A majority of Britons might now be identifying themselves as neurodivergent, a leading psychologist has said.
Francesca Happé – who is professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London – explained that more people have been either seeking medical diagnoses for conditions like autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia, or even self-diagnosing, as a result of decreased stigma.
But she warned that behaviour previously considered as just “a bit of eccentricity” is at risk of now being labelled with a diagnosis.
Ms Happé told The Sunday Times: “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]’.”
But she continued: “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.”
There has been a huge surge in the number of patients in the UK who have requested an autism assessment, growing 22 per cent year on year to hit 200,000 in August 2024. With demand more than 10 times higher than it was in 2019, a massive backlog has built up – 90 per cent of referrals are waiting longer than the recommended 13 weeks for assessment, according to NHS data.
Featuring in a new BBC Radio 4 series called The Autism Curve, Ms Happé told the broadcaster: “An increasing number of people are choosing to self-identify [as neurodivergent] without seeking a diagnosis. That is going to change things, because we may well already be at a point where there are more neurodivergent self-identified people than neurotypical people.
“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.”
Autism spectrum disorder is a range of intellectual, language and social difficulties, like rigidly following routines, having fixed or obsessive interests and struggling to hold eye contact or understand nonverbal communication.
Ms Happé, who is dyslexic but was not diagnosed as a child, said there are benefits that come with a diagnosis, such as enabling access to care, and helping people communicate their needs while socialising.
She said: “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.’ ”
