Majority in UK now ‘self-identify’ as neurodivergent

Post Reply New Topic

A majority of Britons may now consider themselves neurodivergent, meaning they have a condition such as autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia, according to a leading psychologist.

Francesca Happé, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, said reduced stigma around these conditions had led more people both to seek medical diagnoses and to self-diagnose.

She said: “There’s a lot more tolerance, which is good — particularly among my children’s generation, who are late teens and early adults, where people are very happy to say ‘I’m dyslexic’, ‘I’m ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder]’.”

Happé said there was a risk, however, that behaviour that would have been thought of only as “a bit of eccentricity” in the past has now been labelled with a diagnosis.

She said: “Most of the science around conditions like ADHD and autism suggest they are on a continuum and where you put the boundary is a clinical judgment. But whether we have now come too far down the dimension to something we would have called a personality type — or a bit of eccentricity — and we are now giving that a medical term, whether that’s helpful or not is a discussion we need to have.”

Happé is among the experts interviewed in a new series, The Autism Curve, which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4, starting on Monday, and which explores why autism diagnoses have risen sharply in recent years.

In 2021 a study found a 787 per cent jump in the number of diagnoses between 1998 and 2018 in the UK, while the estimated number of children who have autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has risen from one in 2,500 children 80 years ago to one in 36.

“Once you take autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and all the other ways that you can developmentally be different from the typical, you actually don’t get many typical people left. That is going to change society, but not in a bad way.”

Happé, who was appointed CBE in 2021 for her services to the study of autism, is herself dyslexic, but was not diagnosed as a child.

Like many parents, she made the discovery about herself only while seeing her child being diagnosed with dyslexia. “When we first went to the speech and language therapist [for my daughter], there are all kinds of exercises you are supposed to do — for example, helping her hear the difference between two things, and I couldn’t do them,” Happé recalled. “I had exactly the same blind spots as her.”

She added that a diagnosis can bring benefits. Many schools will not be able to receive additional funding to support students with special educational needs unless they have one. It can also help children access care more broadly. An unnamed clinician is quoted in the programme as saying: “I’d call a child a zebra if it got them the services they needed.”

Additionally, Happé said, a diagnosis can help people communicate their needs in social settings, and cited the example of an autistic woman who used to have to spend ten minutes in restaurants explaining why she was ordering plain pasta with nothing on it. “Now she can just say: ‘I’m autistic. I have sensory issues and I’m very particular about food,’” Happé said.

In The Autism Curve, Joshua Stott, a professor of ageing and clinical psychology based in the ADAPT Lab at University College London, said: “Very occasionally we would come up against someone who had experienced various forms of cognitive difference throughout their life and it became apparent that some of these people were autistic.

“People had assumed they had dementia because what was happening to them in many cases was they were losing their social supports as they got older, becoming more isolated, and suddenly some of difficulties became more apparent.”

Happé added: “You see people coming in for a first diagnosis of autism in their seventies. They have often had a good job that worked to their strengths and maybe a supportive partner who was their social brain, and one of those things gives, such as the partner dies or they retire, and [they] become isolated. The other route is a grandchild gets diagnosed and everyone in the family starts reading around autism and they go: ‘Oh, that’s grandad too.’ ”

The Autism Curve airs on BBC Radio 4 from Monday to Friday at 1.45pm. It is also available on BBC Sounds

This is also probably right wing propaganda. It has the effect that autists are no different.

Yup, it's another culture war front. The right wing media has been trying to undermine neurodivergence for some time, running frequent stories about overdiagnosis, complaining about special treatment in schools for children with diagnoses and generally subtly planting the notion that everyone is somewhat neurodivergent and therefore no-one deserves social care for spectrum disorders.

It's depressing in its predictability.

This is also probably right wing propaganda. It has the effect that autists are no different.