Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You

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Between a flawed system that focuses on younger, male populations, and the fact that girls are conditioned from a young age to blend in, women often don’t learn about their neurological differences until they are adults, if at all. Also a large focus is on highly successful entrepreneurial individuals, further alienating the average high functioning autist. I'll start with the actual writing itself: definitely needed more editing, topics do not flow well into one another, and the surface level coverage of too many topics ends up feeling disorganized altogether.

The framing of most neurodivergent traits as positive differences is nice, but glosses over the struggles of people who have higher support needs. The author uses the term 'Aspergers' multiple times, without saying anything about the history of that term.Overall, as an autistic person, I would not want someone I know to read this book and think that this is representative of my experience. Absolutely useless to the individual, and only addressed white collar corporate culture, completely ignoring blue and pink collar work, and offered absolutely no practical advice for the neurodivergent individual working in environments that are controlled at a level far higher than the individual location. Reads as an extremely out of touch hr manual which is especially jarring considering how much passion the author clearly has for the topic. The author's passing endorsement of training cops about ways autistic traits can look like disobedience feels especially ignorant, given the amount of young autistic Black men and women who have been arrested or assaulted by police who knew they were autistic. As a result, potentially millions live with undiagnosed neuro-divergences, obscured by anxiety and depression.

Divergent Mind is really for all women, giving them the chance to understand each others’ invisible differences and gifts. As a result, potentially millions live with undiagnosed or misdiagnosed neurodivergences, and the misidentification leads to depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and shame. I loved that Nerenberg explained all of the ways the brain functions out of the norm and how to deal with this. I found the author's treatment of the problems that undiagnosed autistic women experience at the hands of psychiatry lacking, especially with respect to race.The most interesting insight contained in the whole book is a couple (un-cited) paragraphs about the design of the environment/architecture as a function of European desires to demonstrate extreme restraint, and how that can be at odds with the optimal contexts for a woman of neurodivergence. I kept reading in hopes that the author might criticize the idea of productivity as one that harms disabled people whether they're like me or not, but such criticism never came. Her inclusion of Samantha Craft's list of ways that autism can present in women was instrumental for me to recognize it in myself, and am now working to get psychological testing. It contains a lot of suggestions that are probably very helpful for autistic people who do work "normal" jobs, for making their workspace more comfortable.

And I'll save my criticisms of treating "Highly Sensitive Person" like an actual diagnosis because oh my god. Worth the read but may make you crave for a deeper dive of a book which hopefully is on the way from Jenara or other authors. Sharing real stories from women with high sensitivity, ADHD, autism, misophonia, dyslexia, SPD and more, Nerenberg explores how these brain variances present differently in women and dispels widely-held misconceptions (for example, it’s not that autistic people lack sensitivity and empathy, they have an overwhelming excess of it).I bought the book hoping for lots of ideas of how to manage life in this world however it seemed more of a book about why and how we should advocate for change. This book is geared towards late-diagnosed autistic women who are able to have a "normal" job, given sufficient sensory and social accommodations. ACT Contact / FAQ About Events / Videos Merch / Subs Sign in/up Divergent Mind : Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You Nerenberg, Jenara More by this author.