UK government takes aim at ADHD/Autistic people
Louise
Epiphanies Host
Having already targeted trans people for persecution and government- backed pseudoscience to strip them of appropriate medical treatment, the UK government are using the same playbook to go after neurodivergent people - especially kids.
This was mentioned previously both here and on the Wes Streeting thread in Hell.
Basically despite recent and overwhelming scientific findings to the contrary, Streeting apparently doesn't like those results and so has appointed an alarming team to do him what looks suspiciously like a Cass style review on us - including the main person who horrifically damaged people with ME with his opinions on graded exercise.
As @chrisstiles said
And as I said
Well now it begins -
Streeting's hit squad just came back with an interim report which has been spun on the front page of The Times - the same newspaper that did the heavy lifting on spreading the persecution and smearing of trans people.
They know the overdiagnosis stuff is not true and that there's actually huge underdiagnosis because the services are under-resourced so all they've got is innuendo about 'incentivisation' and 'self diagnosis' and 'medicalisation of distress' - so basically all the dogwhistles for 'these people are putting it on and faking.'
It comes in the wake of a well known credentialled dinosaur ( apologies to dinosaurs) giving a woefully wrongheaded and out of date interview to the TES to attack late diagnosed Autistic people - especially women- and something notable about this was that the attack was taken up and spread by leading activists who persecute trans people and who have access to prestigious media platforms.
There is a significant overlap between autistic people and LGBT+ people- so there's been anti-autistic rhetoric in the anti-trans movement from the start - trying to say young trans people are 'just' autistic and trying to use prejudiced notions about autism to then strip their agency away from them to say they cant know their own gender.
But now it's got worse - and part of it seems to hang on the trans persecutors hatred of self-ID which they want to use to force trans people through discriminatory and damaging medical hoops to make life harder for them.
Because it's so hard and the waiting lists are so long to get a diagnosis if you're neurodivergent, a lot of people have to self-ID as they try to get access to help. So the chief anti-trans activists seem to have have seized on this too ( People like Helen Lewis and Kathleen Stock)
I'm honestly tired of this. I'm glad I backed trans people before their opponents really started coming for me too and I'm angry at the 'friends' who were taken in by them and especially at those who allowed these harmful bullying bigots to present themselves as 'feminists' and those who keep taking this line. I'm a woman - I'm not 'protected' - I'm attacked.
I dont know what these people are - they seem to hate autonomy and difference in others, or perhaps they're just social conservatives who want to bully things back to how they were in some imaginary golden age in their heads? When 'men were men and women were women' and autistic people were neither seen nor heard from because we were in institutions or forced to shut up and suffer till we went mad trying to be square pegs in round holes in a society which didn't accommodate us. These people make me sick - and the newspapers and media that platform them, and the political parties that harbour them and do their bidding.
I dont want to post this in Hell as it's so raw and personal for me but I cannot believe that this is what the Labour party have come to. That they are active enemies of so many people in our society and that they have chosen bullies and bigots and their lies over large groups of harmless people, many of whom previously voted for them.
What's the solution? What's the best way to fight them and the press and media who promote these moral panics? What makes them so effective?
When I work with local University students they know about neurodivergence and cheerfully accomodate me and I them because they've not drunk in this particular poison. When I work with older people I have to be a bit more careful because they can and sometimes do hold prejudiced views or just aren't aware about accommodating people- and they're the group most likely to read these newspapers or to consume 'both sides' traditional media which will treat Streeting's attacks with kid gloves.
What can we all do to fight this?
I'm changing my vote, as though not as bad as Labour, the SNP has not done as well as the Greens in opposing this and I'm taking the risk of being out more so people can put a known face to those Labour and the media are attacking. I know many others have it much worse but I'm so tired of this.
This was mentioned previously both here and on the Wes Streeting thread in Hell.
Basically despite recent and overwhelming scientific findings to the contrary, Streeting apparently doesn't like those results and so has appointed an alarming team to do him what looks suspiciously like a Cass style review on us - including the main person who horrifically damaged people with ME with his opinions on graded exercise.
