Lucy Honan examines the politics of neurodiversity and argues that we need to fight the pressures capitalism places on people, not just look for individualised solutions
Neurodiversity is a framework that many hope will challenge the stigma and exclusion of people whose behaviour, mannerisms or cognitive patterns diverge from what’s seen as typical and, according to bourgeois standards, preferable. It has been taken up by many people who want to fight against the stultifying pressure to perform “normal”.
But, despite the focus that neurodiversity politics puts on changing our attitudes and institutions to accommodate difference, it reinforces a deficit-based, medicalised and individualised approach to human difference and disability. It doesn’t help us transform our increasingly oppressive and disabling social relations, or give us adequate tools to fight for people to live and flourish.
At face value, neurodiversity is a statement that our brains are actually not made to standard; that we are all essentially “wired differently” than each other. Some neurodiversity theorists would agree with Marxists who insist there is no single correct human biological form. We are not “meant to” have a certain kind of brain or body, nor is there inherent superiority of one biological form over any other.
This is a radical rejection of capitalism’s insistence on objective standards for human worth. From developmental growth charts, testing at school, through to the labour market, where our labour power is bought as interchangeable units on a productivity hierarchy, our rulers insistently measure and weigh our conformity to norms that suit their interests.
These idealised norms for body size and appearance, academic achievement, behaviours, and so on are almost always racist and sexist and artificially constructed. No one can fit on them all the time.
Capitalism values us based on what suits the needs of profit-making and maximum exploitation of our labour. Marxists oppose these ideological and economic efforts to reduce us to what our rulers believe we are worth. We reject the idea of a fixed and unchanging standard of human nature.
Marx argued that, for all its focus on the individual, capitalism does not allow people to give their individuality full expression. The aim of socialism is human emancipation and the creation of social conditions that allow the full development of each individual’s personality.
But instead of challenging capitalism’s dehumanising pressures, much neurodiversity advocacy rests on assumptions that ultimately reinforce these pressures.
There is no typical or divergent wiring
The idea that diagnostic categories like ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), ADHD (Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) or OCD (Obsessive-compulsive disorder) are the result of separate and fixed brain structures, with biological underpinnings that diverge from “typical” brains, is a core assumption of neurodiversity.
Social media and popular culture encourage us to understand each other by essentialised brain-based differences. The Australian national guidelines for many of these categories explicitly assume that biological causes will one day be identified.
Neurodiversity campaigns for greater access to assessments, early diagnosis and treatment explicitly promote the idea that “divergent” brains can be medically diagnosed and treated, and are therefore not just different but dysfunctional or disordered.
There is no scientific basis for this political concession. Neuroscientists have failed to find evidence that people can be divided into such neurologically distinct groups based on a psychiatric diagnosis.
For example, a large 2019 study comparing brain scans with the results of the psychometric tests and behavioural diagnoses used to arrive at a psychiatric diagnosis found no evidence that the existing diagnostic categories of OCD, ASD, ADHD and “typical development” are associated with uniquely different patterns in brain structure.
The authors concluded that their research added to the evidence that “these diagnoses may not exist as uniquely-defined diagnostic constructs”.
There are no clear biomarkers, that is genetic tests or brain scans, that can determine whether someone has dyslexia or other learning difficulties and disorders. Nor is there evidence that these diagnostic categories can predict treatment responses.
Pseudoscience of Psychometrics
Psychometric tests, then, provide the appearance of objective science in diagnosing (and allocating funding) for neurodivergence.
Psychiatrists require teachers in the Victorian education system to rank children’s traits on tests like the Vanderbilt Assessments Scales to inform their diagnosis. The traits are completely subjective and almost all deficit-based.
They include whether a child: loses things, is easily distracted, is forgetful, fidgets, butts into conversations, “cons” other children, runs about or talks “excessively”.
The Vinelands test for Autism Spectrum Disorder, which is used to grant or deny disability support funding, has particularly dehumanising items, including whether a child is: overly needy or dependent, extremely anxious or nervous, cries or is sad for “no clear reason”, avoids interacting with others, has temper tantrums, or is disobedient. This then generates a teacher report which is a series of scores quantifying how far the child deviates from the norm.
