As formal medical information is outdated, social media and the sharing of lived experiences within a global community is growing exponentially. While this can be great in terms of raising awareness, it’s important to remember that behind the screens, everyone is a human being — we don’t see the full picture. And pinning a diagnosis on someone else can actually do more harm than good.
In fact, the impact of “diagnosing” autism, ADHD, or both in other people, when we aren’t medical professionals carrying out formal assessments, can have a significant impact on the neurodivergent community. For one thing, unprofessional diagnoses can lead to harmful misinformation. When we “diagnose” others based on snippets of what we’re presented with, we risk strengthening the common headlines seen about how neurodivergence isn’t “real” — that it is merely a “trend.”
When we set the example of taking serious, comprehensive medical assessments into our own hands, we also risk undermining the extreme struggles that the majority of neurodivergent have in accessing a medical diagnosis.
Courtesy of Leanne Maskell
I believe that everybody is fully entitled to self-identify with neurodivergence, especially considering how difficult it is to access an assessment, but we should take care when this involves other people. There’s also the possibility that by diagnosing those in our day-to-day life, we risk getting it wrong. The reason that not everybody has ADHD, despite us all losing our keys sometimes, is because the diagnostic criteria requires symptoms throughout a person’s life to have met a certain level of “disorder.” Although this is far from perfect, it’s an important distinction that we aren’t qualified to make — we haven’t seen that person grow up, for example. Diagnosing others can lead to unforeseen consequences.
Everybody is on their own journey, and even if someone is neurodivergent and doesn’t know it, they might not be ready to hear it. It may even make them less likely to seek out support, in a form of demand avoidance, as they may attach opinions to why others are making that assumption.
For example, I knew someone who’s parents kept telling them to seek an ADHD diagnosis, which only resulted in that person increasingly feeling that their parents were trying to shift the responsibility of their actions onto a medical condition they didn’t believe they had. Ironically, the more they kept pushing, the more that person started to view ADHD in a negative light, feeling as though they were being labelled as “disordered.”
Although it can be tempting to discuss potential symptoms of neurodivergence in others, speculating about someone’s neurodivergence not only disrespects their autonomy, but also risks trivialising and stigmatising the real, lived experiences of neurodivergent people.