Here’s how ridiculous this country’s obsession with ADHD has become. I’ve got it, I take medication for it every day, I believe I would not be able to do my job – or indeed any job – had I not got a diagnosis seven years ago and I consider that to have been one of the most transformative experiences of my life.
Yet, I still catch myself complaining that everyone’s got a bloody excuse these days, sneering at people who tell me they’re “sure” they’ve got ADHD too and tutting that nobody can handle the normal stresses of life and work anymore.
ADHD has become synonymous with a work-shy, snowflakey, TikTok-addicted, identity-starved generation who think every bad feeling warrants a label and every label warrants considerable allowances. That assessment, I know very well, is wildly inaccurate – but it is unnervingly easy to absorb the toxic narrative around it, glaze over the reality and stop taking its range of debilitating consequences seriously.
That is about to get a lot worse with the news that Health Secretary Wes Streeting is launching an independent review into the “overdiagnoses” of conditions such as ADHD and autism, and mental health conditions like anxiety and depression, which are keeping people out of work and on benefits.
Record numbers of young people are leaving the workforce or are taking long-term sick leave, which he believes is related to a rise in diagnoses for these conditions. The obvious solution? Diagnose fewer of them! I’m sure that will end the “cycle of worklessness” in which this country finds itself trapped!
Except overdiagnosis is not the problem. If ADHD, at least, was overdiagnosed (and more people prescribed the stimulants I’m on) then surely we would have a hyperproductive workforce, instead of one he believes is disproportionately claiming PIP.
Getting a diagnosis for a condition like this – which is necessary in order to have a fighting chance at receiving the kind of support and treatment to help people achieve their potential and crack on at work – is incredibly difficult, draining and in many postcodes in this country means joining waiting lists that are over a decade long.
Streeting’s review is a distraction intended to placate the usual right-wingers whingeing about benefit scroungers and pointing out that “everybody gets distracted”, and fails those people who do have conditions that affect their capacity to work. And yes, in both a more stressful world and a more compassionate one, where we understand more about the brain than ever before, that is more of us than it used to be.
The absence of diagnoses for people seeking them out, the absence of resources available to schools and families and workplaces to identify diagnostic traits and the absence of support for people who are suffering are the real problems and what really keeps people out of work.
There are always going to be self-diagnosed fantasists, and those who take the piss and don’t believe they need to work. But most people want to have a fulfilling, productive and structured working life and are desperate – really and truly desperate – to get on the right path.
The people who most suffer and who are most left behind in this broken system are those without the tools to do so, or people around them to provide structure and support. Which means money and social class are inextricably connected here, and why it is no coincidence that 25 per cent of prisoners have ADHD.
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Lots of people don’t have the same opportunities to advocate for themselves as, say, a middle-class journalist like me who has faced no real disadvantages. Which means it’s far too easy to see a condition like this as the trendy malady du jour and overlook its severe implications for the people it punishes the most.
Streeting may win the approval of those who declare themselves fans of “common sense” approaches and who are championing the mass return to the office. But he has trivialised the legitimate struggles of millions who need support, not sympathy.
And given there has been no mention of how he might provide that support, how he might improve referrals for ADHD and autism assessments or overhaul NHS mental health services or the very practical ways he might get people “back to work”, it is hard not to see this “review” as pure politics with no promise to improve our health, or the economy’s health, at all.
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