What Good Mentoring of Neurodivergent People Actually Looks Like
Smith, A. B., Adams, E. G., Abercrombie, E., Bibi, N., Bottini, C. L. J., Brown, A. J., Cavalieri, C. N., Clauser, A. L., Duguid, M. C., Fowler-Finn, K. D., Hutchen, J., Leite Jardim, V., Rodriguez, C. S., Swab, B. M., & Varghese, S. (2026). Ten simple rules for mentoring and being mentored while neurodiverse. PLOS Computational Biology, 22(4), e1013917. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013917
Neurodivergent people, referring to those whose brains function outside culturally presumed “normal” ranges, including people with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, OCD, and many other profiles, bring real strengths to science and the workplace. Yet pressure to mask those identities, combined with environments designed for neurotypical people, drives disproportionately high rates of burnout, depression, and dropout among neurodivergent individuals. Smith and colleagues (2026), themselves a team of neurodiverse researchers and allies, set out to address that gap directly with a set of concrete, experience-grounded rules for mentoring across neurodiversity.
The ten rules cover ground ranging from the philosophical to the practical. The foundational shift is reorienting away from a pathological model toward a social model: neurodivergence is natural variation; disability is a product of environmental mismatch, not the person. Neurodivergent identity is often hidden, highly variable across people and days, and best accommodated by extending supports universally rather than waiting for self-disclosure. Ultimately, you don’t need to know who in the room is neurodivergent to start making the room work better for everyone.
The authors push back meaningfully against the impulse to commodify neurodivergent strengths, which is the idea that a detail-oriented person is valuable because they’re useful, rather than because they’re a person. They also address the often-overlooked situation of mentees working with neurodiverse mentors, offering four additional rules centered on resisting pathologizing, seeking shared goals, and advocating for oneself without losing the relationship.
Implications for Mentoring Programs
Programs should build universal accommodations in from the start which include multiple communication modes, clear deadlines, explicit norms around workspace behavior, rather than treating accommodation as reactive. Mentors should have written mentoring statements that signal neurodiverse-friendliness, and institutions need to move beyond legal compliance toward active, visible support.
Read the full article here
