Neurotypical

Early definitions described neurotypicals as "people who do not have autistic-type brains", clarifying that this would exclude "autistic cousins" who are recognizably “autistic-like”[5] but not necessarily autistic.[6] Early uses of "NT" were often satirical, as in the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical,[7][8] but with time it came to be widely used unironically.[9]

People with any form of neurocognitive[10] or mental disorder, whether congenital or acquired, have also sometimes been excluded from the neurotypical label, particularly in academic studies for specific disorders that use neurotypical control groups. In this sense, the term is now contrasted to neurodivergent, an umbrella term inclusive of people with diverse mental and behavioral differences, such as mood,[11] anxiety, dissociative, psychotic, personality,[12] and eating disorders.[13]

The conditions themselves, following the neurodiversity and social construction of disability models and in distance from the hegemonic medical model of disability (otherwise known in the neurodiversity community as the "pathology paradigm"), are often referred to as neurodivergences—that is, neurotypes that are divergent from a given social and medical norm. Neurotypical is, in short, not having a developmental disorder; since most people with mental illnesses are born with no developmental disorders, they are considered predominantly neurotypical from birth. Mental illness could be triggered by environmental causes or traumatic events in one's lifetime, whereas developmental disorders are present at birth and continue into adulthood.

Some people prefer the term allistic,[14] which unambiguously means "not autistic".[15]

The National Autistic Society of the United Kingdom says of the term "neurotypical": "neurotypical is mainly used by autistic people so may not be applicable in, for example, the popular press."[16]

"Critiques of the Neurodiversity Movement", a 2020 review, argued two basic observations:

• Many people who do not have an autism diagnosis have autistic traits. This was known by researchers as the "broad autism phenotype". So, there was no clear bimodal distribution separating people with and without autism. In reality there were not two distinct populations, one "neurotypical" and one "neurodivergent".[17]
• "Neurotypical" was a dubious construct, because there was nobody who could be considered truly neurotypical. There was no such standard for the human brain.[18]

• Russell, Ginny (2020). "Critiques of the Neurodiversity Movement" (PDF). In Kapp, Steven (ed.). Autistic community and the neurodiversity movement: stories from the frontline. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 287–303. doi:10.1007/978-981-13-8437-0_21. ISBN 978-981-13-8437-0. OCLC 1127055276. S2CID 210483688.