Done with looking at the challenges. It's time to look at the positives. I am so excited for Doctor Tom Nicholson, and I've he this is unpublished material. So he has analyzed over 10,000 different ADHD papers looking and filtering for those that talk about the positive aspects, and then going through looking for the credibility of them and the analysis, and has identified, provenly identified aspects of ADHD that provide the positive. We've talked about the challenge, we want to talk about the positive. And I can't tell you, obviously, when he told me that he'd done this, I'm like, really fell off my chair. It's like this is we've been needing this. And he actually then said, actually, did it a little while ago. Like, life got ahead. And.

So he's actually for this conference then updated everything he's he's done. So I am I'm very, very excited for this. So without further ado, doctor Tom Nicholson.

Hello everyone. Can you hear me alright?

We can, we can. Marvellous.

Thanks for having us. Yeah. Gonna be talking about the positives of ADHD, very much from a research perspective as well about what actually what evidence do we have about the positive aspects of ADHD, ADHD traits, ADHD symptoms, and what can we gain from the evidence that we have to move forward in a way that's going to be helpful.

That's very important, right, this is research based, this isn't flimmy flam like just chitty chatter, oh I once saw someone with ADHD and they super did a good thing. This is like data. And I'm That's what I'm trying. Handing over to you. Here come your slides.

Marvelous. We have our slides. Really quickly, just on an sort of off shoot, I heard you mention, Henry, about diabetes and ADHD. I'm actually in conversations with the Royal College of Nursing looking at updating our advice and guidance and giving some guidance for staff on ADHD and diabetes and how to manage diabetes when you have ADHD, how to give support because a lot of our diabetic specialist nurses are also wanting information and advice on how to better support those with things like diet control, things like remembering to take your insulin and how to approach your insulin and things like that. So just a little offshoot of one of the other projects that's going on at the moment.

Doctor doctor Tom Nicholson, he has ADHD. Passionately changed his career into I I I always feel slightly wrong to say it, but, like, focused on ADHD. The it's the focus bit. It just you know, we feel like so but, like, that's what he's doing. And, honestly, diabetes, it scans the like, one, I love I I really, really like sweets. I have 50 now, and I've liked them for a long time. And but, obviously, issues in diet for people with ADHD actually very, very significant. Mhmm. Serious issues around obesity, around impulse eating, like the big, big problems. And, honestly, when I look at diabetes, you do kind of think, why isn't an ADHD person automatically getting automatic monitoring? Because like Yeah.

I mean, why that just seems we have an obvious solution that would make a very, very big difference for our community. And thinking about those kind of things, I've certainly had medication, like.

Where I I've mucked it up and I've just gone. Well I I think Maybe next year. That'll be what topic for next year. Might have a little look at that. Because we might be somewhere That.

Sounds good because we've been talking to the, you know, the main diabetes charity, and we want to we want to do something. So perfect. Right. Right. Positive. Let's get out of this ADHD tangent already.

As you can as has already been said, I have ADHD myself, so I'm gonna try and keep to time as best we can and talk about one of the projects I've been part of a few years ago and how we're trying to reinvigorate that project now. And the project was called the the positive ADHD project. What we were really interested in, it was exploring the what are the research based evidences evidence of ADHD traits. Now, who am I and why am I someone who might have some things to say in this topic? As I've been introduced, my name is Dr Tom Nicholson. I am an assistant professor of mental health nursing at Northumbria University.

That's one of the jobs that I hold. I also have my own ADHD training business where I deliver neuro inclusion training in healthcare, educational environments, and social care environments on how to best support neurodivergent staff, students, stakeholders, patients, who whoever's part of your organization. So that I'm an academic, my PhD was on the experiences of parents across the ADHD diagnostic journey, What's it like to be a parent? What experiences do you have? How do the story of your children change over that die that waiting list, that getting and receiving the diagnosis, and then post diagnosis? And then also how do your story of yourself as a parent change as well? How do those stories form and then adapt.

When we interact with systems? So I'm in that's one of the areas I'm interested in is parenting, I'm interested in the gifted experience of ADHD for gifted ADHDers or gifted neurodivergent people, and as well, positives in how we frame ADHD in society. Prior to being an academic, I was a mental health nurse in a neurodevelopmental assessment service in Newcastle and Gateshead, and prior to mental health, as an assessor and delivering intervention for ADHD, and I use the term intervention lightly because as has already been discussed, intervention is shaky and inconsistent sort of nationally. Prior to this, I was diagnosed with ADHD at five years old, I'm ADHD autistic, I have had that label my entire life, I have.

