I caught up with this on iPlayer last night, and would recommend it:
Some of our political leaders - mainly in Reform and the Tories - would have it that ADHD is not real.
It most certainly is. The ADHD mind has more neuronal connections than the neurotypical mind. There is nothing wrong with that. It just means that ADHD brains are busier than most people's.
This is not a disorder, although it can require treatment when it causes stress.
The fact that it has very clearly survived through natural selection shows that there is an adaptive advantage to having people with ADHD in our communities, as there are advantages to also having people with autism, and those who have both, which has been recognised to be a possibility for more than a decade now.
Neither condition needs a cure, because there is none, although some with these conditions do need help to integrate into a society that is not designed for them.
What is required is that the majority, who are neurotypical, understand that there is a natural bifurcation in the human population that means that not everyone in our society thinks in the same way, which is a strength and not a weakness.
Chris Packham is an excellent champion for such people, having autism himself.
Politicians who claim that these conditions are a problem to be solved should watch this programme, and accept that those with them have rights, including the right to be who they are in school, work, and society at large, without fear of discrimination.
As the programme made very clear, this issue of acceptability and understanding is the real issue for many with these conditions. The fear of rejection that current prejudices create imposes a massive toll on many with such conditions, which Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, Kemi Badenoch and others have sought to exacerbate. Their failure to recognise the value in diversity is staggering.
My sympathies are with all who have, and are, suffering as a result, and all who will suffer in that way unless we do something to challenge the real problem we have in our society, which is the ignorance of right-wing politicians.
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It’s not a “bifurcation”, it’s a spectrum 🙂
Wrong.
It is a bifurcation.
There is a spectrum amongst those who have the condition, but not amongst the whole population. Neurotypical people are not on the spectrum.
I’m not sure you’re right, Richard. Many so-called neurotypical people show neurodivergent characteristics to a minor extent. Very few human characteristics are binary; even for characteristics such as blue eyes some eyes are more blue than others. Why should neurodivergence be different?
Experts seem to think it is. I am simply saying what experts are concluding. That there are some similarities of experience or behaviour on occassion does not prove a spectrum. It suggests some common experiences, not why there are fundamental differences.
Are you sure? Almost every feature of biology defies simple categorisation. Even something as seemingly clear as species or sex.
Sure about what?
There is a massive body of literature about this now. Of course it is open to change, but that neurotypical and diverse brains are not the same seems fairly certain now. The wiring is, quite literally, different. Isn’t that unsurprising?
@Kim SJ Everyone will have traits typical of autism, but not enough of them to be autistic, just like everyone will score on the Robert D Hare checklist for psychopathy, but not enough to be a psychopath. Nothing annoys autistic people more than the phrase “aren’t we all a little autistic?”
I agree, and understand that.
I think both you and Kim have a point. A specialist doctor needs to see if the differences have an impact on everyday life both at home and at work or study. This means there is a threshold, and it occurred to me after my diagnosis that having difficulties but not meeting the threshold would be harsh. However, neurodiverse brains are measurably different, so you can’t be ‘a bit adhd’ even though neurotypical people can be forgetful for example. Maybe if we looked at brains more, that would help people with milder forms get some support.
Brilliant and sensitive films by Mr Packham, and so very timely as you say. I found them very moving and illuminating, and was struck by the overlaps between conditions. I don’t have dyslexia, but some of the difficulties described affect me and my kin. Lovely to see the communication with families and friends resulting from the films made by participants. The emotional impact of these conditions is not much talked about, but being able to speak about neurodiversity and be appreciated for who you are is invaluable to those of us who find the round holes of life impossible to fit into. Sadly, shame and hiding are all too common. Lovely to see celebration and understanding.
Thanks
And as I understand it, every person with autism, ADHD, AuDHD (both) and other neurodiverse characteristcs experiences them differently, and for many they do not create difficulties: they can also be a superpower.
I defer to those with more expertise. Sometimes it’s hard to reject one’s lived experience.
Look at those replies.
