(UK) Scotland: One in 21 schoolchildren has autism
- The end of childhood
- 1 hour ago
- 3 min read
Dec 8, 2025, Times: Struggling NHS is not ready for rising autism and ADHD diagnoses
I have some sympathy with Wes Streeting. As health secretary, he got into trouble for complaining that too many people were being diagnosed with mental health problems.
The statistics for such things as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism were going through the roof, he noted, and in an off-the-cuff remark to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, he said this meant too many people were being written off as mentally ill and relying on the state for support. (He did not actually say the last bit, but that presumably is what he meant.)
It was, Streeting later admitted, a case of “foot-in-mouth syndrome” on live television and he was immediately bombarded with complaints from those who said they wanted more diagnosis, not less. He has now apologised — “I realise that my view on mental health overdiagnosis was divisive,” he told The Guardian — and has set up an inquiry instead, which is always safer territory for a beleaguered minister.
I suspect he had a point, however. While ADHD is undoubtedly an affliction amongst many children and adults — in Scotland, it is said to affect 5 per cent of school pupils — it has become something of a fashionable illness. Celebrities including Will Smith, Ryan Gosling, Justin Timberlake and Jim Carrey have spoken about having ADHD and how they have combated it or benefited from it. Paris Hilton called it her “superpower”.
Autism falls into the same category. The latest statistics in Scotland suggest that 4.8 per cent of schoolchildren are affected, and most experts believe this is an underestimate. Autism ranges across the spectrum from mild to severe, and at its worst it is a profoundly disabling condition. . . . [ONE IN 21 WITH AUTISM]
There are two responses to this. The first, and more respectable, is that the more attention is drawn to mental illness the better. For too long, a range of disorders, from Asperger’s syndrome to dyslexia, were dismissed as middle-class fixations — a way of disguising poor progress at schools, or family failings — rather than as medical issues. The more they are brought into the open and properly treated, the better.
The alternative response is the one Streeting was presumably alluding to. It is one thing to diagnose a mental illness, quite another to fund the system that is meant to deal with it. An NHS under colossal pressure simply does not have the resources to cope with this new wave of cases. Waiting times in Scotland for ADHD patients are said to be as long as two years; for autism, more.
I can tell you what this means from a personal perspective. As the father of a son with that most serious of mental illnesses, bipolar disorder — previously known as manic depression — I have watched hospital provision in the Lothian region steadily deteriorate, against a background of underfunding that has left seriously ill patients unable to access beds and instead, under the umbrella of “care in the community”, been told to fend for themselves. . . .
So here is the irony, which I hope Streeting’s inquiry will grapple with: just as we are being encouraged to recognise a wide range of mental afflictions, including ADHD and autism, the state is failing to support the most serious of mental cases because it does not have the resources to do so. If Streeting had told the BBC that, he would have been applauded for honesty. Instead, he has had to apologise.
