As the world burns: the impact of crisis on neurodivergent consent

Article Two of The Consent Trilogy

You know the feeling before you can name it. It arrives in the chest: a tightening, a low hum of wrongness carried into the day without quite knowing why. The news is on. The bills are on the table. Your phone has already delivered seventeen things needing a response before you've finished your first cup of tea.

For most people, this is simply the texture of modern life: unpleasant, exhausting, but manageable. They adapt. They numb. They scroll a little further.

For neurodivergent people, this is something else. The neurodivergent nervous system does not numb easily. It registers with a precision that much of the current world sees as a problem. The overload is not imagined. It is accurate perception of a world in crisis and the cost of that accuracy is paid for in the person's body, and in the slow erosion of genuine choice.

This is an article about what is being destroyed.

Article One described a gentle world built from neurodivergent experience outward, where the conditions for genuine consent were structural and ordinary. Hold that world in mind as you read this one.

This article looks at four interlocking pressures on that world: ecological collapse, economic precarity, emboldened racism, and the AI-driven information environment. I want to be clear from the outset that these four are not presented in a hierarchy of importance, and they don't land on everyone in the same combination. Some readers will recognise themselves in only one of the sections below. Others will recognise themselves in all four, stacked on top of each other. Neither experience is more or less valid.

This article is simply trying to name some of the different terrain different neurodivergent people are standing on right now.

The same caveat from Article One applies here, more than ever. Neurodivergent people experience neurodivergence in enormously different ways, and nothing here can capture that range. I am one neurodivergent person, writing from research with a specific and limited group of neurodivergent adults. This is one perspective, not a representative account. Those living at the intersection of neurodivergence with race, class, gender, migration status, and chronic illness carry burdens this article cannot fully hold, and the pressures below compound harder with every additional layer of marginalisation.

Article Three will offer a framework for responding to what follows.

This article names the fire.

What the Gentle World Needs

Genuine consent needs a nervous system regulated enough to reach the reflective, values-based part of the brain. It needs time to process information at a pace the mind can absorb. It needs real alternatives, so a yes is freely given rather than coerced by the absence of a no. It needs access to inner wisdom: the quiet internal signal of what we actually want, audible only when we're settled enough to hear it.¹ It also needs the capacity and capability to express and communicate those wants and needs, with a curious person meeting that expression with compassion and understanding.

The pressures below are not separate misfortunes. They are converging forces, each stripping away one or more of these conditions.

Ecological Collapse: When the Body Cannot Find Safety

The body scans for safety through the senses. What it perceives tells the nervous system whether it's safe enough to relax into genuine engagement, or whether it must stay braced.²

We are living through accelerating ecological breakdown: a destabilising climate, collapsing biodiversity, air that is measurably harmful to breathe.³ For neurodivergent people, who often process sensory information more intensely, this is foreground experience rather than background concern. Autistic people and highly sensitive people frequently report an acute physical response to environmental degradation, to polluted air and the absence of birdsong, that others may not consciously register.⁴

This produces a specific and crazy-making experience: knowing in the body that something is catastrophically wrong, while the world insists it's all under control and your response is disproportionate. Psychology has a name for the resulting distress, ecological grief or eco-anxiety, and research shows it lands hardest on those with greater environmental awareness and those already carrying a higher baseline of nervous system activation.⁵

A person in a chronic state of ecological threat is a person whose nervous system sits chronically outside their own window of tolerance, making decisions not from genuine reflection but from ambient dread.⁶ The ecological crisis doesn't just threaten the planet. It threatens the neurological conditions genuine consent requires.

Economic Precarity: When Survival Consumes Choice

In 2013, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir showed that scarcity of money, time, and cognitive resources doesn't just make life harder, it consumes the mental bandwidth good decision-making requires.⁷ People are not making poor choices because they are less capable; they are making constrained choices because the cognitive load of managing not-enough leaves little capacity for anything else.

This has direct implications for consent: a person under sustained financial stress is a person whose capacity for genuine informed consent is compromised before any specific decision is even presented.

Neurodivergent people face structural factors that make this precarity more common: persistently low employment rates for autistic adults,⁸ lower and less stable earnings associated with ADHD,⁹ and the administrative burden of navigating benefits systems that demand exactly the sustained executive function many neurodivergent people find hardest to access.¹⁰ The "masking tax," the cumulative cost of performing neurotypicality, leaves many people depleted in ways that are completely invisible to the systems asking them to make a decision.¹¹

When you cannot afford to say no, when housing, support, or your children's welfare depends on compliance, the consent you give is not free. It is extracted. This is not new, and the cost of living crisis has only made it more visible.¹² And neurodivergent people are paying more of the price.

Emboldened Racism: When the World Itself Signals Danger

This pressure sits alongside the other three, not above or below them. Monitoring bodies including the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism and national hate crime statistics across multiple countries have documented a rise in reported racist and xenophobic incidents in recent years.¹³ This is not a claim that racism is new. It is an observation that its public expression has become more visible, more organised, and more normalised in many places at once, amplified by the same algorithmic environment discussed below.

For people of colour, this landscape is not abstract news. It is a nervous system experience. Researchers describe race-based traumatic stress: a recognised response to racial discrimination that produces hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, and physiological arousal closely resembling post-traumatic stress.¹⁴ Encountering racism, directly or through a constant stream of racialised hostility online and in the news, keeps the nervous system scanning for threat in exactly the way that closes down access to the reflective brain genuine consent depends on.

