People use “neurodivergent” so often now that it can start to feel like a label that’s always existed, something clinical and settled. It isn’t. The term is barely three decades old, and it didn’t come from a lab or a diagnostic manual. It came from autistic people talking to each other.
The word “neurodiversity” is usually credited to Judy Singer, an Australian sociologist who is herself autistic and has an autistic daughter and mother. In her honors thesis in the late 1990s, she framed neurological variation the way biologists talk about biodiversity, as a natural feature of a population rather than a defect in individuals within it. Around the same time, the journalist Harvey Blume picked up the idea and wrote about it for a general audience, arguing that neurological difference might be as essential to human functioning as biodiversity is to an ecosystem. But the thinking behind both of them had already been circulating for years in early online autistic communities, among people trading the first language for describing their own minds on their own terms instead of borrowing the vocabulary of pathology.
That origin matters. “Neurodivergent” wasn’t coined to sort people into new clinical buckets. It was coined to push back against the idea that there’s one correct way for a brain to work, with every deviation from it classified as a disorder to be corrected. The people who built this framework were often responding directly to their own experience of being talked about instead of talked to, of having their support needs decided by professionals who’d never asked them what they actually wanted. Jim Sinclair’s 1993 essay “Don’t Mourn for Us,” written before the word “neurodivergent” was in wide use, captured the same instinct: stop treating autism as a tragedy that happened to a person, and start treating the autistic person as someone whose perspective on their own life is the one that counts.
We think about that history a lot at NeuroHomes, because it’s easy for the word “neurodivergent” to get used the way we’re trying to move away from, as a diagnostic sorting category that determines what kind of housing or supervision someone gets assigned. That’s not what we’re building. The whole premise of permanent supportive housing, done right, is that the people living in it get to define what support actually looks like for them, rather than having a model imposed based on their diagnosis.
In practice that means a resident’s living arrangement isn’t determined by a checklist of clinical traits. It’s shaped by conversations with that person about how they want to live, what kind of independence matters to them, what kind of community they want around them. Some people want quiet and a lot of solitary time. Some want to be in the middle of things. A housing model built on the pathology paradigm would try to standardize that. A model built on the actual intent behind “neurodivergent,” the intent Singer and Blume and the early autistic self-advocates were reaching for, starts from the assumption that variation itself is normal, and that the person living the life is the authority on what they need.
Rural Wahkiakum County doesn’t have much in the way of existing neurodivergent-specific housing, which means we’re building without a lot of local precedent to react against. That’s a chance to build it right from the start, grounded in where this language actually came from rather than in whatever institutional shorthand it’s drifted into since.