Been medicated as a child, had a period of twenty years on Medicaid and been medicated again as an adult. And so I've come from a sort of patient led experience, expert by experience as well as that clinical and academic perspective. I'm gonna talk about positives today and and the reason why I include this picture on the right here is one of the positives that I find personally about being more impulsive than the average person. I was on holiday in Vietnam and I was with my wife and my friends and I turned to my wife, we'd been there for ten days and I said to her, darling, should we go somewhere else? We've been here for ten days, should we go somewhere else? And she was like, well, are what are you talking about? So I got my phone.

Looked at Google Maps, saw that Borneo was nearby, so we flew to Borneo and then we spent a six hour jungle trek in Borneo the next day. That's not typical. That's an unusual thing to do, but that is evidence of impulsivity and being able to live in chaos and spontaneity in a way that when you have the scaffolding and support to allow for it, you get some incredible life experiences And that's part of the thinking that I had around this positive ADHD project of I don't hear a lot of people talking about that in the research world. So the question becomes.

What are the narratives around positivity in ADHD? Because what we've got to be really careful of is to not go to that Pollyanna perspective of ADHD is purely a superpower and everything about it is positive when we have the statistics that we've talked about already today of in interactions with the criminal justice system, increased rate of suicidality, poor poor mental health, and lived experience of difficulty and impairment. And this talk is in no way meant to delegitimize or devalue or invalidate the experiences that many might have of difficulty and shame and challenge, but to also give people a different language or alternative language of what can we gain from the research about positives. But I'm also gonna.

Problematize that a little bit and talk about some of the difficulties in that research. So the that's the context for our project. I did this project with a wonderful psychologist called doctor Laura Coulthard, what we were interested in was doing some research and this was one of the problems when you are neurodivergent ADHDer doing research. Life events happen. I was doing a PhD at the time. This project was because I was interested in doing it on the side of my PhD. And that's what one of the things that can be really tricky in academia is having multiple projects at the same time, which is why this project is currently unpublished.

And I'm really pushing myself to now get this published over the next year or so. I was moving house, and then COVID happened, and lockdown happened, and things changed in the research world. At the beginning of every single meeting, Laura and I were getting together and going, so where were we? We need to double check everything, we need to check what what we were doing and what data we had, and then did you read this paper or did I read those five papers? And in in line with that, we then not read each other's emails correctly, so things would get missed, and so this entire project took was well well over a year when with our ADHD brains, we probably could have done it a bit more streamlined.

And then the biggest issue of this project was that we didn't actually write it up because of those other life events. I had a son and the newborn phase made it that the idea of writing a systematic review up became insurmountable. So give ourselves some grace is one of the messages of this is we all have difficulties at times and sometimes they manifest in different ways. So this systematic review, what how do we try to explore the positives? We wanted to identify any evidence in any research on ADHD which included a positive reference to living with ADHD traits or symptoms. So really broad and open. Now because this was a broad and open question and we looked at seven large databases of research, we ended up coming back with about 15,800.

Articles. This was naturally massive undertaking. So some of those articles we could sort of discount just based on title, some of those we could discount based on the abstract, and that took a good chunk of time to truly discount as many thousands of those as we could. And one of the unfortunate realities that came out was that only 36 research papers at that time were included for our analysis, our our deep dive analysis, because only 36 research papers in 2,001 truly had any strong connection with positive ADHD traits. This meant that one in every 1,300 papers specifically asked a question about positives, and this is one of those problems that I'm going to bring up in the ADHD research when we're talking about positives is that.

Historically, we haven't even asked the question about what the positives might be. Most of the researchers looked at how do you struggle? What are your lived experience of impairment? What is hard about living with ADHD? What's the worst things? How do you fail academically? But not, what's the best thing about having ADHD? Where do you feel like your strengths lie? So that sort of historic lack of questioning about positives of ADHD has led to a situation where in the research, we didn't have a lot of discussion about positives. We didn't have loads of truly robust evidence that we could use to answer this question, which is one of the core problems. But answer that question, we certainly tried.

What did we find? What positives did come out and are now continuing to come out in research as it has emerged since 2020, 2021? One of the core themes that we found in our research with ADHD and ADHD traits is so many people talked about energy and speed as a positive. They talked about the fact that they when they have because they have ADHD, because they're more hyperactive, they're more hyperkinetic thinkers, they were more spontaneous and that spontaneity allows us to act quickly, think fast, and respond in ways and jump on opportunities in ways that other people may not. We are a lot of us are being described as quick thinkers, quick on our feet. One of the reasons why we might see a lot of people with ADHD is in comedy.

Is because of that quick witted, quick thinking, divergent, bouncing off the wall thinking that allows them to respond in action with less preparation. And this quickness goes into other areas as well from a physical perspective, having a benefit in sports and a benefit in sort of what they call high scan variable attention, so being able to look around at different threats and and what might be happening in the game, and then respond more quickly or impulsively, more or hyper hyperactively in a way that gives you a competitive edge. There are also some evidence for high pressure environments, thinking about sort of high tension, high pressure environments.

