Even for the most cynical among us, it is hard to deny that neurodiversity (i.e. the idea that there is no singular human neurology and conditions such as autism, ADHD or dyslexia are a part of the human condition as opposed to illnesses) has made remarkable progress over the past few decades in terms of public recognition. Where once we were relegated to stereotypes of antisocial nerds or ableist tragedies about broken children, now prominent figures like actress Aimee Lou Wood and journalist Owen Jones openly identify as neurodivergent.
But progress for marginalised groups is rarely linear and even in the face of such meagre gains, a backlash is beginning to coalesce against the idea that neurodivergence should be accepted as a normal part of society.
A growing consensus
One of the driving forces behind the backlash in the UK is the rightwing press, who frequently run articles doubting the prevalence or existence of neurodivergent conditions and framing basic adjustments, like funded school transport for SEND pupils, as ‘golden tickets’ granted at the expense of the general population. Perhaps the most egregious example is a column written in The Times by Matthew Parris last year, who argued that the UK’s benefits system was not just open to abuse, but rife with it. ‘I do not believe in ADHD,’ he sneered through the text, going on to suggest that ‘autism is a real thing for a relatively small number of people and a much-abused diagnosis for a huge number who are somewhere on a spectrum we’re all on’.
These sentiments have started to gain traction in the political sphere too. In the run-up to the 2025 local elections, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage claimed that SEND conditions are overdiagnosed, encouraging young people to believe they are ‘victims’, echoing remarks on mental health overdiagnosis by Labour’s Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Elsewhere, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch recently stated that autistic people, rather than being economically marginalised, were put at an advantage by their neurology (in the real world, 70 percent of autistic adults are unemployed). The most material expression of this backlash are the Labour government’s welfare ‘reforms’. These constitute an assault on disabled people more generally as well as un/underemployed and young people, but they target neurodivergent people by increasing the threshold for receiving Personal Independence Payments, and driving them into a hostile job market with little consideration for individual needs within the workplace.
Nor is this assault on neurodivergent existence limited to the UK. We can see it mirrored in a more frightening form in the United States, where Trump’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has pledged to ‘find the causes of autism’ by September, claiming that the autism ‘epidemic’ must be environmental in nature and that autistic children will ‘never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem’. His National Institutes of Health is amassing thousands of Americans’ private medical records to this end.
The lines being drawn
It might seem unfair to compare Labour policy or broadsheet columnists to someone like RFK Jr. Indeed most of them would rightly regard him as a crank. But the similarities lie in how they seek to reimpose a medicalised understanding of neurodiversity, where the problem is located not in the unequal structures of society but in one’s neurology; and where autonomy over one’s mind is determined not by oneself but by the needs of capital and the state.
In her book Mad World, Micha Frazer-Carroll describes how our understanding of ‘madness’ (and by extension neurodiversity) was constructed in line with the demands of capitalism. As industrial production emerged in the 19th century, a firm boundary needed to be drawn between those who could function as productive economic units and those who could not, and thus had to be contained and institutionalised. Now under neoliberalism, mental health is individualised, addressed through individual self-improvement or for-profit industries.
The reimposition of a narrow, medicalised neurodiversity serves not only to exclude many and subjugate those who do fall under its purview, but also functions to subjugate labour as a whole
As Robert Chapman notes in Empire of Normality, the rise of neurodiversity is not the result of individualised journeys of self discovery but is more akin to a growing consciousness among those who are disabled under current conditions of production by virtue of their neurology. As more people adopt the language of neurodiversity, they build ties of solidarity with one another whilst also re-evaluating their relationship with health and work and starting to request accommodations from bosses and state institutions.
Reframing neurodivergence as a fad or reimposing the understanding that it is a medical defect individually located within a handful of broken people thus serves to defend the boundaries on which neoliberal capitalism relies – and counters its potential as a site of collective action. We can see this expressed in Kemi Badenoch’s rotten little essay, where she claimed that neurodiversity had gone from ‘an individual focused challenge’ to a social force that ‘offers economic advantages and protections’. It also seeks to preserve the disciplinary functions of neurodivergent diagnoses (for instance, autism as a justification for denying gender affirming care).
Fighting back
When neurodivergent and disabled people advocate for ourselves, we often do so by detailing our lived experiences to the people and institutions that harm us. We bare our souls, describing deeply intimate, embarrassing or traumatic details about our lives hoping to appeal to their sense of compassion. Not only does this keep us in a position of disempowerment, but it does not work. Articulating our experiences is still necessary and I would never seek to stop anyone from doing so, but it alone will not liberate us. Rather than begging for mercy, neurodivergent people need to organise politically so as to not ask but demand concessions. But in order to effect this, we need our comrades on the left to take neurodiversity seriously.
Although most on the left are sympathetic to us, a few regard our struggle as ‘identity politics’, separate from the class struggle. This is particularly worrying at the moment as, in the aftermath of Trump’s victory in the US some on the left have argued in favour of moving away from so-called ‘identity politics’, claiming they alienate the left from the working class and distracts from more material avenues of struggle.
This is a false and unproductive distinction. The reimposition of a narrow, medicalised neurodiversity serves not only to exclude many and subjugate those who do fall under its purview, but also functions to subjugate labour as a whole. The assault on the neurodiversity movement is yet another example of capital imposing its will upon labour by curtailing our autonomy over our very neurology. Where workers’ rights and protections are threatened, the left must hold its ground.