As @chrisstiles said
chrisstiles wrote: »There are some early indications that it'll be run on a similar basis to the Cass review:
https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/alarm-over-governments-choices-to-lead-over-diagnosis-review-that-could-help-ministers-cut-benefits/
There was a narrower investigation by NHS England that concluded that adhd at least is probably underdiagnosed: https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/report-of-the-independent-adhd-taskforce-part-1/
Perhaps that result wasn't politically convenient.
And as I said
By the time a well-massaged report hits newspapers and media who lap it up and trumpet it, it's too late. Streeting can weep crocodile tears about how his hand has been forced and the press will totally cover for him. I'd look at what he does and what he's done - not just what he says.
If he had genuinely changed his views he would stop this review and respond to the research already there which shows underdiagnosis, and he would tackle the well-known barriers that stop ADHD folk especially accessing diagnosis and meds. This stuff isnt a mystery.
Streeting has already shown what he is by how he treated trans people. Nobody should trust him after that.
Well now it begins -
Streeting's hit squad just came back with an interim report which has been spun on the front page of The Times - the same newspaper that did the heavy lifting on spreading the persecution and smearing of trans people.
They know the overdiagnosis stuff is not true and that there's actually huge underdiagnosis because the services are under-resourced so all they've got is innuendo about 'incentivisation' and 'self diagnosis' and 'medicalisation of distress' - so basically all the dogwhistles for 'these people are putting it on and faking.'
It comes in the wake of a well known credentialled dinosaur ( apologies to dinosaurs) giving a woefully wrongheaded and out of date interview to the TES to attack late diagnosed Autistic people - especially women- and something notable about this was that the attack was taken up and spread by leading activists who persecute trans people and who have access to prestigious media platforms.
There is a significant overlap between autistic people and LGBT+ people- so there's been anti-autistic rhetoric in the anti-trans movement from the start - trying to say young trans people are 'just' autistic and trying to use prejudiced notions about autism to then strip their agency away from them to say they cant know their own gender.
But now it's got worse - and part of it seems to hang on the trans persecutors hatred of self-ID which they want to use to force trans people through discriminatory and damaging medical hoops to make life harder for them.
Because it's so hard and the waiting lists are so long to get a diagnosis if you're neurodivergent, a lot of people have to self-ID as they try to get access to help. So the chief anti-trans activists seem to have have seized on this too ( People like Helen Lewis and Kathleen Stock)
I'm honestly tired of this. I'm glad I backed trans people before their opponents really started coming for me too and I'm angry at the 'friends' who were taken in by them and especially at those who allowed these harmful bullying bigots to present themselves as 'feminists' and those who keep taking this line. I'm a woman - I'm not 'protected' - I'm attacked.
I dont know what these people are - they seem to hate autonomy and difference in others, or perhaps they're just social conservatives who want to bully things back to how they were in some imaginary golden age in their heads? When 'men were men and women were women' and autistic people were neither seen nor heard from because we were in institutions or forced to shut up and suffer till we went mad trying to be square pegs in round holes in a society which didn't accommodate us. These people make me sick - and the newspapers and media that platform them, and the political parties that harbour them and do their bidding.
I dont want to post this in Hell as it's so raw and personal for me but I cannot believe that this is what the Labour party have come to. That they are active enemies of so many people in our society and that they have chosen bullies and bigots and their lies over large groups of harmless people, many of whom previously voted for them.
What's the solution? What's the best way to fight them and the press and media who promote these moral panics? What makes them so effective?
When I work with local University students they know about neurodivergence and cheerfully accomodate me and I them because they've not drunk in this particular poison. When I work with older people I have to be a bit more careful because they can and sometimes do hold prejudiced views or just aren't aware about accommodating people- and they're the group most likely to read these newspapers or to consume 'both sides' traditional media which will treat Streeting's attacks with kid gloves.
What can we all do to fight this?
I'm changing my vote, as though not as bad as Labour, the SNP has not done as well as the Greens in opposing this and I'm taking the risk of being out more so people can put a known face to those Labour and the media are attacking. I know many others have it much worse but I'm so tired of this.
