I saw on BBC news recently that there is an eight year waiting list for an ADHD assessment in the NHS, with nearly 200,000 adults waiting. In Sheffield, where I used to live, there are 6000 people on the waiting list and only 3 were seen last year. At that rate it, will take two thousand years to clear the backlog, so anyone unfortunate enough to live in Sheffield and wanting an assessment, would be better off waiting for the second coming of Jesus Christ, who presumably would turn water into Ritalin for anyone that needed it. Looks like JC has a shorter waiting list than the NHS at the moment.
I used to live in the UK and had the misfortune to live in Sheffield at one point – the land that neurodiverse diagnostics forgot. If I’d have been looking for mental health care assistance then, I’d have been bang out of luck. I would needed enough self-awareness to realised that I probably had ADHD, then rolled the dice on the waiting list and hoped that I could have been seen in mere decades, rather than have to wait centuries. I didn’t have that level of self-awareness, and I didn’t live in an area with reasonable wait times. It wouldn’t have happened.,
Fortunately, I now live in Australia, and while it is far from perfect, it does boast a functioning health care system. I presented with anxiety to my GP, was able to see a psychologist within a few months, and she was astute enough to flag ADHD as a very real possibility. I was in huge denial though, so I was lucky that someone else recognised it in me. Without that, I would still be a fizzy-minded stress jelly. There is a lot of co-pay in Australia and there is also a shortage of psychiatrist here, but it is still much better than waiting for a millennium for treatment in the country of my birth.
And it does matter that people with ADHD, and the other shades of neurodiversity, are able to get help and understand what is going on with them. The undiagnosed fall victim to substance abuse, their relationships detonate, and they can and do attempt suicide (and sadly sometimes succeed). I was fortunate in that I could broadly operate as a human being in my untreated state, but I drank way too much, fell out with heaps of people, and consistently underperformed at work.
An ADHD diagnosis is life changing, and it is a tragedy that hundreds of thousands of people are being denied that in the UK. I hope it improves for them, and improves quickly.
Photo by Madeleine Maguire on Unsplash
