Spoken before. He is he is absolutely exceptional. He's done something he is exceptional, and he's done something exceptional. It's so he has ADHD, and he's founded and runs London Met Police's ADHD workplace support group. It's the largest workplace support group in the country. And it has 600 police officers in it, and it is now catalyzing groups across into other Met police sorry. So only one Met police. Other police forces across the country. And I believe in total number around a thousand individuals in them. It's now the other thing about being the police is you're because of the failure in education, we see a lot of people, and we have a talk specifically talked to it about the pipeline from education into crime by.

Author of a book of the same name, and it's just been published. We have massive problems of people falling out of education into crime. We have we know that forty percent of people in youth offending institutions have ADHD. We have a number of saying that twenty five percent of people in prisons have ADHD, although you're gonna be hearing later from ADHD Liberty, an a a prisons focused ADHD charity. They think that number is much, much higher. And so the other thing Daley and his colleagues do is meet a lot of ADHD people try to promote that. So he's gonna talk to us as well. He's waiting in the wings. So without further ado, I'm gonna bring him in. Hello, Daley.

Hello, Amy. How are you doing? Yeah. Great. Great to see you. And you. Tanya was brilliant, wasn't she? Absolutely fantastic. I'm up, You know, I talk a lot about reasonable adjustments and stuff within the workplace, so hearing her speaking was absolutely amazing. And thank you for having us, and thank you for everything that ADHD UK does. I think your website and certainly the guide around diagnosis and right to choose is probably the most shared link that we give out because it's very, very informative. So, yeah, thank you. Thank you. And, obviously, we we are in the business of trying to make that a completely pointless.

Page because you shouldn't need to do it. Right? You should have a good local ADHD service that you can go to reliably. Not like here where I sit today where I can't even join the wait list, or in Oxfordshire where people the GPs, because they don't have support for annual reviews, are about to cliff drop all their patients who have ADHD medication. As soon as you hit your annual point, you're going to be medication is going to be taken as an option to be removed from you. And obviously what we're telling people is look at Right to Choose and move so that you're being supported.

But it has to be outside of your area. Absolutely. Right to Choose was invented to erase the postcode lottery. It was to say you can see other parts of the NHS regardless of where you are. But thank you for talking to her. And actually that does remind me, someone put into the chat and I did a good job of pinning it. So a question to Henry, would he be advocating for ADHD more publicly? I do not know how I could do it more publicly, just saying, but like, I find it change. The many people are really struggling, I've done news until I do not feel enough has been done. I can tell you like, we I do every single regardless if it's, like, the tiniest blog to the, you know, biggest BBC news show. I I don't like we do them all. Like, and.

Every single thing we're invited to do, we do we do it on purpose to want we wanna make change. We also work with organizations, particularly news, to do research to prove a point where we're seeing an issue. We will go out and do research. And actually, thank you to everyone who does that research, because we mostly do it online, particularly on Facebook. We so the research itself is on our site, which is promoted on Facebook.

Because those become numbers which are then used to prove a point where we're talking about people struggling to get medication, we're talking about wait list times in different areas, like when we're talking about being dropped off a cliff between CAMS and adult services where we know that lots of children get dropped for two years. Like it's not a story unless we can do two things, which is.

Show some numbers that prove it's a bigger problem than just one person talking. And actually talking to one person, we also do need one person talking. We they want to talk to a case study who hasn't talked to another news service before often or particularly on that not on that story. And so those people who aren't saying, yeah, I'm up for talking. It's a big deal. Do do do it. And it it really genuinely is. We'll find that some stories won't happen because they don't have a case for it. They don't have a case study. Often it's a local. So just this week we're doing one for the Surrey area talking about issues around medication and CAMS. But so it is yeah. So honestly, we're doing everything.

We possibly can think of to do. If you see other things, let me know. Right. Daley, I thought I ruthlessly stole some of your time, of which I should be outrageously putting your mouth on. Yeah. He's literally someone who could arrest me, so, like, I should I should really play nice. You've got slides?

Yeah. Are they present? I I I think I've clicked the sharing link of my They will. And there they are.

I'm gonna put you you and I to one side. So I'm gonna hand over to Daley. He is absolutely incredible. And so not only has he found the Metropolitan Police, the largest both founded it and runs it. This is a big deal, so I'm really looking forward to hearing what he's what he's got to say. Over to you. Thank you, Henry.