In the police, in health care, in academia, in delivering conference presentations to thousands of people. These links also come with high energy just generally and how that can link to academic performance, being able to train harder, faster, longer than others, or at least feeling like they are able to. And a lot of people talked about the feeling of hyperactivity or hyperkinesis, feeling quite positive when not being stifled by society and societal expectations and being able to live that hyperactivity in your environment. So being in a work environment when you can walk around and do what you want and stand up, that being quite a positive experience for some people. When we go from and then finally, being a skilled multitasker.

Being able and this is one of those interesting things that a lot of the psychological research would argue that the psychology research that people with ADHD are poorer at multitasking. But when you ask people with ADHD, they consider themselves to be quite good at multitasking depending on what those tasks are and depending on the different sort of cognitive loads, what they're doing doing sort of multiple really high executive functioning complex tasks might not be the best place for them, but being able to have a conversation while watching the telly while doing something else, feeling more skilled in sort of those more low executive functioning related tasks.

From energy and speed, we move on to creativity. There's a lot being talked about in creativity and ADHD right now, and I think what we have to be mindful of is looking at what do we mean by the term creativity. Cause the research evidence that came out was that people described fear being more creative, increased creativity, both in an artistry perspective, so, you know, the arts and cultural perspective, but also in that divergent thinking, being able to think outside of the box, not just being sort of trapped in linear one dimensional thought processes, but being able to think of ideas that end up making a million pound. You know, these are why we see Silicon Valley large organizations specifically scouting neurodivergent.

Talent for that out of the box nonlinear divergent thinking, which might be a major sort of breakout thought leader approach which is incredible when that is nourished and supported. A lot of people talked about, you know, ADHD allows you to see the world differently, and when you see the world differently, you can approach the world differently. Now this can become problematic in some areas, especially in some social contexts, but being able to see the world differently can allow you to respond to it differently and challenge some of those social norms, and I'll come back on that topic later. I really like this one, this idea that mind wandering is a problematic.

Symptom of ADHD as a disabling impairment pairing symptom, and it absolutely can be. However, mind wandering, you know, daydreaming is often a requirement for novel thought, for creative new thought. We often talk about how our best ideas are found when we're in the shower, when we're driving, when we're doing something else. Well, a lot of people with ADHD often feel like they're often doing something else. And if you're in an environment or a job or a position where you are allowed to do that, academia being one, the creative arts being one, being a writer, being a comic book strip artist, in those situations, being a musician, that mind wandering can be beneficial and a strength. As one an incredible speaker once said to me, curiosity.

Was Ned Hallowell, the mind does not go empty, it goes elsewhere. This idea that people with ADHD have these sort of like blank brains, are filled with fuzz, some often it's just elsewhere, it's not on the topic that's being requested of them by society at that time. From creativity, we found another strong theme of resilience, and I and I really love this one, this idea that people with ADHD have increased levels of determination. I think in part because we've often have to had to fight a lot of fights. We've had to push against a lot of societal struggles. I think this is particularly relevant relevant looking back at a wonderful.

Talk earlier about how when you an intersectional lens to this, a racial lens to this, a gendered lens to this, this becomes an even greater potential strength if allowed to heal and grow in a way that is not crushing and overwhelming. Go back to that higher tolerance for chaos and ambiguity, many of us are more effective in chaotic environments or high stress environments, varied environments where every day is different, you see more ADHDers in places like the police, nursing, teaching, public speaking, places where there is a everyday is different and there is an expectation for you to always be on your toes and thinking on your feet, that's where you see more of us.

Again, thinking about what other types of roles come in mind for the audience members, like, is your role one of those? One of the the other big findings was being different as a positive. This belief that being told that we're different is if it's a is if it's a negative problematized thing, but retaking that language and turning that into a positive of actually, many people see ADHD as a as a personality enhancer, makes them different, unique, it makes them unusual, it makes them odd, it makes them vibrant, it makes them exciting. No a lot of parents I would speak to would say that my children are never boring. My life is never boring and that it can be draining and overwhelming, but certainly not boring.

And ADHD as our neurodivergent people are more likely to combat those social norms. More likely I'm curious about some research evidence in doing a project looking at whether people with ADHD are more likely to be involved in social justice movements such as things like Black Lives Matter, the LGBTQ plus movement, or veganism. And whether those who have been unfairly treated by society, ADHDers, are more likely to fight for others. ADHD makes you an individual. That that is some power in that. Morphun. One word that came up quite often, which I thought was interesting, bubbly. A bubbly personality. And for parents who who are neurodivergent, who have ADHD, there's this there's some emerging evidence that having an ADHD child.

