Neurodiversity™: The Neoliberal Invasion

The Radical Roots of Neurodiversity

The neurodiversity movement began as a form of resistance, led primarily by autistic people who were tired of being spoken over, pathologized, and institutionalized. For decades, autistic people were framed as impaired, incapable of agency, and unfit for meaningful lives unless a neurotypical professional intervened on their behalf. The dominant narrative erased self-advocacy and stripped away autonomy.

While neurodiversity is often discussed in the context of autism, its philosophical roots go deeper. Think of Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, which traces how people labeled “abnormal” were historically confined, dehumanized, and subjected to systems of control in the name of care. The neurodiversity paradigm draws from poststructural theory, aligning with the disability rights movement to challenge the systems that pathologize mental and neurological diversity. It rejects the medical model’s message—“You are diseased”—and embraces the social model of disability, which reframes the issue: “Your environment is the problem, and maybe it’s not all your fault.”

This matters now more than ever. In April 2025, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly declared that autistic people “will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” These ignorant comments weren’t just offensive. They were dehumanizing, rooted in outdated eugenic thinking that continues to shape policy and public perception.

Why This Matters to Me

Let me tell you why we need neurodiversity-affirming spaces. There’s been an influx of self-proclaimed affirming therapists and neurodiversity advocates jumping on the trend, trying to profit off yet another vulnerable community. But neurodiversity is more than a brand. For many of us, it’s something deeply felt—intertwined with our identity, our history, and how we move through the world.

I still think about the disorientation I felt when I volunteered at a habilitation day program, long before I transitioned into the counseling field. This was back in 2010. What were these strange programs built for autistic people? Why were autistic children being treated as subhuman? Staff members hovered at a distance, arms crossed, talking with each other while watching the clock. There was no interactive play with the children. No one laughed with them. It felt like two worlds existing side by side, never touching. It was all so sterile, so joyless. But I felt close to them. And I felt heartbroken, quietly enraged, disillusioned, and ashamed of the entire setup.

I’ve seen distressed autistic people under attack throughout my career as a mental health professional. And I empathized with all of it because I could relate. I’ve been there. We’ve all (neurodivergent people) been there. I’ve had meltdowns and experienced the shame that follows. I’ve tried to hold it in as long as possible, feeling like I might explode, just needing to escape. The tension. The fear of being seen. The need to conceal it. The exhausting pressure to be the “expected” version of yourself. I still feel it, though I have more awareness and a little more freedom to unmask now.

What always struck me was getting in trouble without knowing the rule I’d broken. The hypervigilance we carry. The quiet shame of social missteps. The mind-numbing monotony of social decorum. Why is everyone following this strange choreography? Who decided this was how we’re supposed to move through the world?

I remember talking to someone who was alarmed by what I described. He compared it to dog training, and yet it was somehow called therapy. I cried more than once watching how children were treated. But I also assumed I didn’t understand because I was a naïve neophyte. I didn’t know any better because I was uneducated on the matter. These were the experts with years of experience. I was just an autistic engineer volunteering in their carefully constructed system.

There were entire schools built around this. Schools that proclaimed to “pioneer excellence” and provide “behavioral support” to unruly, defiant autistic children. But behind the glossy brochures and mission statements, the reality was darker. I’ve spoken with adult survivors of these behavioral correction camps, and their stories are chilling. Behind closed doors, they endured what can only be described as a nightmare—one that, for too many, still hasn’t ended.

What about the holds? The isolation rooms? The punishments for so-called “bad behavior”? Children were sent to “behavioral” schools where the threat of control shadowed every moment. Some tried to run. Some were arrested. All of them were blamed—pulled deeper into a system that pathologizes and drains the life out of you.

Some teachers were frightening. They hid behind “behavioral science” as a shield, using it to justify demeaning and cruel practices. Imagine being terrified to walk into school. I remember the physical escorts—the staff pulling children from their parents’ cars while they kicked and cried. Children who froze in fear were labeled “selectively mute.” Others were branded “oppositional defiant” for resisting absurd, humiliating rules.