Hello, everybody. Happy ADHD awareness month, month. Good morning tomorrow, Australia. Hopefully, some of you are joining us. As Henry said, yeah, I am DC Daley Jones, and I'm a detective in the police. And, yeah, when Henry so I had no idea that we were the country's largest ADHD workforce group until me and Henry were talking about the presentation I was gonna do. And I talked about the numbers we had, and Henry said it. And I think Henry probably attested to the fact I was quite shocked.

It's it's a it's a I attest to this fact. We're happy to be corrected in the in the chat too. So if you if you know of a bigger one, do you but I know I don't know one even close. And, obviously, we did talk to those troops soon.

If anyway But, well yeah. Pops up in the chat. I'll I'll fight them because I want I want that title now. But, anyway, just a little bit about me. First of all, I joined the police back in 2007, and that's me looking vaguely fresh faced there with hair and dreams. It was a bit of a culture shock. I'm from a small town called Hemmel Hempstead, which is.

At the time, wasn't particularly diverse. So it was a real culture shock for me, meeting people from different cultures and the like. But, you know, it shaped the person I am now, and and, hopefully, it shaped the way that I treat people as well. I've actually spent the majority of my career working in safeguarding. So that's anything from child abuse to domestic abuse and things like that. My job now is I currently review and audit public protection reports in the map. And that I will come back to that later because that does give me a bit of an insight around some of the sort of challenges. Forgive me. Oh, I just realized this next bit slightly on the wonk, ADHD. Outside of work, I I love history. I did a degree in history at university.

I probably like history a little bit too much. I'm in a civil war enactment group. That's me and my gear there. And, yeah, I'm a big fan of collecting weird and wonderful football shirts, with my brother. It's, we started, because we didn't know what to buy each other, and it sort of sparked a bit of tradition. So much so the BBC actually wrote a a an article about it once. I think it was a very ADHD thing to do. Yeah. Me and my brother both diagnosed ADHD. And that yeah. With the hereditary link in it, it doesn't shock me at all. I'm immensely proud of him and his, journey, through neurodivergence. My own personal journey to getting diagnosed. I was seeking counseling way back in 2014 after the breakup of, a relationship.

And if anyone here watching has ever been to counseling at all, you think you're gonna go in and talk about one subject. What actually happens is you talk about everything. And it was as I was there, sat there talking about everything and certainly certainly some of the sort of challenges I have around my emotional dysregulation, organizational skills, challenges at school, university, and in work. But the counselor turned around to me and said, has anyone ever told you you probably got ADHD? As a real light bulb moment, It meant a lot to me. But because I've got ADHD, I didn't I procrastinated and didn't do anything with that information. I actually left policing back in 2017. I had a job opportunity to go and do something else, and.

It went quite badly wrong. And one of the theories I have about ADHD, obviously, it being, you know, present. It's hereditary. It's always there. Is that often the traits of the condition and some of the maybe the more challenging traits of the condition can be quite well managed if you're in a sort of stable role. When I left policing and the sort of structure and the sort of knowledge I had of doing that into something different, I really, really struggled. It's also fair to say that employer wasn't particularly inclusive. I'll say no more. I was eventually got around to getting diagnosed via the Right to Choose scheme, and I probably went on Henry's website, on ADHD UK to get it. We've combined ADHD at the age of 36.

I'm 40 now. I know it's incredibly hard to believe with my Hollywood good looks. It made a lot of sense to me, my ADHD diagnosis, obviously. I'd already been told. But what I found is I kept meeting people who are really creative, are really good at doing things in their hands, really, really good at sort of artists and drawers, and I've got none of those things at all. These things are effectively useless. So it was a great relief to be diagnosed with dyspraxia a year later. It makes complete sense to me. As a police officer, I have to do officer safety training, every every year. You know, I'm more a desk jockey these days. Desk jockey, not desk jockey. I wanna make that quite clear. You know, my initials are DJ. Anyway, ADHD. If.

Officer safety trainer is trying to demonstrate, like, a handcuff technique or some sort of restraint technique in front of me, I cannot mirror what they are doing. So I have to kinda stand behind them. If they don't know what I'm doing or if I've not explained it, Greg, is very, very confusing for them. Long time before I got anywhere near an ADHD diagnosis, I was medicated for anxiety. I still take anxiety medication now. I talk about that because I it I think it's, you know, I don't it does not something that bothers me particularly, and I, you know, see it as my job to try and break down stigmas around mental health.