And having ADHD yourself increases parental ability, I. E. It improves your resilience, your problem solving, your levels of maturity, your communication, assuming that things aren't too difficult and too challenging if you are pushing that sort of zone of proximal development, that place where it's not too hard, but it's hard, you end up developing really unique skills that can make you a a more stronger parent in some of these areas. Some discussion on empathy, and I've heard a couple of things about the criminal justice system today already, and some emerging evidence that and we found some evidence that those with ADHD have increased empathy, or at least feel like they have increased empathy, but that empathy.

May not look the same as it does for everyone else. Know, we might be very highly social and really aware of people people's difficulties, but getting it wrong in that social situation. So struggling with things like friendships, but deeply wanting and needing them, and being a linchpin friend for your friend group. Having a greater awareness of those bigger picture issues linking back to our social justice movements. And as I've said earlier, I'm curious, is there an increased likelihood of involvement? We don't fully know that yet. There's then we need more evidence, we need more research in this topic. So if there's any academics in the room, give me a shout. I'd be curious to look at some projects on this area.

We talk a lot about risk taking in ADHD. You know, impulsivity being connected or with this idea of risk taking, and very often when we certainly in healthcare, when we talk about risk taking, it's it's done with this air of problem of something that we want to avoid. People with ADHD take more risks, they you you use more substances, they're more likely to be in a car accident, they they're more likely to take a risk that leads leads them to financial strain. And that is true and we can't deny that. But on the flip side of that is positive risk taking. Increased impulsivity leading us to take risks that societally are seen as positive. What is a positive risk in society? Well, entrepreneurialism and entrepreneurship.

Where there's a huge now growing body of evidence in ADHD and entrepreneurialism and entrepreneurship are people with ADHD are more likely to be self employed, they're more like than average, they are more likely to be business owners, they are more likely to own multiple business. I think it not unexpected that many of the speakers today who have had careers or have careers are also business owners, CEOs. They are thought leaders, you know, that we these are the types of places and these are the type of things that we do, but it doesn't have to be at this big sort of conceptual conference academic y level. Business owning in ADHD can be opening up your your coffee business in coffee cart in a in a market, that is risk taking.

Doing something that you really love, opening up a plushy store, opening up a vegan bakery, like risk and ADHD go hand in hand. But what we need to be mindful of and cognizant of is the contextual risk and the scaffolding of risk. So taking a risk is safer for some people than it is for other others. Opening your own business is safer for someone who has other forms of financial security than those who do not. And that's why you would see things like access to work and other forms of governmental funding being able to supporting ADHD business owners or disabled business owners with the acknowledgement that if you have these diagnoses or these conditions, you face additional barriers that are non normative, so to speak.

This idea of impulsively changing your career for greater fulfillment, just leaving your job without fully thinking through why, but not putting up with and taking a dissatisfying life, or dissatisfying situation, or social situation. And this idea of million dollar or million pound ideas, you know. We talk a lot about our truly exceptional billionaire millionaire ADHDers and and there is absolutely a place for that, but we also have to recognize there's a lot of privilege in those places, and I love what Atif said earlier about what about those those leaders, those wonderful individuals who don't look on in a position of sort of visibility, but are still brilliant in their families, brilliant in their communities, brilliant.

In their clubs, in their sport clubs, they're supporting in supporting the people around them, but not on the cover of a magazine or on a all classified all over social media. I've I love this. This is probably my favorite theme. This idea when we talk a lot about sort of fixed interest, specialist interest, and that being more of an autistic trait and yet so many ADHDers experience this. This acute passion and enthusiasm for your specific interest. What I've put on here is the amount of pages that I have read over since 2013 because one of my specialist interests is reading. I absolutely adore books, I've got tattoos of books on my arms. You'll notice the little dip in the middle from sort of 2017 to 2021.

That was doing a PhD, that kind of gets in the way of your reading a little bit, but typically I would read around about 51 to sort of 75 books to 52 to 75 books a year. I'm on track with about 49 right now. I'm reading Moby Dick right now as just as you do. Like, so when you have this acute passion and enthusiasm for your specific interest, that leads to having a good memory for the things that interest you. How many of your ADHD children and ADHD friends can list every single character of their favorite anime or cartoon or dinosaur or how many have really good knowledge of the video game that they're playing at that moment or their favorite wrestlers or their show.

Almost at an unusual atypical level, like real deep memories, real deep thought processes, being really good at those things that interest them, being excellent at those things that interest them because you're more able to put in so much extra time because you almost can't get enough of it. You can't get enough of the thing that interests you, so you just keep doing it and keep doing it, and you do it more than the average person. And we see these high levels of enthusiasm for the thing that interests them. Now, know Atif as well talked about, like, our capitalistic society and how if the thing that interests you is something that is sort of can earn you money.

