Dr. Coleman Noctor

You know, Freud said, you know, mental illness is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.

You know, we all have these tendencies towards these things.

And so that becomes really deeply problematic when people are looking for a diagnosis that they don't have the threshold to meet.

And so that creates more demand and possibly creates more diagnosis as well.

Yes for sure and again I suppose that's so that you've got the awareness issue you've got the over-pathologizing issue but and I say this you know I definitely would say there are more children in Ireland today with ASD and ADHD specifically and certainly more anxious children than I've ever seen before that's not an over-diagnosis issue that's not just an over-assessment issue it's

Yeah, but I'd say numbers tenfold is what we have now versus that.

I've been talking about a smattering of people in my year.

If you think about even the demand for additional supports and special classes dedicated for ASD units, all of these sorts of things.

And there's no doubt that the children who are in those units absolutely need to be there and require that level of support.

I can't.

I wish I could.

If we look at the ADHD piece, I think you can probably say maybe as a society has have we kind of altered our brain wiring that our concentration and persistence and all of those things are actually less now because of.

convenient speed of technology and all of those things that kind of erode that muscle in our brains so that our brains are being wired to more have an attention deficit across the board pervasive problem but asd i don't think you can explain in those terms and i don't even have a theory okay okay okay

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I suppose that came from a personal experience as well, Ray.

I mean, I...

i remember back in 2010 when my son was born and facebook was just starting out and you know there was kind of i put a post up i remember you know baby seven points to mother and baby well or something like that and then i was getting all these likes and comments and this was new to me it was the first post i'd ever made and it's a very ego massaging thing when people are saying beautiful child and beautiful this and beautiful that

And you're thinking, oh, you're glowing with it.

But then over the next few hours, like popcorn in the microwave, the gaps get longer.