This talk is hosted by the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science in the Facutly of Arts.

Much debate about psychiatric diagnosis, or overdiagnosis, seems to assume that there is a fixed or natural limit on how many neurodivergent people there should be. Any time diagnostic rates expand significantly for any given diagnosis, dismissals of that diagnosis as a ‘fad’ or ‘brand’ soon follow. Such dismissals have been happening more since the rise of neurodiversity movement, where many people reclaim categories such as ‘autism’ or ‘ADHD’ sometimes even bypassing clinical diagnosis. A similar thing has happened with the mass expansion of the ‘trauma’ concept, which is currently often dismissed as overused to the point of being meaningless. While some worries about classification expansion are important, here I question the underlying logic and ideology driving much of this discourse.

What I am interested in is the tendency for such concepts to expand as and when neurodivergent people find them helpful. Whenever a great many neurodivergent people begin finding that any given classification genuinely useful, more tend to adopt it. But because this, the classification expands and is then instantly dismissed as a fad. This means that neurodivergent tend to only be granted recognition of labels they do not find helpful. To make sense of this, I suggest our collective understanding here is limited by ideological constraints, including conservative narratives about cultural and moral decline that imply that finding the recognition of disability useful is a moral failure. This often lead to a kind of epistemic double bind, where most accept that classifications are needed, yet any given classification is only widely accepted if those receiving it tend to not find it helpful.

All welcome!