what is the difference between neurodivergence and mental health disorders?
In: Biology
Neurodivergence is simply a matter of a functioning brain that is wired differently from the standard brain. A mental heath disorder is a matter of a brain whose healthy functioning is impaired for whatever reason.
Here’s an analogy:
An Android phone and an iPhone are different ways of building a smartphone. While each has different strengths and weaknesses, both are capable of doing basically everything that you want a smartphone to do. Depending on how you want to define it, one platform would be considered neurotypical, and the other would be neurodivergent. There are many ways you could choose which is which, but the simplest would be to simply state that the most popular one is the “typical” phone platform, and the other one would be the “divergent” platform.
A mental health disorder would relate to a damaged phone. Maybe it has a virus, maybe you’ve dropped it and it has a cracked screen, maybe the battery is failing, maybe there’s a problem with the hardware. Regardless, there is some damage to the phone that is making it incapable of functioning at the typical level.
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