I did… hence my deference. 😉
🙂
https://theconversation.com/everyone-isnt-a-little-bit-autistic-heres-why-this-notion-is-harmful-256129
Very good.
As is the embedded video.
The Studies show podcast spent an hour on autism last month. It’s well referenced as can be seen from the show notes.
https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-71-the-autism-epidemic
Disclosure: I’m related by marriage to one of the researchers
I will listen, later. There are videos to make first of all.
Thanks. 🙂
Having neurotypicals, and those with ADHD, autism, and both in my family, I concur that it is a bifurcation, or maybe trifurcation, not a spectrum. That said, neurotypicals can have some autistic traits (perhaps learned from autistic parents). But, hey, spectrum or bifurcation is perhaps not so important as recognising that people have different neurological traits, which is good, and not making life difficult for the minority by assuming they are the same as you are.
These minority neurological traits have survived and prospered through millennia of evolution so they clearly provide some benefit.
Look at it like eye colour. People have different eye colours. We expect it. We don’t “other” people because they have different eye colour. We should not “other” people with different neurological characteristics, with different ways of seeing the world.
Humans are a social animal. Were not just individuals. We live in a society. Some are good at some things others at other things. We need a diversity of characteristics for society to work and thrive.
But remember, it is not long ago that there was almost total intolerance of left handed people.
I had a business partner who was obviously left handed who had been forced to elarn to write with her right hand. Her hand writing was appalling; almost as bad as mine.
The problem is that certain groups have to “other” groups that don’t fit into the way their world needs to be, perhaps in order to fit in with an ideology like markets are rational, or that there is no such thing as society. Non-neurotypical people are terribly inconvenient.
I am starting also to believe that neuro typical people are inconvenient for the economic system that we have. We made decisions at 16-18 and 15 to 20 years later we know we want off. For young adults who have zero financial security, they can not. They don’t have that freedom. They feel trapped and know that others are pulling the strings.
Much to agree with
It’s not just right-wing politicians who don’t care to notice it.
Lots of people with autism will be losing their PIP if the government has its way, and will therefore lose their means of getting to whatever work they have managed to get.
Agreed
Interestingly enough a symptom of ADHD is frantic activity that achieves little or nothing.
Sounds like being a politician…………
Thanks for that Richard. I actually recorded that and the one that follows, so look forward to watching it. A friend of mine realised quite by chance that he has ADHD and since being properly diagnosed his whole life has changed dramatically.
Neurotypical, bifurcation, neuro-divergent, ADHD and all the other words from the English language that are used to describe conditions some people have – you can get lost in a spaghetti of words; you loose sight of one fact that cannot be disputed.
You are talking about people, living people who came into this world the same way we all did.
They all live on earth that collectively form humanity.
Classifying people creates the possibility of those, who for their own reasons want to assign blame, to create an outsider group – the ‘others’ – and in so doing make them the target for hatred and blame. To me, that is the inhuman act.
And yes, there are some in my family who are neuro-divergent.
But no realising and recognising people are neurodivergent means people do not get the consideration they are due.
Yes, I absolutely agree. That recognition should trigger an obligation on the part of our society. My comment was really about what is the base situation, all else follows…..
During my MBA of 2014, I got into studying ‘knowledge management’ or ‘KM’ as it is known – and this set me off into all sorts of subject areas.
One of those areas was human ‘cognition’ (in psychology I think) – the mental process of acquiring information and knowledge because I was looking at systems to reinforce team learning and sharing within complex projects.
What I found was that cognition was extremely sensitive to contexts and conditions because people also learn differently, very diversely indeed and often need a mix of tactics to learn. Learning can also be accompanied by feelings such as fear or elation, both having consequences (lack of confidence/too confident, rushed).
My recommendations to managers in my dissertation were:
1. Be there, never underestimate the value of spending time with your staff or the team.
2. See the value of pedagogy – it has informed human learning for centuries – because it works.
3. Accept that your team members will all need different things from you – try to adapt and provide them in order to get the output you or the task needs.
