There has been some discussion lately, asking whether “Neurotypical even exists anymore, given how many people now seem to be neurodivergent”. It is a sentiment that has gained traction as conversations around ADHD, autism, and dyslexia have moved into the mainstream.
To understand this, we first have to discuss what ‘neurodivergent’ actually is and means. There is some debate around this, and there are posts from Sonny J Wise making a good case for how the term actually includes more conditions than many people recognise. My own view, is that the threshold is whether or not a condition is a permanent difference, or a potentially temporary one. For example, with anxiety there is Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and then there are people who experience a period of anxiety in their lives, over months or years, but ultimately overcome it. That is not to lessen the experience – going through years of anxiety is awful, with panic attacks and living in dread. But thankfully for many it does subside, through treatments such as CBT and medication, but also there are some very good books that can help to understand how the amygdala can eventually learn the false alarms which triggers the effects of anxiety. ADHD, however, will not ever subside; people just learn different ways to cope with and manage it. For some people anxiety may last a lot longer, perhaps their whole lifetime, in which case that would not be temporary but permanent, and is therefore a ‘disorder’ in clinical terms – and certainly that should be considered as neurodivergent. This is an important consideration because if when talking about “so many people being neurodivergent,” then we must know who is being including in that definition.
Despite the statement that “so many people are neurodivergent”, the statistics tell a different story. While older estimates were lower, many recent figures suggest 15–20%. Even going with the higher 20% figure, that’s one in five people. Statistically, if you work in an office with 25 people, five might then be neurodivergent (ND) and 20 neurotypical (NT). If you work for a big company with 200 people on your office floor, 40 of those people may be ND and 160 NT. My studies focus specifically on ADHD, so I’m going to zoom into that here. While previous estimates were around 2.5%, recent research will likely revise that to 3–4%, but in the spirit of the discussion let’s go as high as 10% to really overblow the case being made about “so many people”. In your office of 25 people then, there might be two or three people with ADHD. In your office with 200 people, there might be 20. That tracks, when you really take comprehensive account of who you meet and whether they are ADHD or not.
The reason it feels like “so many” to some people is largely due to a logical fallacy known as the frequency illusion, or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Because a lot of people are newly diagnosed (the reasons for that are here) it’s more talked about. This triggers what’s called the ‘availability heuristic‘, in that because ND stories are now more ‘available’ in our minds, we overestimate how common they are. This is a known effect, and also shows that if a group has been historically underrepresented, a move toward proportional representation can feel like overrepresentation because it stands out against the long-term baseline of the majority. Another way of putting it is that we are also susceptible to confirmation bias. If someone has anchored on something, like noticing increased numbers of ND people, they will register every example that confirms this, while lesser registering the 80% who are neurotypical. This is compounded by the numerosity effect, where our brains struggle to intuitively grasp the actual scale of representation. What this all amounts to is that if you come across 100 people in a week or two, you probably won’t think about whether they are NT, but you will notice if they talk about being ND, or show themselves to be in some way – and that makes the numbers seem higher in your head.
This is even more pronounced if you work in an ND-related space. You will naturally encounter more ND people, which affects representation perceptions – just like how anyone with a particular political view tends to think they’re in a majority even if they’re not. This is especially the case online, with algorithms showing posts from others talking about ND experiences, there will be more of it – and that can lead a person to think what they’re seeing is representative of the general population when actually it’s a biased sample. But if you’re ND yourself, it will often be offline too… Consider if you grew up with undiagnosed ADHD, got kicked out of school, and struggled to fit into the system – who do you think you’ll be hanging around with? Life funnels people together when their circumstances are similar. Of course those who fall through the gaps end up congregating. Those who get into trouble and go down a substance abuse route at a young age, will most likely end up doing so with others on the same path, and they’re often on the same path for the same reasons. So returning to my research topic and own experience – yes, if you are ADHD, your friend group is probably over-representative in terms of ADHD, too.
Now back to the premise that “Most” people are now neurodivergent. It is simply incorrect, it just might seem that way because of how poorly we, as humans, estimate numbers at scale.