Well then that becomes something that we cherish and we support and we love and we go, oh, brilliant, you're gonna be a mathematician, you're gonna be this, you're gonna be an engineer, you're gonna be brilliant. But also, what about those who are just exceptional at things that are incredibly passionate about things that are not money makers or production makers, but create joy and create love and create sort of passion for our people, for for everyone. And we often talk about hyper focus as sort of over focused attention and hyper focus being a positive. Being able to be highly productive. I know that I'm.

Talking myself as a as a an academic talking about robust evidence based things, but thinking about my own personal experience, you know, during my PhD when I'm writing, I would be incredibly productive for an hour at midnight, and I would get so much work done in that one hour that others might struggle to do for three or four hours, and then I'd need to not look at it for a day. So I'd need I'd have these ebbs and flows of hyper focus and when you can channel and utilize that hyper focus on a thing that is of interest to you, that is also helpful to you, it can be just a wonderful sort of matching of what you want and then what is wanted of you by society, whether that be your job or your family. But also recognizing.

That you can't hyper focus all the time and that leads to things like burnout. So we need to be mindful of that. And as I've just said, that linking to high productivity. But what does productivity look like if an organization or a job role requires you to, for instance, write down all of your projects and write down in sort of narrative text form, prose form, your findings that you might appear to be very unproductive. You might appear to be really slow at your job and really struggle with your job because you struggle with the act of transferring your thoughts to the written word. But if you were allowed to talk it out, if you were allowed to use software that allows you to sort of speech to text software.

Then suddenly that productivity skyrockets. This idea of, you know, taking ADHD children and putting them in things like forest schools and teaching them not in a classroom, but in a different environment, and suddenly their production shoots up because we're teaching them in a way that is relevant and salient and interesting to them. Then we see what are typical measures of educational success at a higher rate. There are of course problems with that, but the research isn't necessarily talking about that just yet. So from there, when I spoke to Henry, he said to me, this is an incredible project, you did it in up until 02/2020. Wow. When are gonna publish it? And I said to him, it's a bit out of date now. It's been four years since then.

So I suppose I probably should probably start updating it. So I started updating this research and I've I've started some of this work, it's certainly not finished, but I pulled out some really salient papers and some really salient points, some really sort of vital bits of research that have been done since 2020 to see what's happening now. How have things changed in the last four years? Because they have changed in the research, it's it's wonderful. We are seeing significantly more research papers specifically asking about positives, specifically having a question in their interview schedules, their topic guides, their questionnaires.

With a positive slant to them, and even more exciting, are seeing papers specifically focusing on positives as the primary purpose. And some examples of that, we've got Ramji and Foster in 2023 talked about the strengths of ADHD in university students. Talking about this paper, I'm doing okay, the strengths and resilience of children with and without ADHD, and Chip Azertau talking about a qualitative and quantitative study of self reported positive characteristics of individuals with ADHD. When the words strengths and positives are in the title of a paper, it makes me so excited because we saw so few of them only four years ago, and now.

There are lists of them. Things are changing and I think that's really cool. I think that's really awesome that the research world is catching up with the narratives and the language that's being used in the charitable sector and social media and sort of what we call lay public, the general public perspective of these things. And I think what we have to be careful is continue to have that measured approach in the research and that and that measured approach of what is actually about the ADHD and what are just personality traits, what is what is independent of the ADHD that are strengths of individuals.

Maybe for some people that ADHD symptom was was an impairment or a difficulty and not a strength, and for someone else it might be. So these papers, I'm gonna go through them just quite quickly. What found what did they find? Courage was one of the findings, you know, this adventurousness, this justice, nonconformist, proactive integrity, these themes came up in our review, but continue in the research now. Humanity, our theme was empathy, but humanity, kindness, love, social intelligence. A need to seek self actualization, this idea that seeking a diagnosis helps us to seek a way to conceptualize and understand ourselves as we are not an abnormal neurotypical, we are a normal neuro atypical.

That's one of the lines in one of these papers. Now there are some, again, some difficulties and some problems with the language of neurotypical versus neuro atypical, neurodivergent, non neurodivergent, but fundamentally, people are looking for language that helps them to understand themselves. Oh, I'm not I've been using the wrong metric to judge myself for so long, and that's what we see a lot in our adults who are late diagnosed. Vitality, again, we said energy and speed. Vitality, it's it's showing up consistently. Cognitive dynamism dynamism, jeez, the ability to think on your feet, think quickly. And with that wisdom and knowledge, creativity comes back in again, but from a cognitive intellectual perspective, a love of learning.

In one of the other papers, one of the things that I found really interesting in this in paper, which was was that they looked at the resilience scores and how the self reported strength scores of children with ADHD and children without ADHD, and what they found was a lack total lack of difference between those children. Actually, this idea that this this belief that ADHD children are are have much lower resilience, they have they see themselves as having less strengths, they didn't necessarily find that. Children with ADHD are typically doing just as well as children without ADHD in terms of their self reported strength and resilience.