Henry's mentioned ADHD Liberty, and I you know, I know Sarah's gonna be coming to talk about their work. I'm a trustee of their charity, and I take medication for my ADHD as well. I take. So, had the same fun as a lot of people did around sort of recent shortages. I know they've not been resolved. I know for our membership that caused an incredible amount of stress, and, yeah, it was it was not been a fun time. So what happened, and this is sort of explaining how we came to sort of separate ADHD support group, is after I was diagnosed, I went and spoke to my my sergeant, my detective sergeant about it, a lovely lady called Sarah. I can't speak highly enough of Sarah. She's just a wonderful, kind, compassionate human being.

The challenge was, though, that she had no knowledge about neurodiversity at all. And there wasn't a lot of information as to sort of where I could get support within work. Now one of the first conversations I had was with occupational health. And they said to me, and we had a conversation, and they turned around and said, what reasonable adjustments would you like? I won't tell you what my exact response was because it involves a swear word that begins with f, but it was along the lines of you tell me. I haven't got a clue. I'm 36 years old. I've lived my life this way. And, yeah, I've just sort of been muddling on through. Could you tell me what recent lessons that exist? No one had a list of sort of things that were available.

So, yeah, I I I was absolutely clueless. I was directed to the Met's autism support group. Now they are wonderful. They've been around a little bit longer than we. We have brilliant people, to this day, they do incredible advocacy work for the autistic membership and the autistic community. But I sat in their sort of meetings and talking to people, and it didn't resonate with me. Autism, of course, there's lots of overlap in the neurodivergent conditions. We know that. They don't fit into neat little boxes. But what was being talked about and the sort of adjustments and this sort of thing did not make any sense to me. So I left a little bit sort of disappointed.

As I said before, I could not find any resources within our sort of intranet system or anything like that. But what I did quickly realize is I kept finding and speaking to other people who are in a very similar boat to me. So ADHD, obviously, sparkled of, you know, intuition and impulsivity. We just sort of said, well, we'll make our own support group. And back in February 2022, me and my colleague, Alex, does huge deserves a lot of credit because he is the creative one. I am the doer. We created the ADHD Alliance. Yeah. And very, very quickly, what we realized was that.

There wasn't really anything like us. So these very crude pictures here are from our very first meetings that we had. I've And actually got a little bit of a funny story around this first one. So we we hosted a coffee morning there. You see on the on the on the right of your screen, Scotland Yard. Pretty cool place to, host a coffee morning, to try and actually sort of, you know, get some people along, join our group. And I was so focused on this being going well and being good that I used to, always take my medication in the morning before leaving for work. So got ready, had my coffee and stuff, got in the car, and was just pulling off the driveway where I thought to myself.

You've not taken your medication. Ran back inside, took my medication, drove off. Coffee morning went really, really well. Did a little presentation. It's fair to say I felt brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Probably a bit too brilliant. Got to about lunchtime, and I started to not feel so good. Couldn't really work it out. Thought I might have eaten something a bit dodgy, resulted in me starting to get quite cold and shivery. I decided to leave work slightly early. And by the time I got home, I could sort of barely walk. It then dawned on me. That I had taken my medication, and I'd gone jumped from sixty milligrams of my medication to a hundred and twenty milligrams of my medication.

When I eventually got around to speaking to my doctor, my doctor said to me, if you told us this at the time, we would have probably sent you to a hospital. I was fine. I've had some very achy kidneys, but it did lead to a purchase of one of these. It's not gonna happen again because I've got my little windows, and I can see. If in doubt, don't take your medication daily. So we started to recruit. What what we found was sort of the following, really. We found that a lot of people come to our group had quite poor mental health. And the reason I mentioned my anxiety medication and the fact I have anxiety earlier on is because we found an incredibly large amount of people that were coming to our group had previously been diagnosed.

With depression or anxiety. There was incredible fear of stigma around telling anyone at work about their ADHD. I think this is a societal issue. It's nothing really to do with policing. I think there's still a lot of misunderstanding. Henry was talking earlier on about the media work he does, and I can attest to the fact that Henry does a lot. But the problem is you'll get one negative story about something like ADHD or one misconception by a celebrity, and it will unfortunately travel considerably further than people like Henry or some of the other experts out there. And that's the battle we're facing on a daily basis. ADHD is a fad.

