What a day: Facing Disbelief: Neurodivergence, Hypermobility and the Science of 'Anxiety' in Children

S Glew, J Green, A Marsden, J Law

What a day....

It was wonderful to meet a great team, one online, thoughtful, kind people who really care at the recent British Psychological Society annual conference. But it’s hard, moving from speaking to hundreds of people at a recent conference, people who listen, who follow what I’m explaining, who 'get' and 'connect' the importance of hypermobility, neurodivergence, anxiety, executive functioning and the health body/brain relationships that directly affect us to being somewhere where hardly anyone does.

Harder still was encountering a child and adolescent working psychiatrist who said he doesn’t believe in it, the diagnosis and in all my years (numerous) I don’t think I have heard anyone quite like this yet hiding under a smile.

By “it,” he repeatedly said neurodiversity though, he probably meant neurodivergence, or maybe the neurodiversity paradigm. Either way, his words showed a misunderstanding of the term itself: neurodiversity simply means all brains in the world, the full spectrum and variety of human minds.

Smilingly, he repeatedly insisted it wasn’t empirical, that it didn’t make people “different,” and that it was more of a social or political construct. His talk went on about the “political movement” and referenced long conversations he’d had with someone well known from the neurodiversity social movement so yes, that seemed to be the framework he was operating from.

When it came time for questions, I managed to speak up.   He smiled. I gave him the empirical data, the neuroscience showing the body brain connection. I said I agreed with him that mental health had worsened in schools despite huge interventions and perhaps it is because of the physiology not being understood, how hypermobility and neurodivergence intersect, how physiological differences underpin what’s too often seen as social emotional mental health only?

He smiled and replied.

To a story about a twelve-year-old boy he once knew who broke his leg and years later, dwelled on it so much that it affected his mental health!

He said he’d stay for our talk 'Who's Avoiding What?' afterwards. I saw him just before it started, coat in hand.

“You’re staying?” I asked? He did the same crocodile smile and walked off.

We were left discombobulated, and as for me, I got lost going home. Wrong platforms. No trains. Too busy for a non-Londoner now at rush hour now. Lost my ticket eventually the train guard let me through.

Sometimes you lose your way and I‘m not smiling but you keep going and it’s exactly why we keep speaking out as the community charity against all the odds. It’s why we keep presenting the science, disseminating the data, the lived reality of our members. Because disbelief, dressed up as expertise, still walks away when it should stay and listen, found in organisations and in systems. It’s the smile of comfort in ignorance that protects the privileged whilst denying reality.

Jane Green MBE Chair/Founder