It’s been 2 months since I last blogged – and there are several reasons for this, but the main one was that I didn’t know where to start. The expected SEND white paper was delayed, the UK government want to introduce more testing, the US government claimed that Tylenol/paracetamol taken in pregnancy could cause autism, the IFS green budget had some very ‘interesting’ opinions on how to solve the SEND crisis, some Reform party members & councillors were criticising the SEND budget (but a local council has also spent £75,000 on union flags to be hung around the county), and then, more recently, there were bits in the autumn budget that makes me very worried about SEND funding, and finally, Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary has started a review into ADHD and ASD because they might be overdiagnosed, which then lead to a BBC GP survey where, apparently, many of them have said that ‘life being stressful is not an illness’ (link here) and that mental health conditions are being over diagnosed. Just when I thought, right, I’ve enough to blog about, something else pops up on my news feed and I then spend several days ranting at anyone who’ll listen, and I don’t actually start blogging.

This is obviously more than one blog, so today I’ll start with ASD, ADHD, diagnosis and causes. I wrote about the genetic roots of ASD & ADHD (link here if you want to read it). While there are some arguments that early life trauma can cause or trigger neurodivergent conditions, this could be an epigenetic trigger, where there is the genetic coding for a condition, but it can also be that trauma almost ‘switches on’ the genes and then the condition is more noticeable. However, sometimes trauma does not switch on genes, but instead, the impact on the body is so great that the external characteristics appear like ASD, ADHD, or PDA, but are a reaction to the trauma. In addition, some conditions, such as MS, can impact cognition in a similar way to dyslexia, but that doesn’t mean that MS causes or triggers dyslexia.

We are not in the middle of a neurodivergent epidemic. I didn’t suddenly catch ADHD in the last few years – the signs have been there since I was tiny, but ADHD was barely recognised in the 1980’s, and even less so in girls, so I was missed. I was also academic, got things done (often at the last minute). Nobody seemed that surprised when my GCSE and then A-level results weren’t near my predicted grades as I was always daydreaming, but if I were a child now, plucking feather duvets, not getting school work done on time, not concentrating in class, being messy, always forgetting where I put things, having a large gap between my reading and spoken language and my written language, the school, or my parents, may have flagged this. I may have had an assessment much, much younger.

There is a lovely meme on social media at the moment that I have borrowed from Dr Martha Deiros Collado on Instagram (link here) and I think it sums all this up perfectly.

The only other topic I am going to cover today is the debunked link between paracetamol/Tylenol use and autism. The amount of parental guilt when you see your children struggling with life is HUGE. I have spent so many nights wondering what I did wrong. Was it that glass of wine I had before I knew I was pregnant? Was it my stressful job (I found out I was pregnant with our youngest just after an Ofsted inspection)? Was it the fact that all I could eat was salad and chips, and all I could drink was red-bush tea and lemonade? Was it because I worked as an assistant vet nurse, and although I was really careful not to go near anything that may cause any harm to my growing baby, I maybe should have found a different job?

No, no, no, no. Absolutely not. I did not do anything to cause my children’s neurodivergent conditions. Although as parents we have made some decisions that, looking back, could have been better, we did a pretty decent job – and still are. I took paracetamol during pregnancy when I wasn’t well because it was the safest painkiller. I have friends who were on different medications that they needed to take for their own health, and they did nothing wrong either. There have been numerous peer-reviewed studies and meta-analyses that have shown NO link between paracetamol and autism. Paracetamol does not cause autism. We are not in the middle of an epidemic; we are just finally seeing the stars.