You can catch ADHD by taking too much sugar. These are all things I'm sure you guys here have all heard before. And, also, it was certainly fair to say it was prevalent in my early years in policing that it was often seen as an excuse for bad behavior. I think that's still very much the case now in certain parts of society. I wish I knew now what I knew as I wish I knew then what I knew now. But there is still this massive fear of stigma. Now part of that fear is driven by some genuine cases of misunderstanding. Officers who had come forward and said that they had ADHD or had been diagnosed were immediately stopped from driving. Now what the DVLA legislation, DVLA.

Is our driving standards authority over the my friends in Australia there says that you should only really stop driving if your ADHD medication affects you. There's also officers restricted from doing their normal duties, like things like carrying taser, but with no real substance behind that. It was because of a lack of understanding and people just making knee jerk risk decisions. Now I'd be the first to admit that if someone takes a brand new medication or starts a new treatment plan, then might should be maybe some as a period, but not blanket. Just do it automatically. And that came from misunderstanding, I believe. No one knew how to get diagnosed, which is funny, actually, because when I spoke to my GP, way back when and.

Told him that I'd like a right to choose diagnosis, His words were, what's that? I'll call you back. Let me go and Google it, and came back and said, oh, actually, that's legitimate. So if that's a GP, you can imagine what it's like in policing and the amount of people I still meet who are still on waiting lists for three to five years, and we go, hang on a minute. Have you seen ADHD UK's website about page about Right to Choose? Oh my god. I can get diagnosed considerably quicker. What's a reasonable adjustment? I hear that from managers. We've heard that from managers and lots of people, you know, staff and police officers.

There seems to be a lack of understanding what the Equalities Act is, and that's a concern, obviously, because the Equalities Act is what protects us from discrimination. And it very clearly says that, you know, people with conditions like ADHD and the other neurodivergent conditions should be afforded reasonable adjustments, diagnosis or no diagnosis. The amount of times I've had to point that out to people in in policing is is quite quite scary. Another thing we've found as well is just a lot of people get pushed down a performance management pathway. People who have come forward and said, I have ADHD. I need to be diagnosed.

And at no point were they actually afforded any reasonable adjustments at all. And they're pushed down this pathway. When what often happens is in good scenarios, and funny enough, I had a conversation with a manager today about this, about a colleague that was having a struggle is that when they realized that there are reasonable adjustments and things that can be done to just aid people in the workplace, we've had amazing success stories of that person's performance magically being transformed. And as as Tanya was saying, a lot of these adjustments are actually quite minor little things. This is also true of promotion and job interviews in policing.

People not being aware of the adjustments that they could have. So I'll give you an example. In policing to get promoted, you need to do a certainly, as a sergeant inspector, a multiple choice law exam. It's awful. It's genuinely awful, especially for someone who's an overthinker. The only way I was able to pass that exam was by having a break in the middle of it. Literally did half the exam online. It went away. I went had an hour's break, got my focus back, and was able to then continue. And that's the only reason I passed the exam. Again, there's so many people who are unaware of these adjustments. And also often what we find is people who are not afforded the adjustments because they cannot prove their diagnosis.

I cannot think of an app any single other protected characteristic where you have to prove your protected characteristic other than disability and neurodivergence. Challenging work environments. A lot it's fair to say a lot of the police estate was not built with neurodivergence in mind. Open plan offices, crowded spaces, terrible lighting are often something that we people have to find as well. And another thing, and I will allude to this a bit more, is problematic language. Now my team at work is currently doing a piece of work around victim blaming language, language that is used that puts an emphasis of blame on the victim. Well, I also see quite a lot of language around neurodiversity and disability in general, which is.

Problematic at best, discriminatory at worst. And I'll talk a little bit about a survey we ran with our membership recently. The biggest discovery, though, and I'm a massive, Freddie Mercury fan, so any opportunity to get him into a presentation, here we are, was that neurodivergent people in policing and indeed the wider emergency services are absolutely rife. They are legion. They are everywhere. I have an interview for a new role. What accommodations can I ask for? How do I get diagnosed? Think I have ADHD. I'm trying to support one of my staff members with ADHD. These are some of the inquiries we get on a daily basis. And it we are we couldn't believe the amount of people that we were coming across who are neurodivergent within.