Comments
Likewise, except I'm also gay and almost certainly autistic. So the amount of self-immolation this entire shower of cosplay fascists can do is pretty limitless, as far as I am concerned.
I mean, I'm AuDHD and gay, and thus part of the inconvenient population on several levels.
I was diagnosed aged 50. (ADHD) It helped me understand and forgive myself - and to celebrate the fun it brings to life.
I disclose very rarely and only to a few friends and family. Definitely not at work (I was deputy headteacher). I was very good with neurodiverse children, even when I didn't know the term. I had an understanding for them Especially for RSD. Teachers really don't understand this and how it feels to the child. So many use shame as a disciplinary tool. I never did, not once. I also shielded them from the subtle bullies. Few teachers do this as they don't spot it happening.
I have many letters of thanks from grateful parents.
This government are stupidly trying to complete with Reform. They are the (not so subtle) bullies.
@Arethosemyfeet there is also a lot of focus in the interim report on people who are NEET (not in education, employment of training) so I can see how children and adults who are doing okay at school or are in employment might be ignored. I know from my teaching experience that children with inattentive ADHD who need help with their schoolwork, but sit quietly in a corner get much less attention and support than children who are distracting other children from learning. Even when I know they need support it is sometimes very difficult. I'm not sure of the statistics, but I think girls tend to be more likely to have inattentive ADHD than the hyperactive-impulsive type.
Apparently the writers of the report are seeking more people with lived experiences to share their experiences before the final report, but I understand shipmates might not be comfortable speaking to them if they feel the report is not being written in good faith and that the researchers have already drawn conclusions based on reducing support costs and reducing the criteria for an autism diagnosis.
The one thing I do agree on is that there may be more than one type of autism and perhaps more research could provide better supports if the whole spectrum wasn't considered one disorder. I don't think science has totally explained autism. The problem is science can be used to help people or discriminate depending on who does the studies and how conclusions are drawn. Politics always comes into it.
That's what they did with trans people in the Cass Review then completely ignored them and did the opposite of what they were told was needed. Though it might be worth doing anyway so they cant say they weren't told.
As we've seen, the cherry picking media narrative is what takes over and ends up driving government policy. They used Cass as a legitimising mantra - as a rubber stamp - while going far beyond even what she said - hence the attack on the puberty blocker trial. People like Streeting and the anti-trans papers dont seem to bother checking what she actually said now - they interpret it as 'the anti trans activists were right all along and science says so' and act accordingly.
In this case, the first tranch of additional damage in terms of neurodivergent people being faced with more prejudice in everyday life is already in motion - we all know ablist people in our lives and in officialdom and they use articles like the one in The Times and its sister pieces elsewhere to legitimate their prejudice and opposition to giving support. This stiffens their spine. It could be easily condemned and contradicted by the health secretary but isn't.
The previous NHS England report couldn't be spun and cherry picked like this and therefore didn't lead to this damage.
There have been repeated political attempts to break up autism to divide us effectively into 'deserving' and 'undeserving' in terms of support - ignoring the way spiky profiles work - and I can see the groundwork which would be useful for that in the report. They say they have been talking to people with lived experience but I dont see that well reflected.
I certainly dont see the research of autistic/ ADHD scholars (those who are themselves ND) and who are at the cutting edge of the field reflected and that in itself condemns this. It's their work, informed by lived experience and listening to other autistic/ADHD people which has been driving much better support and understanding for us- making real differences- not allistic people trying to divide us up into categories.
I also agree with your point that although the interim report consulted people with autism, it may not have taken their input seriously if the researchers already had foregone conclusions they were looking to prove.
Personally I don't think I am autistic but I do have anxiety, synaesthesia and likely developmental topographical disorder (unable to make a cognitive map and have a terrible sense of direction and spatial skills) which is more common for neurodiverse people. I am also highly sensitive, have auditory issues hearing over background noise and tick quite a lot of boxes on the autism tests for women, but only in certain categories. I also struggled socially with the transition from primary to secondary school and was bullied by other girls for a couple of years. So I don't want to claim an insider point of view or make assumptions, but I also don't know if I am totally allistic. I can relate to feeling like an outsider. But I don't want to upset people with my outsider views as one thing I am really sensitive to and feel bad about is hurting others feelings or offending people. I also don't have a total view of the UK media-scape.
