Gemma Spake

The issue is, is that this image, it's not incorrect.

It's just

not entirely correct.

It's just not reliable.

It's just one image of one kind of person.

And that makes it harder to recognize people whose difficulties looked quieter, whose difficulties looked more internal or more socially acceptable, especially if they

had been fundamentally conditioned because of their race or because of their gender to behave differently.

You know, the example a lot of people give now is like a girl who daydreams and forgets things and procrastinates and is sensitive and feels overwhelmed and has these, has a really elaborate imagination.

probably previously wouldn't have been diagnosed with ADHD, but perhaps that's what she was going through.

Or, you know, a child of color in like a primarily white community may have been corrected more from an early age, you know, by their parents who were trying to keep them safe, keep them safe from standing out or by teachers or members of the community who made excuses for the white kids, but not for them, meaning that their behavior was curtailed, became less obvious.

They masked more and they didn't get the diagnosis immediately.

or weren't seen as having a condition or having a label that they probably did have all along.

So basically, as our understanding expands, we are seeing this reflected in changing numbers, right?

As our understanding of masking, as our understanding of conditioning expands, essentially it means that we are realizing some delays in our recognition of how different conditions show up in different people.

you know, from the outside, it might look like suddenly there is this epidemic.

It is genuinely just a form of social catch up.

And essentially we are just bringing people into the fold and giving people the resources and the understanding that they probably always

should have had, right?

And a big contributor to those increase in diagnostic rates that we are seeing is actually a lot of people who are in their 20s and who are in their 30s, some of them even in their 40s, who are looking retrospectively at their lives or who are finally kind of recognizing something about themselves and getting help.

So it means that the level has been well below where it probably should have been for many, many years.