Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
This note is directed at clinicians who see profiles that resemble the Polymathic Neurodivergent Profile and want to describe them accurately in reports that end up in employment and legal contexts. The PNP is a descriptive construct, not a diagnosis, and this note does not ask clinicians to reach for it. It does ask clinicians to use the vocabulary that neuro-affirming guidance already provides.
A clinician can write that the same neurodivergent trait is experienced as advantage in one context and impairment in another, and that both are necessary to understand how the person functions. Russell and colleagues (2019) is the citation. A clinician can write that everyday dysexecutive difficulties can be present in someone whose laboratory task performance is intact (Hill, 2004; Demetriou and colleagues, 2018). A clinician can write that difficulties can be masked by learned strategies in later life, so that high apparent functioning can conceal rather than refute support needs, citing DSM-5-TR (APA, 2022).
NICE CG142 directs all health and social care professionals to understand the potential discrepancy between intellectual functioning and adaptive functioning. Naming the discrepancy is not a diagnostic claim; it is guideline-directed practice. Where the discrepancy is present in a particular person, saying so in the report is what the guidance asks.
Concrete, specific, and function-anchored. A recommendation to allow extended time on written procedural tasks in low-stimulation environments is more useful and more honest than a recommendation for "reasonable adjustments as appropriate". A recommendation to preserve the person's own timing on complex, self-directed tasks and to protect against externally imposed interruption windows during those tasks is usable by the employer or the court. General recommendations produce general responses.
Crude functioning labels. Inference from the person's presentation on the day of assessment to global capacity. Silence about the burnout endpoint when the profile suggests it is a risk. Claims that the person's productivity in a domain of interest is evidence that they can sustain the same productivity in domains without interest.
A clinician who does not want to name a new construct in a report can still write the underlying facts the PNP captures: strengths and difficulties frequently intertwine; the same trait is context-dependent; monotropism offers a mechanism for the interest-based pattern of attention; twice-exceptionality is a real precedent for describing profiles rather than diagnosing them. Those clauses do not require the PNP to be adopted. They require the field's own existing literature to be reflected in reports that end up in institutional hands.
A clinician does not need to promote a construct to write accurately. The vocabulary already exists. Using it changes what the employer, the panel, or the court can then do with the report. The Polymathy paper's Version 2.0 collects the citations; this note collects the practical guidance.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.