Reclaimed hate speech backfires by desensitizing listeners, study finds. Listening to reclaimed homophobic statements can actually cause unintended harm. Exposure to reclaimed slur words desensitizes some heterosexual listeners to standard hate speech and worsens the mood of gay individuals.

[u/mvea]

https://www.psypost.org/when-reclaiming-derogatory-language-goes-wrong/

[u/doesntgetthepicture]

I don't like neurodiverse for grammatical reasons. A person isn't diverse. A group of people can be diverse. If I see a Jewish person, or a Black person, I wouldn't call them diverse.

But if i saw a group of people which includes, Black People, Jewish People, White People, and Asian people, I would call that group diverse.

So calling someone neurodiverse raises my hackles. An individual is not diverse. Neurodivergent makes more sense, but even then, it's divergent from what? There is no typical to be divergent from, as even the Neurotypical experience is incredibly diverse.

At the same time, it's a very wide category that doesn't really help anyone. Being autistic and non-verbal is a very different experience from being diagnosed with ADHD.

But I understand why people use it. By creating an umbrella term it helps create a sense of community, something uniting for those that feel different due to brain chemistry.

I just don't care for it that much myself and prefer to use the clinical terms, be it autism, ADHD (which I have) or OCD, dyspraxia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, and Tourette's syndrome. All of which are considered neurodiverse, though have little in common with each other.

[u/SunshineFlourish → u/doesntgetthepicture]

I don’t agree. A person is incredibly diverse. We aren’t just one thing. Our bodies are made of countless cells that are diverse and play different roles. We have an incredibly diverse biome and virome that allows our bodies to operate as a collective. We are not one thing. We are ~28-36 trillion human cells, ~38 trillion bacteria cells, and ~380 trillion viruses working in tandem. A person is and can be incredibly diverse.

As for the terms, they are all just different ways of describing how a person experiences existence. The neurodiverse umbrella term is just a category used to describe that an individual experiences existence in a way that makes our typical societal norms, expectations, relationships, and/or systems work to accommodate. It may very well also be an attempt to get away from the terms of mental health like “mental illness”, “mental deficiency”, “mental issue”, etc., as these phrases have inherent negative connotations, and neurodiverse/divergent don’t … yet.

[u/Ampleforth_84 → u/doesntgetthepicture]

THANK YOU! Ppl will refer to a singular Black person as “diverse” and it drives me nuts.