Phoenix. 32. Washington.

🐻‍❄️

Thanks to how hard people have worked in recent years, mental health has become a lot more familiar to people, and within a lot of internet communities (i.e. here) it’s all pretty much common knowledge at this point. There are tons of positivity and resource posts for the mentally ill and neurodiverse, and jesus, it’s beautiful. But there is one thing that people tend not to take notice of, and that’s the difference between mental illness and neurodiversity.

A lot of genuinely ND people are more in-the-know about this, I’d assume, but there are neurodivergents who get these definitions crossed as well. It’s not just neurotypicals who don’t fully understand it. So I’m going to clear everything up.

NEURODIVERSE refers to neurological/developmental disorders that affect how an individual is wired. These include but are not limited to ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), Dyslexia, etc. All of these disorders have a direct effect on how people develop and learn. Neurodivergent people are BORN neurodivergent, and CANNOT BE CURED in any sense of the word, because we just work differently. It’s innate, not learned, trained, or traumatized into the mind.

MENTAL ILLNESS is caused by things like trauma or chemical imbalance. That’s why it’s denoted with the term “illness”: because, whether through therapy, medication or both, the symptoms (which is what psychological disorders are chiefly defined by) and sometimes the cause can be managed or fixed entirely. Mental illness includes but is not limited to conditions like depression, PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder)/OSDD, etc. These are all disorders that people develop as a result of some internalized external event. You cannot be born with a mental illness. Your genetics may render you prone to developing mental illness, but you cannot be born with it. Meaning that yes, if you are mentally ill you can still be neurotypical, and being mentally ill does not excuse you from being ableist. Some of y’all really be out here thinking DID etc. give you a free pass to be ableist scum and it shows.

Neurodiversity and mental illness can come hand-in-hand, of course. One common example is ADHD being accompanied by depression. Someone will be born with ADHD, but can develop depression later on due to attention-deficit related stress. Comorbidity is very common in neurodivergents, seeing as modern society is a harsh environment for the developmentally impaired. So y’know. Let’s work to make it easier on one another by making sure we know what is what.