Edward Norton has a warning for Hollywood: stop turning neurodivergence into a trend. Speaking on Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, the actor pushed back against what he sees as an industry and culture-wide habit of romanticizing conditions like autism, arguing that the impulse to claim a label as a personality trait or a superpower does a disservice to people who actually live with real, diagnosed conditions.
Norton traced the problem back to tech culture before turning his attention to entertainment.
“I feel like Silicon Valley has done a lot of cool things and a lot of really negative things to our society,” he said. “One of the ones that I find kind of aggravating is what I would call the romanticization of like the idea of being on the spectrum, right? You get all these people who are just basically a[]sholes wanting to credit that to them being on the spectrum.”
“It’s like, you’re not on the spectrum. Like, you know, stop it. And it’s like, don’t do that. Don’t casually write off all your bad behavior. And and also don’t casually try to claim as a superpower a thing that for a lot of people is a real thing, right?”
He extended the same skepticism to the trend of self-diagnosing and labeling everyday quirks as clinical conditions, including OCD.
“I think OCD is another thing lots of people just like to say it. I’m a neat freak,” he said, adding that he resists pathologizing normal variation in behavior. Norton argued that many of these traits are simply patterns of human behavior rather than disorders.
Host Dax Shepard agreed, saying, “They are words we invented like 25 years ago and we added them to the DSM and we’re acting like it means bipedal like it’s a real thing we could measure and observe. We I don’t think it’s that. I think we are getting more and more good at recognizing patterns of behavior in humans.”
Despite his hesitance to self-label, Norton praised shows that portray neurodivergence with honesty rather than spectacle, singling out Love on the Spectrum.
“The most beautiful wonderful show. I love it and I think I love the celebration of it. I love that while both observing people with with real divergence, real conditions, whatever, just saying the universality of of love, of relationships, it’s just so great.”
