A friend asked me for a take on a social media post by a mutual acquaintance.
I definitely did have a take, because the post said, explicitly and in so many words, that ADHD and autism are not disabilities.
I understand why some people need to think of ADHD and autism as diseases or disabilities. It's gotta be a disease/disability to get accomodations and to get insurance to cover things. … But they just … aren't.
The social media post I'm referring to
And I want to talk about that for a minute.
I'm not screencapping, linking to the post, or naming the person because it wasn't a public post. But additionally because I think they actually were coming from a good place. A place of saying that all people have intrinsic worth, regardless of neurotype.
Among the reasons I believe that is because the post pretty quickly clarified ("other than comorbidities") that they felt the problems that neurodivergent people have are not because of some kind of inherent problem, but because of the way society is built, or the need to get legal or insurance accommodations.
...being neurodivergent is just a different way of being. One that evolved over a very long time. It's just a
normal, healthy part of human diversity ... The reasons why neurodivergent people have a hard time are due to the completely artificial ways that our society and in particular the corporate world has been set up.
The social media post I'm referring to
That is a true statement, and laudable.
But immediately after stating that, they ended up sounding extremely reductive and ableist. They compared the disadvantages of their neurodivergence to those of other physical, inherited conditions, saying that their neurodivergence wasn't as big of a problem as other, physical aspects of their phenotype and genotype. (1)
And that's a problem in two big ways.
The first, and most obvious, is that both autism and ADHD, let along the umbrella term of neurodivergence, cover pretty big spectrums of experiences, abilities, and deficits. And an individual's abilities — and deficits! — can change over the course of a person's lifetime. All types of neurodivergence cover a wide range of abilities and deficits that can impact an individual's ability to care for themselves and interact with society. A sweeping statement like "autism and ADHD are not disabilities" is inherently reductive, and rapidly disproved by the wide range of those abilities and deficits.
The second, and more problematic, issue is that it erases the very people it hopes to value.
Again, I believe they meant to convey that all people have inherent intrinsic worth.
But they began the post by saying neither was a "disease" OR "disability", and later used them almost interchangeably.
Doing so implies that disease and disability both carry the same, negative value judgment.
That they are both something to get rid of.
I will wholeheartedly agree that neurodivergence is not a disease.
But it is a disability. A disability that is worsened, like many others, by the lack of accommodation in our society, but a disability all the same. Having a disability is just … a fact. Because of something you can't control and inherent to yourself, you have less ability in some areas. That just … is.
I have been effectively (if not legally defined as) disabled my adult life… because I require glasses to be able to see. Without them, I am simply not able to see. Luckily for me on that from, there's assistive tech — glasses — that minimizes the effect of that disability most of the time.
I am not defined by my nearsightedness, but it's still there.
Pretending that my nearsightness does not cause problems does not make the problems go away — it ends up making all the problems worse by ignoring the very real accommodations that I do need.
Minimizing the impact of a disability on a person's life, particularly by comparing it to another disability, does not provide dignity, it is gaslighting erasure, no matter how good the intention.
We can, and should, address the ways that our society is built. Not just the lack of accommodations, but the ways that its structure actively harms others and transforms differences into disabilities.
But we cannot do that, no matter how well intended, at the expense of erasing the very real difficulties both large and small created by our neurotypes.
(1) There's another issue, due to the specific example they chose, but that distracts from and is irrelevant to my point here.
Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
https://ideatrash.net/2026/06/when-affirmation-turns-into-erasure-neurodivergent-edition.html?fsp_sid=1324
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