Some of that language is getting through to our young people now. Some of the language of this is not just the disability focused, impaired focused, you are the problem, you need to conform, is not quite as strong as it was perhaps when I was in education and and really had a challenging educational journey in early education. They also said, which is what I said at the start of this talk, that deficit focused research has contributed to this negative perspective on ADHD within the community, the research and the healthcare and educational community. When all of your research talks about how bad it is to have ADHD.

It's really blooming hard for people to feel good about it, and it's really hard for academics and psychiatrists and psychologists and teachers to believe in some of the positives they're saying because they don't have the the evidence to do so. They don't have the real research evidence to back that up. They just have what they're reading in newspapers, etcetera. In the final paper, those same topics come up. Creativity. Being dynamic. Being high energy. This idea of novelty seeking. Now novelty seeking can be a problem when that novelty comes to from dopamine experiences, high dopamine experiences such as, you know, substance use or alcohol use, but it becomes a wonderful.

Life experience when that novelty seeking means that our ADHD has, we're more likely to be mountain cross, motocross riders, and more likely to work with Red Bull, and they're more likely to be in extreme sports, and skateboarding, and high diving. As an example, you know, I've been bungee jumping, I've been skydiving, my poor mom is constantly scared for my my well-being because that thrill seeking is to to such a higher level than average. And again, talking not about every person with ADHD, but certainly for many of us, that idea is seek novelty, seek excitement. What is the next best thing, the next most exciting thing? That can lead to some wonderful experiences and to some really sort of well rounded individuals who have traveled.

Not just the the geographic world, but the sort of intellectual world. This isn't just about learning, it's about exploring. Flexibility, they found, you know, it comes back to those same topics, speed, spontaneity, being open minded, being pro social, these socio effective skills, being empathic. And one of the things that comes up quite often in our increased empathy discussion around ADHD is, yes, we have that sort of human to human empathy, that idea of being mindful and caring about bigger picture concepts, about social justice concepts, but also empathy towards, for certainly from children, younger children, empathy towards those who are not on the same seen as peers.

But those who are seen as more vulnerable, pro social behavior towards animals. This idea of children with ADHD absolutely adoring their pets, think I one of the aspects of that that's important is we talk about man's best friend, this idea of like, what do dogs never do? Or what do animals never do? Well, they never judge you. And that allows for love and true sort of empathy to flourish cross species almost. This idea of higher order cognitive skills, hyper focus, being analytical, being a quick learner if taught correctly. And that's one of the things that we also need to bear in mind is like, these potential strengths, they exist and they are real and they can be life affirming and life changing.

But what we really need to ensure we do as a society is nurture them because it's really hard to see someone's strengths when we are constantly telling someone how crap they are at other things, how bad they are at this, how much they fail at this, how their symptoms are a problem for everybody else, how they cause disruption in classrooms. When we focus on those things, those potential strengths get masked and hidden, and like those researchers who were never looking for those strengths, as parents, as professionals, as clinicians, we stop seeing those strengths and stop the potential of seeing those strengths because we're looking at those difficulties and those problems.

And they are clouding our views. So we need to be open minded with this without being overly optimistic and denying the real lived experiences of difficulty and of challenge. And I wanna just sort of come to a gentle end for the potential of some questions of that if we don't look for any positives, we won't find them. If we are not looking for a different way of thinking about these things, we will not find it. And I wanna touch very lightly on my experience and that I was I described my my early life as attachment focused and loving and supporting for my family and institutionally abusive and and traumatic from an educational perspective. This idea that, you know, even with a diagnosis.

Being told that you are the problem by education so often, being told that I was a poor learner, that I couldn't be taught, that I was I shouldn't be in school, that I'm not right for school. And then when I was 15 years old, being recognized as gifted and talented by a wonderful set of teachers, mister McGowan, missus missus Wright and mister Spurs, recognizing that actually, I would have some amazing strengths in my academic ability, but that had been ignored and hidden for fifteen years. And because I it was clouded by this idea of how much of a problem I was. And I want to end on this idea of stories and the story around ADHD and the research has been one of deficit for so long, that is changing. The story of ADHD in society.

Is also changing in nuanced and complicated ways. And I think we, as a group of however many thousand people are here, have the ability to alter and adjust that story and start looking at positives. And I'd like us to start changing that story because my story very easily could have been one, like the what we've heard of earlier of failure and of struggle, and yet, my ADHD related strengths and the sort of unconditional love of my family, and the wonderful alternative stories that were given to me by teachers of being good at some things, that is what changed my story. It was individuals, it wasn't systems. And I'm happy to end off there if there are any questions.

