Gemma Spake

Actual diagnosis rates have risen over time.

There's been an eightfold increase in the UK over the last 20 years.

But again, much of the literature suggests this is not because of some sudden biological epidemic.

Some people would want you to believe that, that it's vaccines, that it's pesticides, whatever.

It's not that.

It's rising recognition.

It's improved identification amongst population groups that used to be missed.

especially girls and especially people of color.

That is like also combined with a reduced stigma, which is meaning that people feel more accepted to have this part of them be given a label.

We really need to examine this because historically diagnostic stereotypes have been really, really narrow.

For a very long time, many diagnoses were simply shaped around a very limited template of what the typical person with the condition looked like.

And often that template was based on the people who were most visible, most disruptive, most easy to identify, or most represented in research.

That usually meant we based our entire idea of what a mental health condition or what neurodivergence looked like based on just the population group that happened to be studied first.

I cannot overstate

how narrow the clinical definition used to be because of that.

Because for the first 30 to 40 years of ADHD research, for example, 98% of the people who were being studied were boys under the age of 18.

And so the definition or the understanding we have or have had in the past has been formed on that.

Most of the first tests on medications that were used for ADHD, medications that are still used now, that the basis of those medications are still active in medications we take now for ADHD.

Those original tests were exclusively done on boys.

And so for years, the dominant image has been of the hyperactive little boy who couldn't sit still, who interrupted constantly, who ran around, who was obviously very much struggling in ways that inconvenienced other people and which were probably very, very confusing for him and everybody involved.