Each year, the observance of “neurodiversity” asks the public to perform a familiar moral gesture. Conditions once treated chiefly as deficits are now to be regarded as differences; what was once stigmatised is to be affirmed; what institutions once punished, they are now meant to accommodate. The underlying impulse is understandable and, within limits, just. Much of the older social response to cognitive and behavioural abnormality was crude, punitive, and morally obtuse. Children whose difficulties ought to have elicited patience and support were instead treated as if they had simply failed at ordinary self-command. Families were often left not only burdened but blamed.
There is no wisdom in wishing for a return to that harsher order. But it does not follow that every correction is self-limiting. Moral reforms tend to overshoot, particularly when they are absorbed into a wider culture that prizes therapeutic affirmation and recoils from judgment. What begins as a humane insistence on dignity can end in an indiscriminate softening of categories. Distinctions that were once perhaps too rigid become, in time, hard to make at all. Diagnostic boundaries expand. Thresholds lower. Public language grows more inclusive, but often less exact.
Something like that has happened in contemporary discussion of autism and ADHD. It is now common to treat rising diagnoses as a straightforward mark of moral and scientific progress: earlier generations failed to recognise what we have at last learned to see. There is truth in this account. Some people were plainly missed, misunderstood, or misclassified. Greater recognition has spared many children and adults a great deal of unnecessary shame. Yet this is not the whole story. Better recognition and diagnostic inflation are not mutually exclusive.
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