For neurodivergent people of colour, this compounds with existing burdens rather than sitting apart from them. Many already carry the cognitive cost of masking neurodivergent traits; many also carry the older, additional cost of monitoring how they are perceived racially, adjusting behaviour, tone, and presentation to reduce risk in institutions, workplaces, and public spaces.¹⁵ Two forms of vigilance, running simultaneously, on top of whatever else the day requires.

It is important for us all to be aware of the impact of racism. A white neurodivergent person managing economic precarity and ecological dread is carrying real, legitimate weight. A neurodivergent person of colour navigating racism alongside those same pressures is carrying more, not because their nervous system works differently, but because the world is asking more of it. Naming this clearly is part of taking neurodivergent consent seriously.

It also highlights how different contexts impact different neurodivergent people.

The AI and Information Crisis: When Reality Becomes Unreadable

The internet, as it currently exists, is not a neutral space for exchanging information. It's architecture designed, at a systemic level, to exploit the dysregulated nervous system.¹⁶ Algorithmic content delivery is optimised for engagement, and engagement is most reliably produced by threat, outrage, and novelty, keeping the nervous system in a state of low-level alert because that state generates revenue.¹⁷

For neurodivergent people with a strong drive towards information-gathering and pattern resolution, this environment is particularly compelling and particularly harmful: a nervous system chronically activated in pursuit of a resolution the algorithm is designed never to provide.¹⁸ For people managing impulse and reward regulation differences, it functions as a sophisticated impulse-exploitation machine.¹⁹

The rise of AI-generated content adds further instability to what can be known or trusted at all. Most of the digital systems that people now use to access healthcare, benefits, financial and legal information require consent to lengthy, complex, non-negotiable terms. The gap between the consent formally obtained and the consent genuinely given is vast; for people managing processing differences, it's a chasm.²⁰

When These Pressures Combine

None of these four pressures, the ecological, economic, racial or informational, is more fundamental than the others, and none is universal. Some readers will find that only one of these sections describes their life. Others will recognise all four, stacked on top of each other. The effect of that stacking does not just add to the cognitive load. It's multiplies the challenges associated with it.²¹

The person's window of tolerance narrows. The capacity for genuine reflection shrinks. The gap between the consent that has been asked for and the consent that can genuinely be given grows wider, while healthcare, social care, education, and employment continue to operate as though forms are being read, understood, and freely signed by willing participants.

What is being given, in most cases, is compliance: the path of least resistance, chosen not from agreement but from the absence of enough resource to do anything else.

The Weight That Was Already There

These pressures don't land on a clean slate. Many neurodivergent people were already carrying the cumulative effect of growing up in a world that repeatedly signalled: the way you are is wrong. Masking, performing a more acceptable, legible version of oneself, comes at a cost paid over years.²² Rates of trauma and post-traumatic stress are significantly higher in neurodivergent populations than in the general population, not because neurodivergent people are fragile, but because the world has consistently failed to provide the basic safety all nervous systems require.²³

Trauma narrows the window of tolerance further. It makes the fawn response, compliance to avoid conflict or harm, even more automatic and harder to interrupt.²⁴ It can make the internal signal of genuine preference very difficult to hear, because so many years of suppressing that signal in order to survive have made the quiet voice of inner wisdom very quiet indeed.

This is the baseline onto which the four pressures above land, different for every person, in different combinations, but rarely starting from zero.

What This Means for Practitioners

Many practitioners reading this are already trying to build something close to the gentle world within systems that measure contact time in minutes. The gap between what you know is needed and what the system allows you to provide is a form of moral injury, and it deserves to be acknowledged.²⁵

Understanding these pressures isn't separate from clinical work, it's the context in which a client arrives: already carrying some combination of ecological dread, economic precarity, racial vigilance, and information overload, and in which you're being asked to obtain meaningful consent and build genuine trust.

Naming and understanding the context that neurodivergent people experience every day is a step towards truly witnessing the fullness of their experiences. They may never have had the time or space to explore all the different aspects contributing to their overwhelm. They may feel disconnected, misunderstood and lost.

Practitioners who understand the context have a much better opportunity to create a different kind of space for neurodivergent people. One where they feel seen and understood, perhaps for the first time ever.

If you are a practitioner, coach or therapist, there is still time to take part in our research. To find out more and to take part visit: http://www.untangleroots.org/research

The Canary Is Still in the Mine

The neurodivergent person who cannot function in the open-plan office is telling us something about what the open-plan office does to everyone. The neurodivergent person in burnout from navigating systems not built for them is showing us, in amplified form, what those systems are doing to everyone who passes through them.²⁶

If we paid attention to that signal rather than pathologising it, we would have a real-time monitor of what our collective environment is doing to our collective capacity for genuine choice.

What This All Means

These are not primarily crises of individual psychology. They are collective conditions, systematically dismantling the ground genuine consent stands on, disproportionately borne by the people most sensitive to it and most exposed to it.

Naming this is not hopeless. It's the beginning of something foundational.

Article Three will offer a framework for understanding the cumulative weight placed on a neurodivergent individual's capacity for genuine consent by the state of the world around them.

Here we have explored the fire. Next we can begin to talk about what it takes to repair it: one session, one relationship, and one act of genuine consent at a time.

This is the second article in a three-part series. Article One, 'The Conditions for Consent,' imagines a gentle world built from neurodivergent experience outward. Article Three, 'Ecological Consent Load,' introduces a framework for understanding the cumulative impact of environmental conditions on the capacity for genuine consent.

**The author's PEACE framework, developed through qualitative research with neurodivergent adults, offers a practitioner-level response to the conditions described in this series. Find out more at: http://www.untangleroots.org

If you are a practitioner, coach or therapist, there is still time to take part in our research. To find out more and to take part visit: http://www.untangleroots.org/research

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