Looking at it, I dont get any sense that the writers of the interim report are listening.
They talk a lot about greater female diagnosis but nowhere bring up that I can see - unless I'm missing something- that sexist concepts of ADHD/ autism used to lie at the very core of these diagnoses - apart from one fleeting mention of conduct disorder in boys. This is important given that the increased diagnosis of women has been a main plank of overdiagnosis attacks like Uta Frith's. They could easily have pointed that out and made it clear why increased diagnosis of women is reasonable and to be expected. It's omissions like this which I think facilitate media cherry picking and insinuation.
We'd always suspected there was something but didn't know what it was. When I read up on it I wished I had a time-machine and child go back to her teenage years knowing then what I know now.
And yes @Mili girls are more likely to have the inattentive thing rather than the disruptive behaviour thing... although I don’t think it divides so neatly as that between boys and girls. A bit of both but in general terms, yes.
If anything I'd say it was under rather than over-diagnosed.
I'm afraid I still don’t go along with @Arethosemyfeet's binary 'the Labour right are shitty people whereas the Labour left are squeaky clean.'
I've seen plenty of shitty behaviour from the Labour left and find myself disbelieved.
That doesn't mean I give Streeting a free pass, nor this current Labour government in general.
It's doing some good things, largely under the radar but it's also doing pretty shitty things. Like what Streeting's up to now.
Autism is not entirely unfamiliar in my family, shall we say, but the effects on each individual family member and the set of things they find difficult to do vary. I'll also note that the degree to which one needs an accommodation depends a lot on whatever the "default environment" is. When I was at school, the environment was very regimented. The uniform was specific, we sat in class in rows facing forward, raised our hands if we wished to speak, and otherwise we shut up. That environment worked well for me. Modern classrooms tend to be a lot more informal. Elementary classes seem to accept a lot of background chatter whilst children are working that would have driven me completely bonkers. So I think if I was a child in my local school today, I would face a lot more in the way of challenge just because the environment is different.
I assume there are other children who benefit from the relaxed chatty environment. I don't understand these people, but I have been told that they exist.
Except you made up the second part, didn't you? Not everything requires you to jump in with feet on "both sides". The shittiness of the Labour right stands on its own, without comparison to anyone else, and I mention them because they're the ones in power and doing the shitty stuff. This discussion has fuck all to do with the Labour left (what remains of it).
But yes, the shittiness is coming from those who really ought to know better.
@Gamma Gamaliel @Arethosemyfeet this might be a good Purgatory thread, but it's a tangent for this thread. Consider taking it there, but not here please.
Gwai,
Epiphanies Host
And this system is much cheaper than funding early diagnosis and intervention, if you ignore the cost of supporting all these traumatised and underachieving children after the age of 18: children who could have become functional adults with the right early support.
Yes, I am bitter. And furious at the waste and gratuitous cruelty of it all.
These days, our societies have access to interactive media that make scapegoating quicker and cheaper and easier than ever before, and attitudes encouraged by social media that reduce our sense of personal accountability and our appreciation of the consequences for others.
Political ideologies appear more open to exploiting it, whether as a direct, intentional strategy or indirectly through increased tolerance for policies (for example of fiscal prudence) that result in scapegoating.
On one rather troubling level, scapegoating works, in a way to which liberalism does not provide an answer.
I've wondered about starting a Purgatory thread about 'Both-sides-ism' and where we draw the line on that issue between whatbis reasonable and what is untenable.
I'd worry that it may become Hellish though or end up here in Epiphanies if certain issues came up. I'll think about that and perhaps draft one for after Holy Week (this coming week for us).
Meanwhile, I have no intention of derailing this thread and apologise for jolting it somewhat.
This all sounds terribly familiar. My eldest, who is autistic, only got an EHCP at the point he'd burnt out and started refusing to go to school. I'm enormously thankful that he quickly got a place at a specialist school, where he is now thriving - but so much unnecessary trauma suffered in the interim.
