Paying for neurodiversity diagnoses

Mail on Sunday article highlights the cost and profitability of private ADHD clinics. As I said in a previous post, neurodiversity has become an industry, often more motivated by profit than patient interest. Packaging our everyday problems as neurodiverse conditions that can be diagnosed and treated may well be creating more problems than it is worth (see eg. another previous post). Discouraging self-responsibility may not really be helping to resolve underlying difficulties (see eg. yet another previous post). 

As the government independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism has found (see last post), diagnosis alone is insufficient for assessing the need for personal adaptations in educational and workplace settings. Exposing how ADHD diagnostic services may be organised more for their own interests than those of patients reinforces the need to challenge widespread misleading myths about neurodiversity used to bolster profitability (see eg. another previous post). 

Making neurodiversity less medical

The Independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism (see previous post) has produced an interim report. Its main interpretation of the evidence is that there needs to be more of an emphasis on functional need rather than diagnosis alone.

The implications for policy and service design are to be worked out before the final report. It would be better, at least as far as neurodiversity is concerned, if assessment did take more of a functional rights-based approach. The person’s level of functioning and the intervention which can maximise functioning, together with an evaluation of the usefulness of that intervention, need to be properly assessed. This is required primarily in educational and workplace settings. In effect, this should shift much of the work of assessment and treatment from health services to educational and occupational psychologists.