Our job. I'll move on to that a little bit more in a minute. I always like to use this slide around some of the things that a lot of people don't know about ADHD, and this is certainly very true around the training that we've done and the awareness sessions we've run. Now, obviously, you've got the three things there at the top of the iceberg, which most people know about. The one I always point out to people here in particular is, first of all, the self esteem. For thirty six years of my life, I genuinely believed I was stupid, lazy, and incapable of doing what other people would be doing.

At university, my housemate was doing the same course. A piece of coursework would come in. We'd both go and get all the books, and he would be able to sit there and just work on it. Whereas I would sit there and my brain would kick in and say, you've got two weeks to do this, Daley. Why do you need to do it now? Two weeks go by, and there's me running down the road to the history department with my essay on a floppy disk. Shows how long ago it was trying to get it in because I've done it so last minute. It has led to some pretty bad low self esteem issues, and that is something I've seen with the people we supported as well. And I'm gonna the other one I'm gonna point out, certainly, the biggest lesson for me was the emotional reactiveness.

Of of people with ADHD, and it's very true for me. I go from naught to 60 at the drop of a hat. What's frustrating for people, I've got room ready for an argument, is I also go from 60 to naught again just as quickly. Certainly understanding that, and then when we think about how that applies to people we might meet is a massive lesson. Certainly, in my personal relationships, understanding that side of things and the rejective sensitive dysphoria as well.

The fact that I read or hear something, and I will perceive it critically. My good lady wife, who is the most patient human being on planet Earth, will say something innocuous like, the dishwasher didn't go on last night, and I hear you didn't put the dishwasher on last night. In a professional sense, that has been an absolute nightmare for me, and learning about that has been an absolute game changer. And, again, this sort of awareness sort of talk situation around this sort of thing has massive repercussions in policing. Always this video gonna play. It might play. This is a video I always like to show. Fingers crossed it will play.

It's the best version, I think, of what I think ADHD looks like. I'm also conscious that it's got very dark in this room, so I'm just gonna put a light on if this will play for us.

It started raining in the pool, and I immediately thought, what a beautiful example of ADHD. You give me a task, and the task is that leaf. Alright. Focus on the leaf, not the dots. Just the leaf. Just the leaf. Just the leaf. Why is it taking you so long to complete that task? Well, because there's dots all around my little task that are constantly pulling my attention, and I don't have any control over that. Can you just watch the leaf?

The reason I like this video is because it works both for the people we support within the workplace, but also the people who are out there we meet on a daily basis on the street who might have ADHD. So workplace and scenario, example here is that leaf is a case file that I have to work on. I have ADHD. The idea of doing paperwork is not my, idea of a fun time. I, I have been asked to do it. So that's my leaf. I'm focusing on the leaf, but I'm sat in an open plan office. The phone is ringing.

Emails are going off. My personal phone is there. Someone's playing a radio. The police radio is turned up. There's a TV on for some strange reason. They are the raindrops. I'm not concentrating on that leaf at all. Taking it out to the street. If it was me who's the witness of a car crash, I'm still on a busy high street, and a police officer is trying to talk to me about what I've seen. Again, that police radio, if that's turned up, oh, that sounds like an interesting call. Cars passing, music blaring from a local bar. I'm not focused.

On what is going on. This is why reasonable adjustments come in. And reasonable adjustments for that person on the street might be turning the police radio down and speaking to the person in a slightly quieter place. And this is why when I tell you later on about mandatory training of policing, these little changes and how big a difference they make, it makes all of all of a stranger that, you know, it's not always the case around training. Sorry. I was jumping ahead of myself slightly there. I always include a slide about ADHD in women and girls because one of the things we found running a group is the amount of women who'd be completely missed, down that sort of neurodivergent, pathway, especially around ADHD. I think stereotypically.

Because it doesn't present as obviously as it does in in in men and boys. I'm told the ratio of diagnosis is one to three. And, you know, without that external hyperactivity, ADHD is often completely miss mistaken for hormones, anxiety, and mood disorders and learning disabilities. Of the other very interesting things that we have had a lot of people come for support from us around this is ADHD and the menopause. It's fair to say there you go. Changes in hormones during the menopause can exacerbate the traits of ADHD in women. It's so relevant that we actually have got a range of talks.