I myself got an ADHD diagnosis last year at the age of 43, and will be watching for news of this review with significant trepidation.
There's a lot of academic work on moral panics and how they work. One of the key insights is that they tend to target
So back in the day when most gay people were closeted, my parents easily believed newspaper propaganda that worked on othering and scapegoating LGBT+ people because they thought they didn't know any and accepted the newspaper version. To me who was meeting out LGBT+ people at university the newspaper stuff was obviously absurd and instead of making me buy papers and hate gay people, it made me reject the newspapers that did it.
For obvious reasons, though, people don't want to come out in the face of fierce moral panics, and one of the functions of the moral panic is to enforce social conformity against those they've labelled as 'deviant' by forcing them back into the closet under threat of violence or punishment and making scapegoated people pay a really high price for being visible. But it's by being faced with the personal proof and witness in their lives and communities that the newspapers are lying that people change.
The problem is that media propagating moral panics have enormous sums of money behind them and huge reach - effectively they're megaphones - drowning out the individual voices of lived experience that contradict them.
We know what undoes scapegoating but we dont have the same resources as the scapegoaters and the minute we try to turn down the deafening amplification and ubiquitous reach of their lies, their proponents cry 'freedom of speech' when they actually meant freedom to deafen using their structural and financial advantage to drown out less powerful people's speech. It's actually ' freedom of rich powerful supremacist speech' only
It works because we dont get that yes, there really is a big problem with 'freedom of overwhelming scapegoating megaphone' and if that's not regulated the scapegoated voices cant be heard and those scapegoated withdraw or try to make themselves less visible. So to have scapegoated people visible, scapegoating voices have to be tightly regulated and the voices of those they target boosted.
The way this is playing out in the UK is that scapegoating is used to get away with austerity cuts that harm and kill people. By demonising a group, government hopes to be able to make swingeing cuts that target them without losing support through social revulsion. They hope the scapegoating works with the median voters getting their news off sources which will scapegoat or 'both sides are reasonable' a scapegoating campaign.
Scapegoating also makes an appeal to social conservativism that thinks the world was better back in the day 'when there was none of this nonsense'. The irony is that some things like wage growth and home ownership and wealth distribution were better in the recent past but it's not the fault of trans people, ND people and people who come from abroad for safety or work that these things got worse. But there's a kind of magical thinking that just making the world look like some idealised 'white' 'normal' past by shoving all these strange 'new' people back in the closet or ejecting or punishing them will somehow bring back order and prosperity and make all things well again. It's snake oil - but there's a lot of it about.
And a minority of people really are just cruel and get off on feeling superior to others and exercising power over them.
ND people, unfortunately for us, are currently one of these groups who are both earmarked for callous austerity cuts and disapproved of by the 'back to my imagined rosy-tinted good old days and down with these new-fangled ideas' crowd.
I feel like we need to make a noise and be as visible as we can - we can see what's happening to the people they came for first - we can see that absolute pseudoscience can triumph over the NHS and BBC when it comes to us, just as it did with trans people. There's a lot of very well funded and targeted propaganda being broadcast out there and we're now firmly in its sights.
In contrast to scapegoating, moral panics aren't about an individual or group that can be undeservedly blamed and targeted (for negative treatment) - it can be a "condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests." A list of 20th Century moral panics (from Wikipedia's article) cover a wide range of subjects:
- Red Scare (1919–1920, late 1940s–1950s)
- "The Devil's music" (1920s–1980s)
- Comic books (1950s)
- Switchblades (1950s)
- Mods and rockers (1960s)
- Dungeons & Dragons (1980s–1990s)
- HIV/AIDS (1980s–1990s)
- Dangerous dogs (late 1980s – early 1990s)
- Increase in crime (1970s–present)
- Violence and video games (1970s–present)
- War on drugs (1970s–present)
- Sex offenders, child sexual abuse, and pedophilia (1970s–present)
- Satanic panic (1980s–present)
Scapegoating is not equivalent to the creation of a moral panic, being used to "get away" with something. In this instance, I would say that scapegoating relates to the harm inflicted by those cuts, when that harm is (not necessarily consciously) both recognised and accepted as being necessary, because that group is seen, in some way, as being to blame.Scapegoating isn't about looking backwards, although that can be part of the narrative, it's about treating negatively, inflicting (metaphysical) harm on, a contemporary group that is unfairly blamed for something, whether that is the "threat posed" by transgender women, or the "increasing demand for scarce resources" by neurodivergent people.