Oh, there is. I'm sure there there are. I'll give a quick update on our current cumulative live views. 19,074, the live thing at the top which tells me that to be completely honest, I'm not quite sure if it's 19,000 is our total that have come to see Okay. Or 19,000 is the current. Like, that's almost suspicious. But regardless, it's a fantastic number. But I loved that. Exactly what was needed on the just yeah. And it's a very, very powerful point at the end where you talk about if we only look for negatives, that's all we're gonna find. In the and we do. And it's brilliant. It's brilliant work. Like, could can't you get two page? Surely that's worth another PhD. Can't you be doctor doctor?

Well, one of the things that I would say is doing a PhD with ADHD, myself and a number of colleagues have done it, I know I've spoke to now dozens of people, it's a really interesting journey in itself. There are some unique challenges and some wonderfully unique benefits that come from doing a PhD, and one of the things that I think is really fascinating, I'm gonna I am gonna touch on this, was that in education, we are bombarded with what we need to know at what time, geography at 10:00, math's at 11:00, humanities at twelve, we have to do a certain thing at a certain time and you need to always be learning and there is no real time in the typical educational journey for creativity, for you to just think and act and be, and yet.

You get to PhD level and when you're doing a doctoral thesis where the expectation is that you make an original contribution to knowledge, you bring something that has never been seen in sort of research before, that's what a PhD the expectation of a PhD is, and you get five three or five years to do that, you are told and expected to put time in your diary to think, to be, to have a coffee and have a chat with other people, to explore, to go down rabbit holes of research that you think you're going be writing about, and you do that for three months, and you write thousands of words on what you think is going be really integral, and then you throw it all away because actually it turned out it wasn't. But that.

Tangent that you went down is expanding your sort of intellectual horizons. It's it's developing your intellectual ability. That's that's expected. But we don't get that freedom until doctoral level, not really. And that's often felt quite backwards to me, that we should have that freedom all the way through. And that freedom might look very different for the child with ADHD who ends up becoming a world class comedian because ADHD is over represented in comedy and in sort of professional comics. And where in your educational journey until 18 do you have the ability to celebrate not just celebrate, but develop your comedy skills, to develop your ability to be a comedian, to be on stage that isn't just drama. And we don't celebrate.

The types of roles and skills that we see so many and we don't nurture them, that we see so many ADHD as going into and neurodivergent people going into. You know, these these ideas of where do we develop the skills of being a YouTuber or content creator or an an athlete, but in a non normative sport? You know, in The UK, it's football predominantly or tennis. In other countries, the dominant sport is something else. But what about chess? What about Warhammer? What about being a dungeon master in Dungeons and Dragons? What about being a short story writer? What about doing comic book strips? What about being a barista? What about all these different ways in which our ADHD strength our strengths and interests can be nourished.

That isn't just the standardized educational perspective of what we need to know by a certain time? Because you're allowed to do that. That was sort of I hate to use this term, it's like sort of upper echelons of education. In academia, that's celebrated, but in first school, that's punished. Anyway.

It's a big it's a big point. Actually, someone has commented in put a put a comment in saying Stuart saying, I eventually got a joint honors degree, but failed my a levels the first time around. Yeah. We.

We see this we see this so quite often because in education well, we see a couple of things. One thing that we see is people being less likely to get into university when they have ADHD.

And people being more likely to drop out in the first year. Now I had a a conversation with the head of disability in one sorry to talk. And the head of disability with the Russell Group, and they talked exactly your point just then of lots of people diagnosed in the in the first year and looking to get the support of realizing they had ADHD because the scaffolding is no longer there from school, particularly parents and the structure of school. And suddenly, they're struggling and expected to do a lot, and they don't have any of the instructors to do. I asked them, what do you do? And they said, what do you do with the kids who come to you already with a diagnosis of ADHD? They said, And it was a devastating answer. The answer was.

We don't get many of those.

Mhmm. Well, one of the things that I've been doing in this space, because this is something I'm I'm really passionate about working in higher education, is we've I've developed the role of neurodiversity champion for equality diversity inclusion within nursing midwifery and to look at how can we better support neurodivergent students and neurodivergent pupils and staff, especially considering those who may not have a diagnosis or who may be seeking a diagnosis. We talked a lot about diagnostic rates and wait times in this conference, and how you might have a student in first year who we think might have ADHD, and then they're told, well, you might get a diagnosis in three to five years. Their degree is finished by that point. So how can we.

As universities, as as educational institutes, how can we support those people without needing labels? And we should be able to do that and we can do that, but what one of the things that requires is knowledge and education of ourselves as academics as well, you know, not everyone has this sort of knowledge that I have or like peers that have in mental health nursing when you think about as a mathematics academic, or a geographer, or an ancient history lecturer, you might never have come abreast of ADHD as a concept, really, in your life. So we need to support academics to be able to support our students.