4. There is no such thing as a stupid question at all. Fear should not accompany learning.
5. Mix methods of knowledge/information/process retention – writing and also ‘rich pictures’ (graphics, flow charts) to help cognition of tasks and objectives.
6. Reinforce the positivity of learning all of the time – it is a continuous process.
I find it shocking that there is a lot of stuff in my work place about neuro diversity that does not focus on the cognition bit – its effects on ‘learning the organisation’ or its various functions.
The current love affair with working from home is causing huge issues and I do not think organisations have caught up with how to close the gaps in teams who are now more often split up and are seldom in the same space for long.
I missed being taught to read at school as I was bumped up one year at primary school. This meant I missed learning to read at school. My mother got my grand mother to teach me to read, from books. I have realised that I identify words by the shape and out line in addition I do not say the word sub verbally. This means I can read very fast, I can read about 100 pages an hour, I once I read the whole Lord of the Ring book in 9 hours, with one comfort break.
A couple of there quirks:-
In a stressful situation I can some times organise my argument while unconsciously speaking.
Twice I have been thinking while driving my car and suddenly reailised I had no memory of driving. That really shook me and have tried not to do it again.
I am not sure those prove ADHD thinking, or autism. But I am not an expert, of course. And I know the autism joke, which is that when you have met a person with autism, you have met just one person with autism, because every person’s experience is different.
I missed learning to write in “joined up” writing in school as I was off sick. I think it was probably when I had measles (had to lie in bed with the curtains drawn and wasn’t allowed to read AT ALL. So boring!). Consequently hardly anyone can read my handwriting – even my husband struggles! And I do too! Learning to type was a godsend (though I never mastered the numbers and special characters – still have to look for them). Great upside of that was I was able to teach my daughters how to touch type, which they were very happy to do, and it certainly paid dividends when they went to Uni!
Rather off topic there! But I wondered if any of you have watched The Good Doctor, streaming on TV. The early ones are best at describing the character’s autism – at least they seem to be good to me, but then what do I know?! Just checked where to find them currently, here’s what Google’s AI says:
“You can stream the early episodes of “The Good Doctor” on Now TV, Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Video with Ads, and for free with ads on Channel 4. You can also buy the series as a download on Amazon Video, Sky Store, or Apple TV. ”
I always found the series interesting & fun, and became quite attached to many of the characters in it. I have time to watch a LOT of TV since I became almost completely bed bound – one of the few upsides to that. (rolls eyes and laughs – I’m hooked on Chicago Med too)
Thanks
I sometimes wonder if the current Right Wing interest in neurodivergancy is something more than looking for scapegoats, i.e, something to blame for increasing school budgets. I wonder if it is the fact that high-functioning autistic people can be an absolute pain in the backside if you are trying to do something wrong or dishonest, and they are worried about having to deal with them. The sense of right and wrong can be very strong in the neurodivergent, with little allowance for the grey areas most politicians and corporations like to lurk in. Look at Greta Thurnberg, or even Chris Packham. They are persistent, don’t get intimidated easily, and often aren’t materially driven. I suspect that many a political activist in this country, focusing on equality in particular, is on the spectrum. Just my musings on the matter. As the husband of one neurodivergent and father of another, I have often been told I am infuriatingly neurotypical, and have lots of experience being called out for the weird behaviour of so called normal people.
🙂
I think you are right.
I recognise some of your life experience, but with a twist.
Thanks for your enlightened thoughts on this Richard. We have had our daughter diagnosed recently with autism and our eldest daughter we suspect has ADHD and is having problems at school because of it.
Getting a diagnosis of neurodivergence is not easy now, given parents are now more aware of it and there is a big shortage of qualified people to make diagnosis in the NHS. I suspect this is because mental health practitioners have been flooding out of the NHS for some years now and the autism criteria are wider than before too. There is a very good program called a the Autism Curve on BBC Sounds which explains this in a fair and even handed way.
