As my life got easier, I got angrier. Things should not be so hard for the working class
2025-04-25T07:35:42Z
I cannot accept that mental health issues and neurodivergence are ‘overdiagnosed’
Like other people diagnosed with ADHD, I was the canary in the coalmine for other members of my family. Photograph: iStock
One of the saddest things about transitioning from working class to middle class is realising how much everyone you have ever loved has suffered unnecessarily. When I reached a point of economic stability and started being able to access healthcare, I should have been happy. My problems got smaller. I should have been breezing around the White Company shopping for candles, legs clad in Lululemon and nerves muted on ashwagandha. I could say “I don’t do politics”. I could give anti-anxiety advice like “try not to watch the news”. I’d spend my weekends in Aga showrooms, saying daft things such as, “I want our house to tell a story”.
But as life got so much easier, I got angrier. Because I realised it should never have been that hard in the first place. I grew up in a place where a missed diagnosis could permanently alter the course of your life. I sat next to children at my state school who were given up on because they were “too lazy” to read when, with hindsight, they were showing signs of dyslexia. Kids who “couldn’t concentrate” or “wouldn’t pay attention” but had ADHD, or were lugging years of trauma to a classroom that didn’t meet their needs.
The school often didn’t have the resources to cope. Parents weren’t coping with their own issues, never mind addressing their children’s. Kids whose biggest lesson from school was that it made them feel dumb and unworthy. Parents didn’t know about seeking help, getting tutors or asking for extra time on tests. That was a foreign concept. If you weren’t good at school by 16, that was it. You left early. You sealed your fate.
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That suited some people. Not everyone has to go to university. But it’s nice to have the option. To be given help or even the chance to think about it. My father was deemed illiterate by bigoted, unthinking teachers when he left school. This is the man who later rose to the rank of acting superintendent in one of the world’s largest urban fire and rescue services. The same man who read all 700-odd pages of Moby Dick.
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His grades amputated his options and ambitions. The only job he could get was in a windowless factory as an apprentice fitter and turner. While university was free at that time in Australia, it was still as inaccessible to him as if a degree cost €100,000. It was simply not for people like him.
Like other people diagnosed with ADHD, I was the canary in the coalmine for other members of my family. ADHD is heritable, like the good china and the Waterford Crystal.
The more I read about the links between untreated ADHD and addiction, the angrier I got. Anger sometimes is a safer way to feel sadness heavier than we can bear. Serious drug and alcohol problems run on both sides of my family tree. So do ADHD traits.
Research from New Zealand suggests that if young people with ADHD receive adequate and timely treatment, there is an 85 per cent reduction in risk for developing a substance use disorder. It says something I already knew to be true. Substances aren’t used as a coping mechanism if people are given the tools and medication to cope. My relatives and friends who slipped into methamphetamine and heroin addictions struggled with their mental health first. No one who tries intravenous drugs is feeling A-okay with themselves.
It’s not healthy to torture yourself with a game of “what if”, especially at 2am when you can’t sleep. But I have a thumping, awful belief that if we had the tools and support in my community for early medical intervention, some of my loved ones would still be alive today.
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This is why I cannot accept that mental health issues and neurodivergence are “overdiagnosed”. We shouldn’t “put labels” on everyone, some people cry, as if they are commitment phobic 25-year-old men weaselling out of a relationship. Labels are for preserves.
But what you are talking about is a diagnosis, assessed by a medical professional. Diagnoses – the correct ones – save lives. For too long we have lived with the consequences when people were unable to get the right diagnosis and treatment. It has sent disasters down family lines, leaving legacies of intergenerational trauma. We cannot let shame and fear of things “not being bad enough” to seek help to force us back when we have come so far.
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