Golden oldie who likes Cognitive. Social. Neuroscience. But not only.
frithmind.org/socialminds/
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I am taking this very seriously. We need to have a discussion about the huge demand for diagnosis.
The tide turning was inevitable.
ADHD and autism diagnoses have skyrocketed. This man is reversing the trend telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/09…
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Very concerning
Last week I saw a post by someone who identified as AuDHD. It told of their terrible year, punctuated by serious mental health problems. Admissions to hospital, life-threatening symptoms - they had had to quit their job and move back in with their parents as a result.
The next post was their announcement that they were now a certified ND coach, and an appeal for people to get in touch to book a consultation.
I’m not sure who I am most concerned for here. The coach, who is going to be dealing with potentially vulnerable people while in a state of high vulnerability themselves, or their clients, who may not find the containing presence they were hoping for. For both of them, this is high risk. Things could go really wrong.
My online experience is full of adverts telling me it’s so easy to become a coach. I’m told I could be an ADHD coach with just a few hours of online study, a ND coach by this time next week and (the newest one) an AuDHD coach with a exciting and well-paid career in front of me. All I need to do is pay my money and they’ll tell me how to ‘kick start my business’.
These courses have proliferated in the last few years. They sell a dream - be self-employed! Run your own business! Make money doing something you love!
There are typically no barriers to entry except cost. No assessment of whether someone is suited to this work. No regulation or professional body to uphold ethical standards. No one to complain to when things go wrong. Even the cost can be low if the whole thing is online and recorded. I’ve just seen one which charges £77 and promises me that in 40-60 online hours I’ll be a certified neurodiversity coach.
They will attract vulnerable people, these courses. Many people decide to go into coaching because of their own life experiences. They want to help other people. Then when they get their certificate, they use their lived experience to promote their services, because there is a widely held belief that a person with a given diagnosis is best placed to help others with that diagnosis. ‘I’ll understand you like no one else can’ they promise. They may really believe it. Because they are not regulated, they can make extravagant claims which a qualified professional would not make. The general public may not know the difference between a coach who has done 40 hours online, and a psychotherapist who has studied for four years. They often charge similar prices.
I know there are many really excellent coaches, but it also seems to be a Wild West out there. Working with distressed people is hard, and it’s an illusion if we think that coaching is straightforward. People don’t leave their complexity at the door.
When vulnerable people work with vulnerable people without checks and balances, boundaries can go missing and real harm can be done. We really need to talk about neurodiversity coaching.
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Uta Frith retweeted
Camouflaging in autism as a dual-normative construct: a philosophical critique pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4233… It doesn't mean that 'some' impression management isn't utilised by some. Merely that 'autistic masking' is contrary to fundamentals about autism (and social communication)
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Autism Diagnosis Risks “Losing Its Meaning," Says Veteran Researcher. Others Say Her Arguments Just Don’t Stack Up iflscience.com/autism-diagno…
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The evolution of symbolic artefacts: How function shapes form sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
A model of a study that uses rigorous methods to answer a deep question and succeeds with a clear answer.
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Sensory context improves language prediction in humans and LLMs | PNAS pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.26…
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Uta Frith retweeted
Excellent and equally worrying article @TheGuardian by Zoe Williams on psychopathy in the work place with key insights from UCL’s Prof Essi Viding theguardian.com/science/2026…
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In case you want to know my views on the autism spectrum in 2016 (and more besides), there is an in-depth interview
thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publ…
I don't think my views have changed that much. But well, even subtle changes can have consequences.
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Uta Frith retweeted
Improving outcomes for people with co-occurring autism and psychosis: from diagnostic overshadowing to system-wide clinical capability cambridge.org/core/journals/… The first stage is recognition that the two can overlap. And in the longer-term asking 'why?'.
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Uta Frith retweeted
A split in the spectrum? The ongoing battle to define autism bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdew… Prof Frith's latest article continues to make waves. Combined with DSM-5 autism levels, ICD-11 Table 6.5 (look it up), the rise of 'profound autism' & more, we are slowly looking towards autisms
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Autism spectrum disorder: has it lost its meaning and is it leading to misdiagnosis? | Psychological Medicine | Cambridge Core - cup.org/4wgJjTi
My thoughts about the broken spectrum.
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Uta Frith retweeted
This is, potentially, an extremely important observation
Decades of neuroscience have operated under the assumption that shared genetic or environmental risks explain why multiple mental disorders often appear together.
osf.io/3t2cm
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Uta Frith retweeted
This time of year, we put our 16-year-olds through a coming-of-age ritual. We make them sit in rows and write down things they have spent the last two years trying to memorise. We pit them against the clock, and prevent them from talking to each other. We tell them that this is the most important thing that they will ever do and their future life depends on it.
