Among classmates you meet everyday, 30% may be neurodivergent, according to UW-Madison School of Education. Sitting exhausted in a late Friday class, you may come to notice the boy with the too blank eyes staring a hole into the wall, or the girl rocking back and forth in her chair with a cheery smile. At first sight, you may be concerned, or slightly bewildered at activity that you previously deemed ‘abnormal’. However, neurodivergency is a surprisingly common aspect of our daily lives. Following generational awareness and enhanced psychiatric criteria, the Business Disability Forum reports that the percentage of identified neurodivergent individuals have recently skyrocketed to 20% of all humanity. This rise is attributed to increased recognition of this matter, fueled by recent awareness efforts. Today, I will be taking a deeper dive into neurodivergence and its significance in our rapidly changing society. 

Before I focus on ableism and its regards, it is important to properly define our main topic: neurodivergence. Cleveland Clinic defines neurodivergence as a ‘nonmedical term that describes people whose brains develop or work differently for some reason.’ This means the person has different strengths and struggles from people whose brains develop or work more typically. Within our global community, the National Library of Medicine reports that approximately 25% of adults in the general population were diagnosed with mental disorders during their lifetime. The lifetime prevalence of mental disorders was 27.8%.

Considering this abundance in neurodivergent individuals, awareness should not be a learning experience, but common sense. Due to the fact that it is not, unfortunately, a common sense, widespread awareness of sanism should be strongly encouraged in modern society. When consulted, however, CIPD said that 20%, or 1 in 5 neurodivergent individuals face discrimination. While the word ‘ableism’ seems fit for these types of situations, there is a more specific term that the neurodivergent community strives to promote. This word is ‘sanism’, with the following definition being coined by AMA Journal of Ethics. ‘Sanism,’ an irrational prejudice against people with mental illness, is of the same quality and character as other irrational prejudices such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and ethnic bigotry that cause (and are reflected in) prevailing social attitudes. This stereotyping of the effects of mental illness also flows from the meretricious impact of a false “ordinary common sense” (OCS) and the impact of narrow minded thinking on judicial decision making. OCS is self-referential and non-reflective (A key example being “I see it that way, therefore everyone sees it that way; I see it that way, therefore that’s the way it is”). Areas such as these are treasure troves of self-righteousness, narrow thinking, and “atrophied moral development”, as AMA states.

Now that the concept of sanism is thoroughly engraved into your minds, the next crucial step would be to implement the knowledge of ableism to fix remaining issues in our community. While making a worldwide change is near-impossible at the moment, it is more than possible to eradicate sanism from our school community. The Chicago School Library has already made firm approaches to this anti-neurodivergent issue. For example, students should be encouraged in a direction of erasing sanist vocabulary in classroom settings. Vocabulary such as ‘high functioning’, ‘on the other end of the spectrum’, ‘retarded’, or just downright ‘autistic’ may sound casual to most, but many neurodivergent individuals find it discriminating or hurtful. If other schools and communities around the world are executing these processes, there is no excuse for ours to not parallel their actions.

As this article comes to a close, you may wonder, why should I? That is a perfectly valid question for everyone to think about. In the perspective of the neurodivergent, the answer is painfully obvious:because we are exactly the same as you. A symptom of depression, one of the many umbrella disorders of the term ‘neurodivergency’, is lacking serotonin within the brain. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that neurotypical people, the same people that discriminate against the mentally ill, also produce. The only difference is that those individuals have the ability to naturally produce said neurotransmitters. If someone didn’t have tomatoes in their fridge, they would go and buy tomatoes from the market. You wouldn’t mock and harass them because you have the ‘privilege’ of having tomatoes in your fridge. It’s this mindset that this article aims to emphasize. Neurodivergent individuals are no different from the ‘normal’ people in your community. So why is sanism still a recurring issue?