I was just listening to a radio programme that had medical professionals talking about ADHD. They were talking about the large increase in the number of people identified as having ADHD, and thus a large increase in the number of people claiming disability because of it and similar neurodiversity conditions.

Putting aside the many issues around whether this is because there are genuinely more Neurospicy people or if we simply never identified it properly before, one of the medical professionals made a strong point about symptoms versus disability.

They said that, with any non-neurotypical person, one of the key things they are now looking at is whether someone with symptoms of a neurodiverse condition is actually suffering a disability, rather than simply looking at how severe their symptoms are.

This relates to me personally, and is the reason for this blog post on what could be considered quite a contentious subject.

I am someone who has quite severe dyslexia. I couldn’t spell my own name until I was about ten, but once I learned to embrace it, it has never really been a disability to me. I have all the symptoms, but I simply work around them.

Indeed, in my areas of work, dyslexia can positively be an advantage. The help it gives me with analysis and large-scale problem solving is huge. For the bits where it causes me problems, I have spell checkers and other tools to deal with them.

So, even though my symptoms might compare badly with someone else’s, the actual disability they cause me is effectively nil. In some circumstances, I would even say the effect is positive.

And that is apparently where one of the key issues lies.

You can’t necessarily treat someone as disabled simply because they have a particular condition. Two people can have the same condition but experience it completely differently. Worse, from a medical or government point of view, the strength of someone’s symptoms does not necessarily denote the level of disability.

Some people might struggle hugely with a neurodiverse condition and find that it ruins their life. Another person with more severe symptoms from the same condition might find aspects of it an advantage and embrace it completely.

So how on earth, as a society, do we determine who genuinely needs help versus who is taking advantage of a disability label because it provides an easier route through something?

I can only speak personally about dyslexia, but I have met people with far milder versions of it than my own who use it as an excuse simply not to do things.

The way the medical professional put it on the radio really highlighted something I had not properly considered before: even the severity of the symptoms does not necessarily denote the severity of the disability that being neurospicy might cause.

One of the core factors in how severely people experience the disability caused by their neurodiversity may be whether they consider it an affliction or simply part of themselves.

I learned this the hard way.

I was taught very early on that dyslexia was to be considered an affliction, and my contact with government agencies reinforced the idea that it was a disability. You could get free audiobooks if you were dyslexic. You could have someone write your exam paper for you if you were dyslexic.

In my case, that mindset was changed by one simple comment from my father, which again shows how profound an effect our parents can have on us.

A friend of mine was having someone write out their GCSE paper for them, and I asked about doing the same thing.

My father simply said:

“Is someone going to write out your paperwork for you for the rest of your life?”

That simple statement made something click in my brain.

Dyslexia stopped being something I had to battle and became simply a part of me that I would have to deal with for the rest of my life. I embraced it, worked around it, and ultimately found ways in which it worked for me.

But if you don’t see it like that, and instead see it as a constant affliction, like a missing limb or a missing sense, then I can understand how it could feel very different.

Perhaps that is part of the difficulty with neurodiversity and disability. The condition, the symptoms and the disability are not necessarily the same thing.