Been meaning to write this for a year. Ever since I got diagnosed with autism and ADHD. Still not ready to talk about autism as I don’t really understand it. To be told at 46 I am ‘very firmly’ on the spectrum was odd. Rainman stereotypes are hard to dissolve. One difference between ADHD and autism is that autism is (sometimes) taken seriously and ADHD - like OCD - is dismissed as a trait. ‘Oh I’m a bit ADHD’. You either are or aren’t. 5 per cent of us are and many of us flew under the radar all our lives as it wasn’t talked about in the 80s. You had to be chewing tables to be diagnosed with anything. Are people now overdiagnosed? Maybe. It’s a kind of reverse-Buddhist age where we cling to identities more than ever and I have had in the past a sad tendency to use them as magic sympathy shields. (‘I may be privileged but I ALSO have all these points on my identity scoresheet, so be nice to me...’) But I think with ADHD it is under diagnosed and this is bad for society. People with ADHD are FAR more likely to struggle with society. The divorce rates are staggering. And a recent U.K. study found that 25 per cent of prisoners had undiagnosed ADHD. That is FIVE TIMES higher than the general population. And so, had they been diagnosed, they could have managed the impulsivity that incarcerated them. I have read that people with ADHD are also five times more likely to be addicts. Finding out I was ADHD was the key to becoming sober. In my life I have got into a lot of pickles because of impulsivity. I wish I had known when I was confined in a police cell for shoplifting at 16 I could do something about this. Or when I was struggling with a cocaine habit at 24 or alcoholism far more recently. Anyone who ever followed me on Twitter saw my tendency for impulsive statements, and arguments. It’s not all been roses since my diagnosis though. The first medication I tried was an amphetamine and I was abusing it within a week. The pills I’m on now (methylphenidate) have helped, with therapy, to change my life. The book Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté has also explained so much. So what I am saying is sometimes labels can be the help you and your loved ones need. They can save you.