When I later became a supervisor in an autism therapy program, I was still expected to follow the lead of “expert” behaviorists and their so-called gold-standard interventions for children. Yet these same experts showed little understanding—or compassion—for me or anyone like me. In case conceptualizations and staffing meetings, I heard how they spoke about autistic people and their families: condescending, detached, utterly unaware. And somehow, this was considered therapeutic.

Now picture me—an autistic therapist with ADHD—sitting in a room full of BCBAs during those same meetings. Listening as they confidently recited rigid protocols, reducing people to data points. The approach was infantilizing, dehumanizing, and wholly disconnected from the lived realities they claimed to serve.

They created behavior plans to eliminate stimming because parents found it embarrassing. They trained kids to suppress natural movement, to maintain eye contact, to make small talk, to sit still in tiny chairs while completing discrete trial tasks. As Ivaar Lovaas so proudly declared in the 1980s: make them “indistinguishable from their peers.”

The overreliance on positive reinforcement carried over seamlessly from the therapy room to the break room. Starbucks gift cards, potlucks, and “you’re doing great” emails were trotted out to boost morale while staff came to me in tears—exhausted, burnt out, and drowning in impossible workloads. Profits were down, productivity had to go up, so the answer was simple: demand more. Put those struggling on performance improvement plans, a corporate love letter reminding them they weren’t meeting “productivity standards.” Meanwhile, management kept expanding—hiring layers of directors and assistant directors who never set foot in the rooms where real work happened. They built out office suites for themselves, ignored the waste, and wrung every last drop from the people on the front lines. It was bourgeois management at its finest.

I remember being called a unicorn because I suggested we talk about intrinsic motivation, rather than use meaningless external motivators. Or—radical, I know—get rid of productivity standards altogether. They were convinced therapists would exploit such a system, but that’s precisely the kind of distrust baked into most profit-driven models. In Alinsky’s terms, it’s always the haves versus the have-nots, and the hierarchy guarantees the tension. We wasted endless hours chasing metrics that had nothing to do with the work we cared about. Therapists wanted to do therapy. I wanted to supervise therapists doing therapy. Yet most of our time, and all of my time as a supervisor, was spent on profit. It’s the hyper-capitalist blueprint for turning care into commerce. The irony? Energized, supported, and autonomous therapists would have delivered the profits they were chasing all along.

Then I got all “ones” on my final performance review — in retrospect, a gift, considering how quickly everything brightened after I resigned. And they were right. I wasn’t good at their job because I was never meant to thrive in a system built to contain me. Anarchists don’t survive in management’s cages. I don’t belong in those spaces. My work is dismantling the hierarchies and power structures that uphold them. The self-important executives, the board members, the ones who believe their titles make them untouchable—be ready for an uprising.

It turned out to be a blessing. I’ve always done my best work by channeling revenge into something constructive. That performance review became the spark for my vision: a sanctuary, an anarchist-informed space where neurodivergent people could finally exhale and gather. A place to build our own power, create together, and offer refuge—for both neurodivergent people and the therapists who stand with them.

Flying the Black Flag

When I first heard the term neurodiversity in 2016, it immediately clicked. The ideas behind it gave language to everything I’d felt for years. It pulled together so many loose threads. It made sense to the social justice punk rocker I was in high school—restless, defiant, unwilling to conform. And it turned out, there were others like me: neurodivergent people who were countercultural, anarchist-leaning, questioning the norms handed down by a neurotypical world. We were weirdos bewildered by a society built on hierarchy, suppression, and performance. Who decided this was the way to live?

I named our group Neurodiverse Counseling in 2018, back when almost no one was using the term. For those who did, it was a black flag. It marked you as part of a loose, radical thread of people with shared values and a common philosophical pulse. It’s how we found each other, like rebels in the outer rim. It meant you weren’t just another practitioner. That’s how I met one of my closest friends, Dr. Sami Pieknik. She was the only other person who also got fired up about neurodiversity. We were wandering through this bizarro world, somehow speaking the same language when no one else seemed to. We were a strange and subversive underground 1980s B-horror cult classic.

