Labels are powerful things
The complexity of a neurodivergent diagnosis.
My wife is pretty sure I have ADHD. She’d know; after all, she’s got an ADHD diagnosis as have two of our kids and I’m a lot like them (perhaps unsurprisingly). My mom, however, is less persuaded. I was a restless kid but I always did fine in school and wasn’t any more disruptive than most boys my age; I’m not like my cousin who would be bouncing off the walls if it weren’t for his medication.
As for me, I’m pretty open to the possibility that I’m “neurodivergent” but I haven’t felt too much inclination to get assessed. I’m managing with my mental habits as they are and I don’t know that I need a diagnosis; after all – if I don’t need treatment – a diagnosis is just a label, right?
What’s taken and what’s given
Well, labels are powerful things. Labels – like “neurodivergent,” “autistic” or “ADHD” – can do a lot for the person who bears the label and potentially also take a lot away from them. When I was a kid, only kids who had profound impairments got “labels” and so those labels were marks of exclusion or, at least, the kind of “difference” that kids did not want to be known for. My parents’ generation were understandably nervous about their kid getting a “label”: it might lead the kid to be written off or disregarded (and maybe even taken to imply some deficit in their parenting).
These days – largely thanks to tireless advocacy by neurodiverse people and the broader disability community – a label can be comparatively empowering. It can be a ticket to needed accommodations and understanding from the communities that used to exclude or marginalize on the same basis. And certain kinds of labels don’t just “ask for” understanding and accommodation, they can compel it, due to legislative and regulatory developments in education and employment. Labels have power.
Who bestows the label?
But if labels have power, so too do those who get to give them out. Who gets to give people labels, and who validates and invalidates labels, is a strong index of where the power is in our society. Even when labels are tools of empowerment for the labelee, the power of that tool largely depends on the power and prestige of the person who bestows it. If you need the label to unlock accommodation and understanding, then you need to submit yourself to the power of the doctors and the “system.” They might be beneficent, but they hold the keys.
Christians, who follow the One who “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (Phil. 2:7), must be sensitive to the ways in which power is stored and spread in our societies. We should prefer to see those who are subject be empowered and those who have power use it to empower. That’s not all there is to controversies about diagnosis, accommodation and treatment, but we need to keep power in view. I don’t know what that means about whether I should get assessed for ADHD, though. Maybe that really depends on my wife’s powers of persuasion.