We do. We had there was an instance about must be now about a year ago. The GP at Cambridge University decided to write an op ed in one of the news saying that too many too many students at Cambridge were getting ADHD diagnosis. And the main reason she thought that was happening was so that people could not have to take their exam in in the main hall. And I think I think that's the main main grudge. Just like of all the things to get annoyed about Yeah. Because sometimes people go, well, it's not like that in, you know, these adjustments like exams. Like, you you we're not you don't get that in real life in the workplace. And I one, people need to understand that there are workplace adjustments and you do get things in real life.

And two, I think you'll find that an exam hall isn't exactly a great proxy for the business environment. Any form of professional environment at all, yeah. Yeah. And the great hall at Cambridge, the least you know, how many people are going to medieval halls to do their daily work? It's just such a ridiculous premise. We work with some students to create a response to go in. This person didn't work at the university, but was influential on some of the boards. And and we said Cambridge has been home to an extraordinary diversity of minds over centuries. Mhmm. And that diversity of mind and diversity of thought is what has made Cambridge and has made many other universities famous. And we should celebrate that we are Cambridge.

Itself is working to have a wider neurodiversity of minds and wider diversity of ideas because that's that is where the future will the future of new ideas. And that's not saying that new ideas come from neurodiversity. It's just saying neurodivergent. It's just saying that diversity wise, that that's how you get new ideas. That's the whole Yep. And and hello, I this.

I spoke I've brilliant. I spoke to I've spoken to so many PhDs, so many professors with ADHD, so many that are coming out of this sort of woodwork so to speak, and talking openly because we have forums for that now, we have sort of an acknowledgement that we exist in academia, we exist and we have always existed, but now we exist much more openly and we talk about it much more openly, which is a wonderful step in the right path. Right?

If it's the ones who who weren't able also to get through backwards, and I know that's one of your passion points is getting that support to people who are struggling. Well, you've got fans. I've got in some of the comments. It's funny to hear Tom, sorry, so similar to mine. And a lot of people talk about how fantastic you are and how wonderful the presentation was. Thank you. Delight. We've had someone asking about any new links to ADHD and empathy. Like, people talking about how they feel that well, particularly think of ADHD and social justice. I do see it as a positive or a negative. I guess, I think it's definitely double edged swords.

I I agree. I I think it could. We don't know for certain exactly why that might be happening. I suspect there may be an element of when you are neurodivergent, you have often faced quite a lot of adversity in society's systems and institutional spheres, whether that be healthcare, education, the criminal justice system, whether that be in your in your culture, in your communities, and so often those who have faced a lot of adversity get this sort of sensitized perspective of justice and this really strong sense of justice, of fairness. Now you you you add in something like sort of quite cognitively rigid thinking that you might see from someone who's neurodivergent, perhaps more sort of on the autism spectrum, and you see clear.

Paths of this isn't fair, and things that aren't fair are not okay, so well, we need to do something about that. And it becomes almost like simple, you just have to do something about it. And these sort of social barriers to supporting social justice movements become less obvious to you or less important to you because the deep sense of unfairness and justice, it it allows us a way to to I I often don't like using language that's very sort of evocative of fighting, but like fight back. It allows us to take the pain that we have felt, take the challenges that we have faced and turn that into something where we can make change for the better. You know, one of the my sort of core tenets to my entire approach is I wouldn't want.

A child, any child to have the educational journey that I had, the early educational experiences, that's what sort of drives me. So to to have that driving force which like leads to everything I do today, which is wonderfully positive today, but to actually have that driving force was because of challenges and and and a diversity that was faced earlier on in my life. So you're absolutely right, there is this double edged sword to it of is that just a sensitivity, a byproduct of the injustice that we have faced coupled with a more rigid sort of black and white thinking of how to respond to it. I'm not sure. I don't know.

But that's that's certainly an area which would be fascinating to explore from multiple different perspectives, sociological, psychological, etcetera.

It is. You've been amazing. Like, we've hit the time. Trying to run rigorously this time. Experience tells me that if you're running a twenty four hour continuous conference, if you go out of time, you're out of time forever. Like, it just gets worse and worse. And I have to hand over to to back on on schedule. You've been amazing. I thought that was really interesting. It was a great self to talking about all the challenges and talking to the bosses. I thank you for the work you've done. Thank you for updating it, for coming here, for doing this. It's absolutely spectacular. Thank you.

Thank you. A wonderful rest of the conference, and good luck to everyone in the audience. Wish me luck. We still I got well, it's actually overachieved on quality content.

We've already got twenty six hours, I think. So it's it's twenty six and a half, I think. Let's see. Let's see how I look tomorrow.

Great. Thanks. Coffee in. Right. See you later, Henry. Take care, everyone.