Over the last 14 years, I have grown accustomed to my husband’s “face blindness”: his inability to recognise people on sight, particularly when out of context. He regularly falsely identifies actors on television, once mistook an elderly man on the Tube for Jeremy Corbyn, and failed to remember our friend’s name despite having met him at half a dozen parties before. My husband apologised, saying that he would remember next time as the friend shared the same name as his brother’s. The friend tersely replied: “Yes, you said that the last two times we met.”

Face blindness, or developmental prosopagnosia, can be socially embarrassing, but I am not sure it is a disability. Yet leading experts are now calling for people with the condition to be protected from discrimination and given “reasonable adjustments” at work, as with other neurodivergent conditions such as autism, ADHD, dyspraxia and dyslexia.

Diagnosing eccentricities is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, having a label can help people to communicate their needs in social settings, and allow them to access crucial funding and support. On the other hand, a diagnosis can be used as an excuse for failure or poor behaviour, and take away resources from the seriously ill people at the furthest ends of the spectrum (it is estimated that it would take the NHS eight years to assess all the adults now on a waiting list for an ADHD diagnosis). Our obsession with neurodivergence can help foster tolerance and empathy, but it can also entrench victimhood and a lack of accountability.

Earlier this month, it was reported that a majority of Brits now self-identify as neurodivergent. But not all personality quirks are pathological. In her book The Age of Diagnosis, consultant neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan writes: “We are not getting sicker — we are attributing more to sickness.” As most neurodivergent conditions exist on a continuum,  the boundary between eccentricity and condition is a matter of clinical — and often subjective — judgement. Ever-broadening definitions risk undermining the experience and treatment of people with extreme, debilitating disabilities. I often wonder what parents of severely autistic children, who may never communicate, socialise or live independently, think of the endless carousel of celebrities who pay for an autism diagnosis in order to “understand themselves better”.

We are all neurodiverse, because everyone’s brain is different. My husband can’t remember names and faces, but he is incredibly logical, practical and physically dexterous. I am very good with names and faces (a benefit for being a teacher), but I probably have “spatial-awareness blindness”: I am terrible at judging distances, fulfil every female stereotype when it comes to parking manoeuvres, and find most diagrams as decipherable as hieroglyphics.

By medicalising people’s natural strengths and weaknesses, we risk dividing the world into fully functioning people versus those who struggle — and yet everyone struggles to some degree. There are other ways to validate the challenges people face rather than automatically rubber-stamping a diagnosis. For some, being neurodivergent can be genuinely life-limiting, and these people deserve sympathy and support. For most, though, cognitive diversity should be celebrated — it can indeed be a “superpower”, and many neurodivergent people who struggle in some areas have exceptional talents and skills in others. Ultimately, however, it should also be accepted as a normal manifestation of the incredible variety of life, and all the possible permutations of personality.

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Kristina Murkett is a freelance writer and English teacher.

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