Official Report search · Parliament Workbench

Committee

Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee 20 January 2026 [Draft]

20 Jan 2026 · S6 · Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee

Item of business

Neurodivergence

Dr Crabb Watch on SPTV

That is a huge area. It is not an either/or situation; it is an and situation. That is one of the challenges. We are taught, particularly in the UK, to think in a binary way and to believe that there is a single, right or wrong, way of doing something. Diagnosis can be incredibly powerful and validating; for some people, it can be life saving. On the other hand, it takes four or five hours to do a proper assessment, and there are risks in the misdiagnosis and overdiagnosis of a condition. A huge number of people who have the traits of neurodiversity but do not meet the full diagnostic criteria will also need help and support.I can give two examples from my practice to illustrate that. When I was working in an autism service, people would wait for five or six years to see me and have an assessment. However, for a large number of people, the help, advice and support that they needed was the same if they had a formal diagnosis of autism or neurodivergence as it would have been if they had traits. The tragedy was that people had been left for four, five or six years because no one wanted to make things worse. General practitioners did not want to say, “It might be autism,” because they did not know much about that and did not want to make things worse. Primary care mental health nurses would leave those people alone. Schools, teachers and everyone would withdraw because they did not know what was going on.What those people actually needed was advice about sleep, screen time, exercise and caffeine. They needed some coaching about how to manage lifestyle factors and busy environments and about how to feel more confident in social interactions. I would often give the same package of interventions to someone who had autism and someone who had traits, and the tragedy was that a person might have waited four or five years to see me and to be given that advice, yet I often would not have the time to follow them up and see how that advice was going.That is one situation where we clearly need to ensure that we get help into the hands of people and their families years before they get so stuck that they need to see a clinician like me.Another example from my practice relates to the other end of the spectrum. I saw a gentleman in his 50s who lived with his mother and had managed to maintain a part-time job. He needed his mother to help him to get dressed and prepare for the day and to help him with most activities outside of his part-time job. The health of his mother, who was in her 80s, was failing, so she said, “I won’t be able to support my son any longer, and he won’t be able to live independently.” She was desperately worried about what would happen to him. In that case, an autism diagnosis opened up care packages from social work, and that man and his family could rest easy knowing that, over the long term, he would be able to live independently in the community.For some people, a diagnosis is essential. However, if we are talking about having to meet the needs of 10 to 20 per cent of the population, we are thinking along the same lines as conditions such as obesity. Most people understand and accept that specialist surgeons and doctors are needed to help people with the most severe and complex forms of obesity, but a suite of interventions are needed across society, because an awful lot of people will not need to, or cannot, see specialist doctors.

Search Hansard contributions

Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee 20 January 2026 [Draft]

In the same item of business