a drgn azure, couchant

Framework: “a system of rules, ideas, or beliefs that is used to plan or decide something.”

Everyone has their experiences, their ways of thinking, processing, perceiving, their feelings, etc. Everyone’s experiences are different. Sometimes people’s experiences are associated with problems, such as distress / unhappiness, social conflicts, difficulties with day-to-day activities, etc. This is the basis for the “neurodiversity” framework.

Sometimes these problems are intrinsic to the experience – for example, ongoing low mood or emotional numbness is not something people appreciate experiencing.

Sometimes the problems are a result of lack of self acceptance / self-management. For example, accepting that you experience delusions will increase your chances of recognising these when they start, and will open you up to trying new self-management techniques to ensure you stay safe. Note that medication is one possible management strategy.

Sometimes the problems are about other people’s lack of acceptance or willingness to accommodate – this basically covers the social model of disability. Many people who describe themselves as autistic find that other people are their main source of difficulty – people who are unwilling to speak directly, or who discourage visible self-regulation strategies such as stimming, for example, or a psychiatrist or other prescribing medical professional being unwilling or unable to prescribe a medication that may be helpful.

Under the psychiatric framework, these underlying experiences that are associated with distress in an individual, may be catalogued and categorised as various mental disorders.

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Everything that exists is coloured by its history.

Homosexuality used to be classed as a mental disorder. Do you know why this changed?

Psychiatry is supposed to be an evidence-based field. What sort of research could possibly be done to prove whether an experience is a mental illness?

Nothing. Because what it comes down to is, “what counts as a mental illness?” and what counts as a mental illness is whatever we define as a mental illness. Back then, someone was “mentally ill” if their experiences were considered “abnormal,” that is, not socially acceptable. That was the basis of their framework of the time.

Homosexuality was removed from diagnostic materials, not because there was evidence to it not being a mental illness, but because queer activists protested the hell out of it’s inclusion. That is not an evidence-based decision, that is a political decision. It was queer activists that pushed for the inclusion of the distress/impairment criterion, changing how psychiatry officially classifies mental illness.

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The pathology / psychiatric framework is just that – one framework, one lens through which to view a portion of people’s experiences. The neurodiversity framework is another. These are not the only two framework; for example, there is the “Power, Threat, Meaning” framework, and many different spiritual or indigenous approaches.

People can choose which lens they use to understand their experiences. Sometimes, because the society & institutions around us insist on working through the psychiatric framework, we will use this terminology for ease of communication or as a tool to get what we need (for example, we may be required to be formally diagnosed with something to access medication or accommodations) despite preferring the neurodiversity framework.

One thing I have come across numerous times is posts that say something like,

“You guys realise that neurodiversity isn’t just ADHD and Autism, right? That it includes Schizophrenia and Psychotic disorders, DID, BPD and NPD and other personality disorders, OCD, bipolar disorder, etc.”

and all I can wonder is if they even understand what neurodiversity means, because all they’ve written here is disorder, disorder, disorder. Yes, all of those experiences are ways of being neurodivergent, absolutely, but people can be neurodivergent without their experience even being classifiable as a mental disorder under the psychiatric framework – both because they have the underlying experience without it causing problems, or because the experience simply is not included in a manual, for example sensory processing difficulties (recognition and treatment of which falls under the realm of occupational therapists, not psychiatrists or psychologists.) Additionally, there are people who could be diagnosable (or are diagnosed) but choose not to use that framework to understand and manage their experiences.

I think part of the cause of this, though, is that we seriously lack language outside of the psychiatric framework to describe these experiences. We have “voice-hearers” for anyone who hears voices (regardless of whether the diagnostic category they best match is a dissociative, psychotic, or schizospectrum category.) “Plural” overlaps this, a loose term to describe people who have headmates, and I appreciate how easy it is to specify “disordered Plurality” if one so chooses.


Autism is in a funny place, here, where the diagnostic term is “autism spectrum disorder” but most people just say autism/autistic, and the community is overall very inclusive of self recognition or “self-diagnosis,” the latter of which is predicated on the idea of fitting the criteria of the psychiatric framework.

I have seen suggestions for more neutral terminology for the underlying experience (regardless of associated problems) that “ADHD” describes, such as “Attention Variance,” and this is always shot down by people who prefer to describe themselves as having a disorder, who don’t understand that a rando on the internet coming up with a term does not mean they have to use that term, nor do they appear to understand that psychiatry doesn’t change Official Terminology because some rando on the internet suggested it, nor do they ever seem to consider that they could simply describe their Attention Variance as disordered, the way many Plurals do.

In conclusion, I wish there were more neutral terms to describe experiences for those who prefer to work under the neurodiversity framework. If more people understood that neurodiversity vs psychiatry is a matter of framework, not of correctness, I think that would reduce a significant amount of miscommunication, assumptions, and conflicts when discussing these experiences.

And I sure wish more people understood the concept that the way one experiences something, and the way one views that experience, are two totally different things.