Over the years, I have done countless phone-ins on my LBC radio show about people who have some form of autism or ADHD diagnosis. They range from children in the early years, to people in their 60s or 70s who have been diagnosed. Many older people tell me that their diagnosis helps them answer many unanswered questions about their lives.
Some people remain sceptical about kids being diagnosed with ADHD. Aren’t they just what people of my generation would have called ‘just a little bit naughty’? The number of children being diagnosed with the condition has rocketed, to lead some politicians (of all parties) to question whether the condition is being over-diagnosed. There may be something in this, but it is always difficult for a politician with no medical expertise or background to counter the decisions of trained clinicians. What is unarguable is the extra burden these diagnoses are putting on the schools system and the special needs sector, which has always been chronically underfunded.
Autism is defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as: “a brain condition that affects the development of social and communication skills in ways that can be severe or slight, and that can make someone's behaviour and interests different from people without the condition.”
We often talk about people being “on the spectrum”. Maybe all of us are somewhere on an autistic spectrum. I think I probably am, given my love for creating lists, my tendency to download every song a particular artist has recorded if I discover one I like, my love of spreadsheets… I could go on. My latest minor obsession is to book to go to see concerts, especially in foreign countries. In the last week, I have booked to go and see Fuse ODG in London, Mika in France, Roxette in Sweden and Dire Straits in the Netherlands. Is that normal? Is it a low level example of Obsessive, Compulsive Disorder? I could give you other examples. It’s obviously very low level, and self-diagnosis is obviously a dangerous path to go down, but the signs are there. I certainly don’t feel a need to be diagnosed with anything, but I completely understand those that feel that they are in some way odd or abnormal compared to people they know.
They very word ‘autism’ is unfortunate in that I think it plays into people’s perception that it carries a stigma. The fact is that as individual human beings, we are all wired differently. We’re not robots, and our brains react differently depending on how our bodies work. There should be no stigma in that, surely. But humans being humans, some people single out those with any seriously noticeable form of autistic behaviour for ridicule or worse.
I’ll continue hosting phone-ins on these subjects because every time I do one, I learn something, and I figure if I learn something, so do my listeners.
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