Coming up for ADHD awareness month. We've already started, and one of them is literally going to be about ADHD and the menopause from a lovely inspector from Derbyshire called Claire, because it's massive, and, it's something people should know a lot more about. Now why are there so many people in policing and emergency services work with ADHD? Well, here's a few little sort of examples of why and the traits of ADHD. Frill seeking. We are out there, seeking dopamine, however it might be. I can't think of many other jobs better equipped to give you that frill than emergency services work, blasting around in police cars or ambulances. For me, it was always the twenty four hours and on the pace clock.

You know, the amount of time I had to deal with someone in custody for a big case. That was what gave me my frill. The ability to change roles. I know so many people with ADHD outside of policing who've had about 25 jobs. I've had 25 jobs within policing. It's very good for that. Structure as well. Special interests. I know that's obviously a often more an autistic trait, but, you know, as I said, don't fit into neat boxes, and policing is definitely a career where you can have special interests. And then I think you've got that compassion and that desire to help others very much comes from often the challenges that we faced ourselves. Strong sense of justice in there as well, ideally suited.

Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons why you see so many neurodivergent people in emergency services work. Yeah. There you go. Love of the chase. I think Tanya mentioned it when she earlier on. We're trying to get away from the challenges and the negatives. I did briefly mention some earlier on, but these are some of the strengths, I think. You know, stability to see the world differently, the ability to make quick decisions, hypervigilance, problem solving. Certainly, one true for me, an endless, boundless amount of enthusiasm, relating to the people we meet because we do meet a lot of neurodivergent people. And it's fair to say if we support people with ADHD.

They can be incredible assets to the team. And this is something I'm trying to get the people who I work for to fully understand and embrace because we should be actively seeking out neurodivergent people. So any idea of how many neurodivergent people and people with ADHD are there are in policing? Unfortunately, not. No. Because we don't record that information. It's often recorded in recruiting, but then it's discarded. And in performance management and employment tribunals, it just gets put under disability.

And I think we're missing a bit of a trick here because I can't sit here and tell you how many neurodivergent people there are in policing. I genuinely believe it's considerably higher than what the would be in in in the general public, but I can only say that anecdotally. Henry's talked about the man the amount of members we have, and it certainly has been quite meteoric as a rise. I meet a lot of neurodivergent people on a daily basis. And I say a lot of them are undiagnosed, and a lot of them are unwilling to come forward. I genuinely believe there is incredibly large amounts of neurodivergent and ADHD people in policing. I did mention that I would be talking a little bit about the people that we meet.

So the statistic is often quoted is that currently in prison in in UK, twenty five percent of the people in prison have ADHD. However, as Sarah will obviously point out later on, and much to my belief, that figure is probably a low estimate. But even if let me were to say that that was the figure, one in four, that's huge. Most people I've spoken to would put it at sixty percent and higher. But there's evidence here to suggest that ADHD is linked to an early increase in early age criminality. I know not near Alexander Patterson will talk about that when when he's talking about his book. Certainly, an increased likelihood of reoffending.

An increase linked to aggressive incidents. I talked about that emotional dysregulation earlier on. You know, up to eight times, more prevalent. And then this is an obvious one. I've about anxiety and depression earlier on, a significant association with suicide and self harm. That's the sort of offender side. I said earlier on that my job and the work I do is mostly around safeguarding and auditing. And recently, we've been doing an audit around child exploitation cases. I cannot begin to tell you the amount of children who I have seen in reports who are being exploited in London who are ADHD and neurodivergent. We're people pleasers. We like to please. We love to frill. We love, you know, frill seeking.

Yeah. I think there's a multitude of reasons. And here's some quotes from a study that was recently published, well, published in February by the Center for Social Justice, and it's called criminal exploitation, modern slavery by another name. And it's very much pointing out that things like learning disabilities and neurodiversity are a big factor. Yeah. There you go. Young people with some form of neurodiversity can find it hard to navigate relationships, understanding social cues and communication, recognizing worrying behavior by others, and identifying risk. And, certainly, that identifying risk point is something I see, this complete willingness to ignore obvious risks.

And that is what can get young people into a incredibly large amount of trouble. Yeah. So I've talked a little bit about this already, but why do people with ADHD get into trouble? Well, thrill seeking. Now there's plenty of nice legal ways where you can go out and seek seek, you know, dopamine and a thrill. Unfortunately, there's lots of nice criminal ways as well. A need for structure. Now it doesn't surprise me that there's this notion of the school to prison pipeline. I think a lot of people with ADHD will massively struggle when they leave the structure and discipline of a school system. And, you know, the rates of people who have been excluded from school going into trouble with the law is quite incredible.

