As neurodiversity gains visibility across research, policy, education, and healthcare, the quality of the research shaping public understanding matters more than ever. Poorly framed studies don’t just miss nuance, they actively distort reality, influence policy in the wrong direction, and can cause harm to neurominorities by reinforcing deficit-based or misleading narratives.
One of the most persistent risks is the conflation of neurodiversity, trauma, and mental health distress. While these can overlap in lived experience, they are not the same thing. Research that fails to draw clear distinctions risks misrepresenting all three.
Below is a set of critical questions that should be asked of any research claiming to speak about neurodiversity.
Key Questions to Ask of Neurodiversity Research
1. How is neurodiversity defined?
- What definitions of neurodiversity, neurotypes, or neurominorities are being used?
- Are these definitions grounded in contemporary neurodiversity paradigms, or outdated medical or deficit-based models?
- Is neurodiversity framed as natural human variation, or implicitly treated as pathology?
2. Whose voices are included?
- Are neurodivergent people directly involved in the research design, analysis, or interpretation?
- Is lived experience treated as valid expertise, or merely anecdotal data?
- Are researchers speaking about neurominorities, or with them?
3. What assumptions shape the methodology?
- Does the study assume a “normal” or “ideal” cognitive baseline?
- Are differences automatically interpreted as impairments?
- Are environmental, social, and systemic factors considered, or is the focus solely on individual traits?
4. How are trauma and neurodiversity distinguished?
- Does the research explicitly differentiate between neurodevelopmental traits and trauma responses?
- What criteria are used to separate long-standing neurotype traits from acquired trauma symptoms?
- Is there clarity on onset, persistence, and context of traits?
5. Is there a risk of conflating trauma with neurodivergence?
- Are neurotypical individuals with trauma being grouped as representative of neurodivergent experience?
- Does the research acknowledge that trauma can overlay neurodivergence, but does not cause it?
- Are trauma-informed lenses being misused to explain away neurodevelopmental difference?
6. How are overlapping traits handled?
- When traits such as sensory sensitivity, hypervigilance, emotional regulation differences, or social withdrawal appear, how does the study distinguish their origin?
- Is overlap treated with nuance, or collapsed into a single explanatory framework?
- Does the research allow for multiple truths to coexist?
7. What conclusions are drawn and for whom?
- Are findings used to justify changing environments and systems, or to justify “fixing” individuals?
- Who benefits from the conclusions, neurominorities, institutions, or existing power structures?
- Are recommendations aligned with inclusion, equity, and autonomy?
8. How will this research be used in practice?
- Could this research be used to deny diagnosis, support, or accommodations?
- Might it reinforce the idea that neurodivergence is simply trauma to be treated or eliminated?
- Has the research considered the ethical implications of its framing?
Why This Matters
When neurodiversity is poorly defined or collapsed into trauma narratives, neurominorities risk becoming invisible. Diagnostic clarity, access to support, identity formation, and legal protections all depend on research getting this right.
Trauma-informed approaches are essential. But trauma does not replace neurodiversity. And neurodiversity should not be explained away by trauma.
If research cannot hold complexity, it should not be shaping systems.
A Final Warning: The Risk of Weaponisation
There is a further and serious risk when trauma symptoms are confused with neurodiversity traits it could lead to a potential criminalisation of neurominorities.
If trauma-related behaviours are allowed to stand in for minority neurotype traits, research opens the door to dangerous misclassification. Most people who engage in criminal behaviour have experienced significant trauma. Under a poorly defined or overly narrow framework, it becomes possible to suggest that such individuals “fit” minority neurotype profiles, not because they are neurodivergent, but because trauma has shaped their behaviour.
This is a profound error.
Neurodiversity refers to innate variations in cognition, perception, sensory band and processing, not acquired responses to violence, neglect, or systemic harm. Trauma can affect anyone, regardless of neurotype. When these distinctions are blurred, neurominorities risk being falsely associated with risk, deviance, or criminality, a narrative with a long and damaging history.
Such framing can be weaponised:
- To justify increased surveillance or control of neurominorities
- To pathologise difference as dangerous rather than diverse
- To shift responsibility away from social, economic, and institutional causes of harm
- To undermine legal protections, accommodations, and human rights
It is therefore essential that research explicitly states what neurodiversity is not, as well as what it is. Trauma symptoms should never be treated as proxies for neurodivergent traits.
Neurodivergence should never be inferred from behaviour shaped by trauma alone. And neurominorities must never become convenient stand-ins for broader societal failures.
If research does not hold this line clearly and rigorously, it lacks precision and risks causing significant harm to millions of people.
We know this pattern and we have seen the outcome.
The wrong kind of research on neurodiversity repeats it again.
A Brief Historical Note on Misclassification and Criminalisation
History offers repeated warnings about what happens when difference is poorly defined and socially feared.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, groups now recognised as disabled, neurodivergent, or otherwise different were routinely misclassified as morally deficient, dangerous, or criminal. Early psychiatry and criminology blurred the lines between poverty, trauma, disability, race, and criminality, producing theories that framed certain minds and bodies as inherently suspect.
Autistic traits were historically labelled as childhood psychosis. Intellectual disability was conflated with criminal propensity. Homosexuality was classified as a psychiatric disorder. Black and Indigenous populations were subjected to pseudoscientific profiling that framed responses to oppression as evidence of innate deviance. In many jurisdictions, institutionalisation, forced treatment, and incarceration followed.
These errors were not neutral mistakes. They served social order, justified control, and protected dominant systems from scrutiny.
When contemporary research about neurominorities is conducted on the wrong assumptions, it risks reproducing this same logic under modern language. The danger is not hypothetical: classification systems shape policing, sentencing, safeguarding decisions, immigration outcomes, and access to rights.
History shows that when science fails to distinguish difference from danger, it is difference that pays the price.
That lesson should inform every modern study claiming to speak about neurodiversity.