We don’t just do this once. For most of them, we make them sit in rows and write things down between twenty and thirty separate times in the space of about six weeks. Maths, English, History, French, Biology….Again and again, they have to keep at it. Each time, we tell them how important it is and they better not have an off-day or be ill.
Then we take their papers and we rank them. For some, the result will be accolades and glory. For others, failure and retakes.
We know for sure that this will always be true, because these rituals that we call exams are designed to rank them. A third will always fail. There would be no top grades if we didn’t also have the bottom. It isn’t possible for them all to pass.
And yet, every year, we talk as if this was not true. We pretend that it would be possible for them all to succeed, if only they and their teachers worked harder. Politicians talk about raising standards and accountability. We pretend that the problem is them not working hard enough, not an exam system designed so that hundreds of thousands fail. We blame them, not the exams.
For the truth is that we have a coming-of-age ritual for our teenagers which involves a third of them being told they haven’t met the grade, that they are not good enough. We launch them into adult life telling them that they will carry the stigma of not understanding quadratic equations for ever. We put them all through intense stress, and then when some of them cave in we say they have anxiety and send them to see a therapist.
And then we’re surprised when many of them say they just can’t carry on, that they don’t see the point. They don’t see potential in the future for themselves.
We need to take a step back and ask ourselves why we do this to our teenagers. For the problem isn’t our young people. It’s not their fault that a third of them fail and many are chronically stressed. The problem is what we make them do. We’ve designed a coming-of-age system with a very high cost in human misery.
Every year a new crop of teens will come of age, and despite their distress we just push them harder. We need to ask ourselves whether this is really the best we can do for our teenagers. We urgently need to think again.
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Uta Frith retweeted
Uta Frith is speaking again about the need for subgroups in the autism spectrum. To hear her in person, listen to our podcast interview. neurosense.substack.com/p/wh…
After a career spent grappling with the neural underpinnings of autism, Uta Frith is unwavering in her controversial call to scrap our current view of the condition and start again newscientist.com/article/252…
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Very glad you’re enjoying this book. It doesn’t look like it but it’s serious science.
I’ve not shared a book I am reading for a while, I should as have enjoyed so many recently. Only half way through this from @utafrith & enjoying it so much, guiding me through a complicated subject in a digestible way
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Uta Frith retweeted
When patients ask, “What disorder do I really ‘have’?” the honest answer is usually more interesting and messier than a single label. I wrote for the @nytimes on what I wish people understood about diagnoses and the nature of mental health problems.
nytimes.com/2026/05/11/opini…
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Uta Frith retweeted
When someone tries to expand the parameters of a condition in order to create an audience for themselves, that’s called disease mongering.
When someone frames common human experiences as dysphoria, or disorder – in order to sell you something – that’s disease mongering. It is happening all around you.
Neurodivergence is fertile ground for disease mongering; because it’s so easy to claim that common human experiences are part of neurodivergence. Once that is done, then people can sell books, online content and live events on that basis. They collect followers. Their content is shared millions of times. Social anxiety, burnout and rejection sensitivity have all gone through this process. They used to be experiences shared by many of us. They have been claimed as part of neurodivergence by online influencers – and then influencers develop niches and sell stuff to their audience on this basis.
Things that sound psychiatric but aren’t (like RSD) are particularly prone to this. No one can tell a person they do not have RSD, because there is no official diagnosis or disorder. No one can say that something is misinformation, because there is no way to identity correct information. People say that content about RSD is so relatable – because it is. It’s so common to be highly sensitive to rejection that to define it as a ‘dysphoria’ seems like needless pathologising.
Note: I am not dismissing anyone’s experience of rejection sensitivity. I am not invalidating anyone’s experience of neurodivergence. I’m saying that there are people out there who have an interest in convincing as many people as possible that (for example) they have RSD, so they become a market for their products.
There’s a name for this, and it’s disease mongering. It often pretends to be raising awareness, but it’s all about influence and sales.
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Uta Frith retweeted
And here is the film about the extraordinary Hertha Ayrton (nee Phoebe Sarah Marks, a Jewish girl from Portsea) - the first female electrical engineer IEE member, and the first woman to be nominated as Fellow of the Royal Society: piped.video/ahLt9Aqc_wM?si=WgjW…
@RAEngNews
Extraordinary women (and a few men...) recounting their life stories & discussing important questions! @DameWendyDBE @jimalkhalili @utafrith! Well done the Royal Society!
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