We got our daughter’s diagnosis by using the right to choose system to find a private clinic miles away in Essex that contract to the NHS. This meant the NHS paid for it. If we had gone through the long road of NHS internal diagnosis, instead of taking about 6 months from GP referral it may have taken 6 years like one of the other parents we know. Private assessments are now the most realistic way to get a child’s needs understood more quickly, and they cost £1000-2000. Not something many can afford.
People who think it’s too easy diagnosed have absolutely no idea how difficult the system is. Being diagnosed as autistic requires a multidisciplinary team. In our case a paediatrician, speech and language therapists and so on. Similar for ADHD. A GP cannot diagnose it, and lies by the likes of Farage really don’t help people going through this situation.
I suspect the large rise in diagnosis is down to a few different things, but one particular issue is the lack of sufficient teaching staff in schools. Budgets have been cut to the bone, and so now there is a fight to even get a child’s SEN needs recognised, let alone specialist provisions. Perhaps with more support for all children following the big mental health impact of the pandemic, there would be less children in need of SEN support and thus less parents seeking further help and diagnosis.
In the name of efficiency, getting a special school place now involves months or years of fighting with the local authority to get your child assessed with an EHCP and then a painful process to update it each year to ensure the child’s needs are met.
Just like many things in Britain, we spend a lot of time fighting blame, signposting around to make it someone else’s problem, and arse covering rather than actually dealing with problems. The SEN system is utterly broken, and it takes well informed, sharp elbowed middle class parents to navigate it at all. Anyone vulnerable or who struggles with communication, (like say an autistic person) is really going to really struggle to get people to listen.
Hi Chris,
My apologies for taking time to get to your comment, but some comments demand that I take time to think about the right thing to say, and how I consider the subject, and yours was one of those.
You touch on a great many issues of concern to me.
Firstly, I am glad that your daughter has a diagnosis. I am aware of some of the complications around the issue, most especially if the state is being relied on, and what the alternative costs are.
You and I also appreciate some of the complexity around the process of diagnosis (or discovery, as I think many prefer to call it, because it is questionable as to whether this is a medical condition), but at the same time, do you think that more consideration should be given to self-diagnosis? I have little doubt that many of those who have ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and other neurodivergent conditions are aware, in the majority of cases, that they are “different“ from a very young age. Just as I discovered that our younger son was left-handed within hours of his birth, because it was his left thumb that went into his mouth, so many of the characteristics of these conditions do become apparent when children are quite young. By the time children reach secondary school age, I imagine that any process needs to put powerful weight on the child’s own perceptions, if, of course, they are able to offer them, and I am aware that some are not.
What I thought to be my first real experience with an autistic child came when I was in the sixth form, and volunteered at a special school, one afternoon a week, as a way of getting out of playing rugby. I remember being asked to work with a girl aged seven or eight. I suspect that she was considered a good person for a young volunteer to work with, because she was undemanding in some ways, looked completely normal, but was totally unable to verbally communicate, and yet her joy when taking part in repetitive gameplay, and most especially being pushed on a swing, was very obvious, and rewarding if you were a 17-year-old wishing to think that you might be doing something useful with your afternoon. I remember thinking, even then, how hard it must have been for her to be locked in without being able to communicate clearly what she wanted. Although the vast majority of people with autism are not in that situation, I’ve never forgotten the fact that communication is profoundly difficult for many people, and regrettably, much of what our government does is only making that more difficult, with bigger barriers to achieving this goal being created all too often, including preventing much face-to-face human interaction that is, with a little sensitivity, able to interpret what a person is trying to communicate in a way that an online form never will.
I also think that there is a particularly important issue considering late diagnosis of these conditions, which Chris Packham highlighted in his programme earlier this week. This is a real issue, especially with regard to women, where so many went undiagnosed because it was simply not accepted that girls could be autistic for a very long time, and they successfully learned to mask their condition, but then had to live with all the consequences of not having the help and recognition (the latter very often being the most important thing) that they needed.
A number of thoughts occur to me as a consequence.
