergence and autism, owing to the presence of symptoms and features and the cooccurrence of disorders that psychiatrist have grouped together under one label, autism spectrum disorders.
Autistic disorder (sometimes referred to as childhood autism or infantile autism) is the prototypic disorder of the group and the one that has been the focus of most of the available research. Research is much less extensive on the broader spectrum of disorders (ASDs) and caution should be used in overgeneralization of results from more “classic” autism to this larger population. – Fred R. Volkmar and Kevin Pelphrey (2023)
In this website, and within the Society, we take the position that neurodivergence in individuals and the neurodiversity of groups is one of many brain variants, which is to say, a difference in brain configuration as compared to that of the major portion of the human population whom we refer to as neurotypical. To our knowledge, and accounting for the indisputable fact that “prevalence estimates can vary dramatically if different diagnostic approaches are used” (Volkmar & Pelphrey, 2023), our survey of multiple reporting agencies shows a prevalence of neurodivergence of between 15 and 25 percent, leaving the neurotypical brain configuration to account for the remaining 75-85%.