Though many people are worried about being labeled, I genuinely believe that being able to name a challenge opens it up to finding a solution. Like my friend Craig Knippenburg MSW, M.Div., likes to say, “Starting in the Judeo-Christian history captured in the Bible, when God created the earth and man, the first command God gave Adam and Eve was to name the plants and animals.”
As a person goes down the path of diagnostic testing, typically the neurodivergent spikes and troughs reveal themselves quite easily. The psychological definition refers to the diversity within an individual’s neurocognitive abilities. In mapping the data related to various diagnostic modalities intelligence scales, memory tests, attention tests, and tests of executive function, there are statistically significant disparities between peaks and troughs of the profile.
In real life the spiky profile translates to an individual being glaringly good at some things and drastically lacking in other areas. For example, a person may have incredible abilities to learn complex scientific data and synthesize the data into novel ideas. However, that same individual may not be able to wake up to an alarm clock or remember to close the car door when exiting their vehicle.
Particularly for our high-masking, high-intellect and savant individuals, it is extremely difficult to avoid the blame-shame game without a diagnosis. And just because a person participates in an evaluation, it doesn’t mean they have to reveal the results to anyone. It is highly protected medical information. However, having that data that shows the disparities in strengths and challenges, revealing the telling “spiky profile” is the quickest way to identify a path to making a person’s life easier to navigate.
In my extended family, we are very spiky characters. Some of us have visual acuity that is off the charts while others have dyslexia. Several minds are so easily prone to math that we have many engineers in our clan, while others have dyscalculia. There is no one pattern that indicates neurodivergence, but looking at the chart of neurocognitive data does create a pattern which can show the answer to many unsolved mysteries revealed by the spiky profile.