The first is a very strong suspicion that the neoliberal political system is deeply antagonistic to neurodivergence. The closer that we all are to being little round pegs that can be put into little round holes, where we can be kept happy with bread and circuses, the happier our masters are. The last thing that they want is anyone who does not think in a standard way, most especially if they use that ability to challenge the neoliberal status quo, which is set up as the great goal of economic policy. I seriously wonder whether this is the reason why it is made so hard to secure a diagnosis, and why that process is so dramatically under-resourced.
There is, of course, the possibility that diagnosis is also under-resourced to reduce the amount that schools, and so local authorities or other funding agencies, have to spend on SEND issues. The first speciality that I took on when becoming a school governor around 40 years ago was SEN (the D was not in the mix at that time), and I have retained my interest ever since. I profoundly regret the fact that the government does not take such education seriously.
There is also a possibility that the limited resources provided for the diagnosis or discovery of neurodivergence is deliberate, with the intention of implying that this is so rare that only limited resources need to be provided. If neoliberalism wants to imply that the neurotypical mind is not just normal, but is what is desirable, and I think that is the case, then those promoting that ideology are bound to want to understate the number of those who might be neurodivergent. It is in their interest to pretend that this non-typicality is so rare that those who are neurodivergent can be treated as being exceptional, meaning that their positions need not be considered. I would prefer not to think that this is their aim, but I also think it is likely that it is, even if estimates suggest that at least one in seven people in our society might be neurodivergent in some way.
Finally, with regard to this series of thoughts, it is important to note that neurodiverse thought is a very obvious challenge to neoliberalism. Neoliberal philosophy is perverse, and even paradoxical, in promoting the idea that competition can provide all required answers to the best allocation of resources, and yet it has simultaneously been used to oppress all alternative schools of economic thought, at least in most universities. It is now believed that around 92% of all economists working in universities subscribe to neoliberal views, and the prospect of anyone now securing an appointment in such a department is incredibly low if they do not do so. Total monopolistic control of economic teaching is, therefore, their desire.
That means that any challenge to their rigid and unrealistic views is repugnant to them, and such a challenge is almost inevitably going to come from those who are neurodivergent because, by their very nature, neurodivergent people challenge accepted patterns of thought, and can create alternatives in a way that most neurotypical people cannot. To deny resources to the education of neurodivergent people is, then, consistent with the oppressive demands of neoliberal thinking, and so neoliberal politics, which is what all the UK‘s mainstream political parties (excepting maybe the Greens, Plaid Cymru and parts of the SNP) promote. Neurodivergence is where the challenge neoliberalism might come from, which is why neoliberals are frightened of it.
Thanks for triggering these ideas.
Richard
PS This rsponse is now being published as a blog post in its own right.
Thanks Chris. 🙂
I looked up that BBC radio 4 show.
There are 5 episodes here:
“The Autism Curve”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m002bswl
I must get to this…
Interesting discussion. I have a neurological condition (epilepsy) which has a similar profile to autism in many ways.
First, you either have it and you have symptoms, or you don’t have it. Is that a bifurcation?
Secondly, If you do have epilepsy, you will experience it uniquely, yet the symptoms and their effect on people will be similar across the whole population. Victims (people who have epilepsy) have been stigmatised throughout history, which leads me to wonder how long it is before the newly empowered fascists carry on the tradition.
I am very familiar with epilepsy. A close relative has it, and I had to learn to help mmanage it when quite young. I hope yours is managed.
It’s so important to reframe how we talk about ADHD and autism—not as deficits, but as variations in human cognition. Your point about evolutionary advantages really highlights why diversity in thinking benefits everyone.
It’s refreshing to see ADHD framed not as a deficit but as a different way of thinking that society hasn’t caught up with yet. The idea that integration should be a societal responsibility, not an individual burden, is so important—and one that’s often overlooked in political debates.
I particularly liked your reference to natural selection. The idea of it not being weeded out by ns. It being normal though less common.
I’d not thought about that before.
Personally I like being, as my daughter once expressed, weird.
You should be!
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