Social conservativism is a big and common part of the appeal which moral entrepreneurs make to cast behaviour as 'deviant' for the purposes of moral panic - as it was in Cohen's original case study of panics about mods and rockers (and for example other moral panics of the 1960s/ early 70s like 'the promiscuous girl on the pill' or 'hippies in Falkirk' - to mention recent Scottish historical cases of moral panic where I know the academic work). It's very commonly about looking backwards to an idealised/ older set of common values that the 'deviants/ folk devils' are presented as challenging/ defying. It's a big part of how publications like the Daily Mail, Express and Telegraph and other newspapers work.
A key concept in moral panic is 'disproportion' - small harmless groups are portrayed as outsize dangers. You can actually see this prior to modern newspapers/ broadcast media in manuscript and printed culture about eg. groups like Jews. Catholic minorities and Quakers, so in fact the concept does have some pre-modern historical relevance, especially as we get into print culture, but isn't a separate thing to scapegoating but a major subset of it.
In individual cases of scapegoating eg. someone being ostracised in a group for personal reasons, it would make sense to talk about scapegoating and not moral panic but here I'm talking about that form of highly effective scapegoating known as moral panic which is how it's done in newspapers/ broadcast and media and in which trans people, people coming from abroad to live, neurodivergent people and disabled people in general are being cast as the "folk devils' by moral entrepreneurs ( to use Cohen's terminology).
It also feeds into the old deserving/ undeserving poor divide in our case. We can use what terms we like for the mass media attempt to delegitimise diagnoses, downplay disability and stereotype ND people as gullible, fragile trendies who need to pull their socks up, go back to the moral sinew-stiffening remedies of a previous age, and stop imagining they've something seriously wrong with them deserving disability help but it will still be there whatever we call it.
"There's massive double standard where intellectual complexity gets celebrated and respected, but emotional complexity gets pathologized and shut down.
Think about it - if someone spent hours working through a complex mathematical proof, testing different approaches, considering edge cases, building elaborate frameworks to solve a problem, that would be seen as rigorous thinking. Admirable dedication. If a physicist mapped out intricate theoretical scenarios to understand particle behavior, that's just good science.
But do the same level of systematic analysis with emotions, relationships, or social dynamics? Suddenly you're "overthinking," "being dramatic," "making it too complicated," or "spiraling." The same cognitive processes that get praised in STEM contexts get treated like pathology when applied to human experience.
The bias is stark. Mathematical complexity: "Wow, look at that brilliant mind at work." Emotional complexity: "You need to calm down and simplify."
This happens because emotional complexity threatens people. It suggests that their surface-level interactions might be missing something important. It implies that feelings and relationships are as worthy of rigorous analysis as equations. It challenges the idea that emotions should be simple, contained, easily manageable.
Society has this vested interest in keeping emotional processing shallow because deep emotional intelligence reveals uncomfortable truths about power dynamics, authenticity, manipulation, social conditioning. A person who can systematically analyze emotional patterns is harder to gaslight, harder to dismiss, harder to control.
The "just keep it simple" crowd benefits from emotional illiteracy. They don't want people developing sophisticated frameworks for understanding human behavior because that threatens systems that rely on people not thinking too deeply about why they feel what they feel."
Stealing from the Arthur Dent quote: you may think astrophysics is complex but that's just peanuts to the human brain. (With apologies to Douglas Adams).
Yes and no. Yes, you're right, of course, but also no, because collective effects are complicated. Electromagnetism is well understood. Modeling the dynamics of a plasma in a fusion reactor is rather more complicated. The underlying theory is simple: the collective effects are complicated because there are a lot of individual particles to consider.
That’s how I understand it.