The story an industry tells itself about its own openness
Richie Barker, Sven Brodmerkel and Tonya Meyrick — at Deakin, Bond and RMIT — have published an analysis in Communication Research and Practice of how the advertising and design trade press writes about neurodiversity. Fifty-four articles from sixteen publications across Australia, the UK and the US, spanning 2019 to 2024, read closely for the narratives, metaphors and rhetorical strategies that recur.
Trade publications are a shrewd object of study. They are where a sector talks to itself — the place professional norms get made and circulated, and required reading within the industries they cover. And the volume grew substantially over the period, from six articles in 2019 to twenty-two in 2024, with thirty-two of the fifty-four being opinion pieces, most written by practitioners and advocates in the first person. This is not an outsider’s account of the creative industries. It is the industry’s own voice, at a moment of rapidly rising attention.
What the authors find is a discourse that celebrates neurodivergent difference warmly and consistently, acknowledges the difficulties honestly, and then places responsibility for resolving those difficulties on the individual rather than the organisation. They call it paradoxical inclusion: difference is recognised, and the work of navigating it is handed back to the person identified as different. Practitioners appear as valuable creative assets and as at-risk workers simultaneously, celebrated for how they think and constrained by structures that remain rigid and normatively neurotypical — with the second half rarely named as something the industry might change.
A superpower granted on the condition that it stays profitable
The dominant metaphor is the superpower, appearing in thirteen of the fifty-four articles. It arrives as liberation — a reframing away from deficit toward hidden advantage, often narrated as personal transformation, in which traits once experienced as obstacles are recognised as strengths.
The authors take it seriously enough to show what it does. It establishes what they call conditional inclusion: the practitioner is welcome insofar as their difference converts into productivity the industry values. Attention to detail, thinking differently, creative problem-solving — these are admitted. The rest of the experience, the sensory load, the executive difficulty, the need for quiet or for clarity, has no place in a superpower narrative, because that narrative presumes what will be revealed is an asset rather than a need. Practitioners are invited to bring their whole selves to work, on the understanding that the whole self will turn out to be commercially useful.
Practitioners quoted in the corpus see this clearly, and their scepticism is the most valuable material in the paper. One rejects the framing directly, saying they are not a superhero but a person with complex needs. Another observes that these are only superpowers if the person is given roles where their approach can actually work — relocating the condition from the individual to the organisation in a single sentence. A third worries that neurodiversity might become trendy, and that the challenges will get lost behind the celebration. The critique of the metaphor is already present inside the discourse; what is missing is any mechanism by which it changes anything.
Running alongside the superpower is the business case: inclusion presented as strategically advantageous, with warnings that the sector is bleeding talent and claims that neurodivergent practitioners are a competitive weapon. The authors note what this framing costs — evaluating inclusion by economic return rather than by rights or dignity leaves it hostage to changing business conditions. What is justified by profitability can be withdrawn when profitability changes.
The remaining themes read as the predictable consequences. Masking is described repeatedly, along with its toll — one practitioner attributing burnout directly to the emotional labour of sustained social performance. Disclosure is narrated as risky, with practitioners describing shame, and the belief that going public would have cost them a promotion. And burnout appears as a recognised feature of the work, with the trade press offering flexibility and simple steps in response.
The silence where the structural demand should be
Then the finding that carries the piece. Across fifty-four articles and six years of rapidly increasing coverage, the word “policy” appears in four — and only one of those discusses an actual policy supporting neurodivergent workers.
Sit with the proportion. An industry quadrupled its coverage of neurodiversity, platformed dozens of first-person accounts of masking, disclosure anxiety and burnout, established that inclusion is both a moral good and a competitive advantage, and in six years produced four mentions of formal policy. One practitioner names the absence directly, noting they have never worked anywhere that talked about a neurodiversity policy despite having worked in many places.
This is what makes the paper’s argument empirical rather than interpretive. It would be easy to characterise the discourse as insufficiently radical and leave it as a matter of tone. The policy count is not a matter of tone. It is a measurable absence at the exact point where a demand for structural change would have to appear, and it maps onto what the authors describe as a broader pattern in the sector’s diversity discourse: accessible entry points and ad hoc accommodations privileged over the structural transformation that formalised policy would require. Awareness rose steeply. The ask stayed personal.
Why the metric was never going to move
This piece sits directly beneath one from last week, and the two are worth reading together. That was Birkbeck’s third annual survey of neurodivergent employees: three years of tracking, psychological safety — the metric their own research identifies as decisive — unmoved, burnout high, and neurodivergent talent leaving conventional employment at a rate that made staying look like the irrational choice.
Here is the discourse layer underneath that data. Six years in which a creative sector told itself that inclusion is achieved when the neurodivergent individual discovers their superpower, adapts, and takes some simple steps — while the structures, cultural norms, informal recruitment practices and unspoken ideal of the socially fluent extroverted creative went almost entirely unexamined. The metric did not move because nothing in the narrative ever asked the organisation to move it.
The mechanism connecting the two is the thing to take away. A discourse that celebrates strengths and individualises difficulties is not a neutral or merely incomplete account — it actively produces the conditions the same discourse then reports as burnout, disclosure anxiety and masking. If your difference is welcome as a superpower, the parts of it that are not super must be concealed, which is masking; concealment is exhausting, which is burnout; and disclosure risks revealing that you were a person with needs rather than an asset, which is disclosure anxiety. The three themes the trade press documents are consequences of the frame the trade press promotes. And the way out is not a better metaphor. It is the thing that appeared four times in fifty-four articles.
Citations
Barker, R., Brodmerkel, S. & Meyrick, T. (2026) — Celebrated yet constrained: neurodiversity and the limits of inclusion in advertising and design trade press — Communication Research and Practice
Chatterjee, S. (2025) — ADHD as entrepreneurial neurodivergence: re-evaluating “ADHD superpowers”, revealing its connections with capitalism — Disability & Society
Branton, S. E., Villamil, A. M. & Reed, J. L. (2023) — Branding neurodiversity: a critical discourse analysis of communicative capitalism and change empowerment among neurodiversity workforce intermediaries — Journal of Public Relations Research
Pryke-Hobbes, A., Davies, J., Heasman, B. et al. (2023) — The workplace masking experiences of autistic, non-autistic neurodivergent and neurotypical adults in the UK — PLOS ONE