Neurodiversity became somewhat of a special interest. And it still is. But there are factors that have dulled the spark a bit in recent years.

Namely, Neurodiverse Counseling is a business. And I rely on it for income, which I’m not too pleased about. How much of a sellout does that make me? How much am I profiting by positioning myself as an “expert” on something that was never meant to be commodified? Even this blog post could be interpreted as a self-aggrandizing marketing ploy.

And that’s the truly insidious thing about neoliberalism. It doesn’t always show up with intention. It creeps in. It rewards visibility, scalability, and personal branding. Eventually, it takes over.

Here’s the thing: I want to create an environment where I can spend my time supporting other neurodivergent people and exploring the intersections of neurodiversity and psychology. I want space to learn, to build, and to follow whatever threads emerge. I want to wander through this work and meet other radicals along the way. To support each other through mutual aid.

Neurodiverse Counseling is our rebellion. It’s where neurodivergent people come for therapy and therapists come to escape the chokehold of corporate culture. It’s rest as resistance, care as strategy, and the starting point for dismantling oppressive systems.

Because we’ve felt the pressure to mask every day, knowing that a slip in performance or presentation could cost us. In their world, we weren’t valued for our work, only for our willingness to play along with their version of “culture.”

We’re the therapists who’ve been cast out, overlooked, or burnt out by traditional models. What we really want, what we’re trying to build, is a network of misfits, holding each other up when the system lets us fall.

It’s a utopian vision, I know. And I know the colonialist venture capitalists are already circling, ready to devour and repackage whatever we build. But maybe we can outlast them. At the very least, the rebellious idealist in me will fight to the end. If all we are is a temporary autonomous zone, then we’ll make it one worth remembering.

But that’s the beauty of it. We were born with a punk rock pulse, built to rebel against the mainstream and push back at authority with DIY grit, anti-establishment values, and unfiltered expression. We set out to create a community from the ground up, messy and alive, far from the grasp of venture-capital hands. And if we burn bright and fade, at least we’ll leave behind proof that it’s possible to live and work another way.

I’ve always had grandiose goals. If nothing else, I hope we’re laying the foundation for a return to something like a cottage industry of therapists — independently owned practices rooted in mutual support. Not competitive or cutthroat. Not scrambling for clout. Not getting swallowed by massive tech companies. And definitely not urging friends to sell out to a billion-dollar platform for a few hundred dollars in referral kickbacks.

But now, suddenly, everyone is becoming neurodiversity-affirming.

The Neoliberal Invasion

Neurodiversity-affirming is everywhere. Trainings, keynote speakers, peer support groups, and intensive outpatient programs are showcasing their commitment to neurodiversity. The Social Thinking curriculum has claimed the label. And in a truly surreal twist, there’s “neurodiversity-affirming” ABA. These are places of self-proclaimed “centers of excellence,” after all, and they have to maintain their status as the “Gold Standard” for autism treatment. Only now, they’ve traded their puzzle pieces for softer branding.

Everyone’s jumped on the neurodiversity bandwagon, and the infinity symbol doesn’t carry the same charge it once did. How many times do I have to hear someone say they’re neurodiversity-affirming or see the word divergent slapped onto branding? The irony is, there’s no divergence left, just convergence on neoliberal aspirations. It’s all been rolled into the autism industrial complex, a system that drains the life out of autistic and other neurodivergent people in the name of service, care, or progress.

Autism therapy is now a venture capital darling. Platforms like Elemy, Cortica, and CentralReach have pulled in hundreds of millions, boasting unicorn valuations, while private equity quietly swallows more than half of the nation’s largest ABA chains. What started as grassroots, community-driven care has been stripped for parts and rebuilt into a consolidated, profit-driven industry.

And every week, another venture capitalist email drops into my inbox asking if I’m ready to “scale” or “partner,” automated pitches from people who don’t even know what we do. They don’t care. They just smell profit.

Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of embodied and symbolic capital help explain how neurodivergent lived experience gets packaged and sold. Embodied capital is the ingrained way of being and moving through the world as a neurodivergent person—something that can be marketed as “authentic” expertise. Symbolic capital is the prestige and moral authority gained from representing a marginalized identity, which can be leveraged for influence, a platform, and income.

Together, these forms of capital turn identity into a currency, allowing organizations and individuals to sell their proximity to neurodivergence as a kind of moral credential. In the process, the raw, complex realities of neurodivergent life are polished into safe, digestible narratives, stripped of their political roots, and repurposed in ways that often serve the same systems the movement was meant to resist.

And now the revolution comes screen-printed in pastel colors. You can buy “Neurodiversity” hoodies on Etsy, enamel pins on Instagram, and even a neurodiversity T-shirt at Target. It’s liberation reduced to a logo. A movement that once fought to dismantle oppressive systems now sells for $19.99 in the seasonal section, neatly folded between Pride merch and Live Laugh Love mugs. I’m not talking about the DIY gear made by neurodivergent artists—that’s culture-making, self-expression, community support. I’m talking about the corporate knock-offs that strip the politics and pocket the profit.

Dick Hebdige called it countercultural incorporation, a process where radical movements are defanged and sold back to us as lifestyle branding. First, the commodity form: DIY symbols of resistance mass-produced, stripped of context, and price-tagged. Then, the ideological form: the politics softened, rewritten to soothe shareholders and upper-class suburbia. By the time it hits store shelves, the movement isn’t a threat anymore. It’s a talking point. It’s decor.

Neurodiversity has been taken up by a bunch of squares who have no understanding of its origins, including its philosophical and political roots. And in their hands, it gets sullied. The message gets diluted. What once felt radical and liberatory is repackaged into something safer, softer, and more marketable. It’s wielded in ways that miss the most essential parts of the neurodiversity vision.

Everyone’s trying to stake out a niche because there’s money to be made. For some, that niche is being a neurodiversity-affirming practitioner. And while I genuinely want more people to practice in ways that affirm neurodivergent identities, the term itself has been watered down. It’s become a vague signal, something anyone can claim if they’ve worked with autistic clients and consider themselves progressive enough to know the phrase exists.

But neurodiversity-affirming work is not a marketing tactic. It means dismantling the hierarchies that decide who gets to be “normal” and who gets pathologized. Neurodiversity is about equity and inclusion for neurodivergent people. It’s not even about therapy—it’s a political term. “Neurodivergent” was never a diagnosis, never a brand. Kassiane Asasumasu coined it in activist spaces to name those pathologized, medicalized, or punished for existing outside neuronormative rules. It was born in resistance. Now it’s too often reduced to a buzzword, its radical edge dulled until it no longer threatens the systems it was meant to challenge.

In the therapy world, it’s become en vogue to be affirming of marginalized identities. Ideally, that’s a baseline—you should expect your therapist to be affirming. But I’m caught in an in-between place. On one hand, neurodiversity-affirming is still an important signal. It tells clients, Maybe this is someone I can trust. On the other hand, it used to mean so much more.

Before the pandemic, if you told me you were neurodiversity-affirming, I could count on you being radical, rebellious, and a little bit punk rock—and I knew it was safe to unmask. Finding others like that in the field was a relief, because most spaces felt dangerous, especially when people like us were often targeted for removal.

But there’s been an infiltration, and the term is no longer enough of a signal for us. The word alone doesn’t tell the whole story, even if it still points in the right direction. What draws me in now is the enthusiasm, the genuine passion for neurodiversity. The people who are genuinely neurodiversity-affirming tend to fully embrace it, like it’s part of who they are. And often, it is. They’re often neurodivergent themselves, and their advocacy feels heartfelt, not performative. That’s the new signal: not just saying the right words, but living them. Being neurodivergent. Talking openly. Advocating with conviction.