I'm one of the 694%: why I keep saying I have ADHD out loud
Recorded ADHD events among adult women aged 31–49 in the UK have risen by 694% over five years.
I am one of that number. So are hundreds of thousands of women who finally got the right name for the thing they'd been carrying.
The number is being used, in some places, as proof of a crisis of overdiagnosis. Everyone thinks they have ADHD now. The TikTok generation has discovered a label. Women are looking for an excuse.
The number is actually proof of something else. It is the sound of a medical system that ignored women for fifty years finally — slowly, partially, inconsistently — beginning to see what was already there.
There's a sentence I've said out loud thousands of times in the last decade.
I have ADHD. I'm dyslexic. I have dyscalculia and an auditory processing disorder.
I say it in meetings. I say it on stages. I say it in school car parks, in the pub on a Friday night and on first calls with people who hire me to come into their organisations and change the way they think about neurodivergent staff and neurodivergent children. I say it in the about-me bit of every page on my website.
Every single time, a small part of my brain says that's enough now. You've said it. Sit down. Be smaller. Don't make this about you.
But I keep saying it anyway. This is why.
The cost of not saying it
When I was twenty, in 1998, I was diagnosed with ADHD, dyscalculia, and auditory processing disorder. I'd already been diagnosed dyslexic at ten.
The labels existed. The understanding of what those labels meant for a young woman didn't. I was treated as anxious, as depressed, as not-trying-hard-enough, as too-much and not-enough in the same breath. The medication I was given was framed as anxiety medication. The conversations I had with doctors were anxiety conversations. The diagnosis was on my file. The frame around the diagnosis was somebody else's.
That's not unusual. That's the experience of most women my age who got an early diagnosis. The label arrived before the clinical understanding of how ADHD presents in women, and the gap between those two things ate up a decade of my life.
I'm forty-seven now. The reason I keep saying it out loud is that the gap is still there. A tiny bit smaller. But still there. And every time I close my mouth and sit down, I make the gap a fraction larger for the next woman.
What's actually happening in the headlines
Last December (2025), the current Health Secretary Wes Streeting launched a government review into rising diagnoses of ADHD, autism, and mental health conditions. His review was framed around whether "normal feelings" are being "overpathologised." It sits inside a wider government conversation about welfare costs.
Then in March 2026, 32 experts — clinicians, academics, and people with lived experience — published a paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry directly refuting the claim that ADHD is overdiagnosed in the UK. Their finding: NHS diagnosis rates remain below the expected prevalence in the population and the real problem…🥁🥁🥁… people are waiting years for assessment. No shit!
Interestingly then in April (2026), The Times covered the interim report from Streeting's review. Researchers from Autistica called the coverage misinformation, saying it oversimplified a carefully balanced review and misrepresented its conclusions about children and diagnosis. 🙏
If you read only the headlines you'd be led to believe that too many people are claiming ADHD. Dig into the research and we find that the picture inverts. The system is catching up, not running away. Maybe Wes Streeting needs to do the same.
Why my voice matters in this
I read those headlines and I feel my own younger self contract. The one who was told for fifteen years that she was fine, a bit overly anxious, too sensitive, too distracted, or said to lack the ability. The one who took an overdose at eighteen because nobody had given her a frame that she fitted.
The women being put off seeking diagnosis right now by these headlines are not strangers to me. They are versions of the woman I used to be. They are the mothers of the children my colleagues are trying to support in schools. They are the people my coaching clients are quietly becoming when they start to wonder if the anxiety label they've been carrying since they were sixteen is the whole story.
If I go quiet — if I decide it's all too tiring, the discourse is too ugly, the discourse has won — they have one less person in the room saying no, actually, you're not making it up, and here's what the research actually shows, and here's what the lived experience actually feels like.
So I stay loud. Not because I want to. But because the cost of going quiet is paid by people who don't have my platform.
What this looks like in practice
It doesn't look like announcing I have ADHD every time I meet someone. It looks like not hiding it. Not flinching when it comes up. Not softening the word neurodivergent when I use it about myself in a meeting full of people who don't quite know what to do with it. The work isn't introduction. The work is refusing to make myself smaller mid-sentence.
It looks like writing this post on a Monday morning when I have other things to do, because if I don't say it this week, I'll find a reason not to say it next week.
It looks like building a business — coaching, school training, EHCP work, community for neurodivergent women — that exists because the support I needed at twenty didn't.
It looks like being the person my younger self needed in the room. Every day. Even when my own brain is telling me to go quiet, sit down, be smaller.
I don't do this because I'm brave or resilient. I do this because my younger self deserved someone, and didn't get one, and the only way I know how to pay that debt is to be one — for the women who are her now.
If any of this is landing, I work with women one-to-one and in small groups. A 30-minute call is free. Book here.
From the desk of Nici Foote · Unbarrier Education Ltd · Companies House 16603630