Because there really is no biological explanation, these symptoms become the essence of the diagnosis—the cause and the result. The diagnosis is a static condemnation of the subject’s place relative to an implied “normal”.
Not only do the tests reveal nothing about under what circumstances any of these traits are emerging, too often diagnosis forecloses serious investigation into how social, political and economic factors might be creating symptoms: such as over-crowded classrooms, the terror of genocide, unemployment, poverty, incarceration, alienation or oppression.
Sometimes these factors are discussed as either barriers to diagnosis or risk factors for divergence.
Usually, the diagnosis is itself treated as the reason individuals are facing the worst of capitalism; their neurodivergence is why they are unemployed, or incarcerated, or failing to cope with the impossible demands of their job. But rarely are these endemic features of capitalism taken seriously as causes of the traits that prompt diagnosis.
Why the rise of neurodivergence?
Many people seek and welcome a neuro-disorder diagnosis because this is the price you have to pay to access support.
Under the NDIS, individuals who are disabled by the restrictive norms and inequalities of our society must argue that they have an individual, medically recognised need, over and over again, to access funding.
Support workers, equipment, services, housing, medical care, specialised education and therapies should be available to all of us as needed, without having to prove we meet artificially-imposed criteria to prove impairment, and not as a marketised voucher system but as well funded public services.
People also seek diagnosis as a way of gaining relief from the increasing pressure to perform competitively in order to be recognised as a valid human being. This pressure pervades every inch of our existence, within families, at school, at work, as consumers, on social media—it is the air we breathe.
With the decline of union strength and left-wing social movements, as well as the political attacks on human rights, there is almost no escape from constantly having to prove our value.
The pressures on people are constantly increasing. In education, the rise of neurodiversity has come alongside the incredibly destructive testing agenda and the dismantling of progressive reforms that were won in the 1960s and 1970s.
The pressure for students to prove their worth in education based on narrow parameters has been increasing markedly since 2008. NAPLAN at Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 was just the beginning.
The rise in standardised testing came with the unashamed narrowing and standardising of the curriculum to teach to the tests. A regime of pre-tests, screening “tools”, self-tests, peer assessment, practice assessment and internally standardised assessments are seen as good teaching practice.
When children don’t perform well, there are two ways that people respond, as the British psychologist Naomi Fisher explains. One is to blame the children for not putting in enough effort, or to say their family are not supporting their education.
“The other way that the system copes with children who aren’t thriving,” she says, “is to identify them as having ‘special educational needs’—a term which essentially says that they’re not well suited to what mainstream school is offering. These children often go on to waiting lists to see health professionals.
“After ‘Blame’, the medical model comes as a huge relief. It effectively says, ‘It’s not your fault. There’s something wrong with your brain. You can’t help it’.”
Up to a third of families now have children who refuse to go to school, and yet “school refusal” is often treated as the result of a neuro-disorder or mental illness rather than a sign that schools themselves are crushing human potential.
The huge rise in ADHD and ASD diagnoses, the promotion of “brain based” education theories and Disability Inclusion Plans meant to prompt under-resourced teachers to cater for individual needs of children, has not challenged the punitive testing obsession or lead to a fight for the massive funding injection that might make schools less hostile and more educational.
The neurodiversity framework allows our rulers to pass off the crisis state of schools, and the crisis of our whole system, as a problem for individuals.
But capitalism is the disorder that undermines our potential, and denies our human dignity. It is a brutalising system that imposes relentless pressure to compete and perform according to the demands of profit-making. And it seeks to narrow our human diversity and worth to serve its destructive logic
We can’t accept that we, or our brains, are the problem. We have to build confident and combative working class solidarity that rejects outright the idea that anyone must be a “perfect form” according to bourgeois norms.
As workers, we have to fight the oppressive logic of the system and use our power as a class to create the conditions for real freedom.