Yeah. That need for structure. A strong sense of justice. Well, I mentioned that one earlier on, didn't I? Actually, I mentioned all of these ones earlier on. What an interesting juxtaposition. What I mean with the where this, though, is that if I don't get the justice in the way that I see it and I feel I've been wronged, I will seek my own form of justice. Again, that will get people into trouble. Poor impulse control. Yep. That ability to sort of say no or that ability to want that thing and take it. Dysregulated emotions. People pleasing, and special interest. And I think this is particularly true around autism and stuff that's online.

I was doing a talk for my dear colleagues at counterterrorism in Wales, and the person speaking after me was talking who is a professor that works with offenders, was talking about how there are so many people with autism that are falling down this path of special interests around around right wing related material. It's not that they have any political views in it, but they just find themselves, you know, getting sucked into it. And the more information they find, algorithms and things like Facebook and, you know, Twitter and that sort of thing, it can really sort of grab hold of them and lead them down bad paths. I always think it's worth pointing out at this point that I'm definitely not saying that ADHD is gonna get you into trouble.

However, the way I like to think about it is it's the socioeconomic lottery. Now I am sat here before you were detective constable in the Metropolitan Police. I grew up pretty much afforded all of the luxuries of a secure family home, constant education. And even though I had my struggles, I stable time. The people from less affluent backgrounds who have a far more dysregulated and disrupted childhood and upbringing for children in care. It's the traits of ADHD that if, you know, if you had all those other factors in that can lead people down the wrong path. And I think the statistical information proves that. But I always get someone saying, are you saying that everyone with ADHD is a criminal? Absolutely not.

But it's that's, yeah, just to the point I am trying to make there. So what can we do to support those in custody? Well, a little bit of a sort of prompt here. I was lucky enough to have co authored a guide with some wonderful people from a group called neurodivergent. They are a group of people who are really interested in the legal sector and making the legal sector, more friendly for neurodivergent people. Now when I talk about a lack of training around ADHD and neurodiversity, even policing, unfortunately, that's also true for the rest of the criminal justice system.

Probation and the courts. And sometimes a lot of people's needs aren't met. And the reason this guy came into being is that we kept hearing stories of people with ADHD being come into custody, and they weren't having their needs met. And this booklet is literally designed to be a resource available in custody for someone with ADHD diagnosed or underdiagnosed to pick it up, have a bit more of a better understanding of ADHD, but also understand what their legal rights are. And that's particularly important when it comes to reasonable adjustments and appropriate adults. Now remember earlier on, I was talking about my, silence exam and how having a break made all the difference. You think of your classic, police interview scenario.

With intense questioning, often very difficult subjects, the fact that there's gonna be a lot of anxiety, you know, going on because of the crime in question. I'd certainly want to have a break every now and again. Little things like that can make a world of difference. Also, how we put information across to people, essentially being able to break it down into slightly more manageable chunks, that kind of thing. Yeah. This is the sort of thing that policing should know about. But, also, people should know to be able to potentially advocate for themselves. Because if these things aren't afforded.

The person with ADHD and they were asked for, well, potentially, you've got a miscarriage of justice on your hands there. And that is what you wanna avoid because believe it or not, white one is a fair and equitable criminal justice system that benefits everybody. Just a bit of a big up to Sarah. She's gonna be talking later on. I just urge you to stay around. She is the founder of, ADHD Liberty. ADHD Liberty have been doing a lot of work in trying to get screening into police stations. When I first met Sarah, she pointed out the amount of people in prison with ADHD, and I sort of said, yep. But what we kind of need to do is capture these people, certainly the undiagnosed.

Prior to them getting to prison. So that's why ADHD Liberty has worked on ADHD screening pilots. There has been a very successful one with in London. The figures of people likely to have ADHD from that pilot are around the sixty three percent mark. Two probation screening pilots have also been in in taking place recently, and that's hitting a rate of about eighty five percent. So, again, that twenty five percent figure starts to get a bit more distant now, doesn't it? So this is the problem, and I'm using my favorite Star Wars meme here. I do a lot of training around neurodiversity within the policing within the policing, within policing, but it's not mandatory.

And that terrifies me because I've already told you that there's a lot of people that work for the police who are neurodivergent and a lot of people will be coming into contact with who are neurodivergent. And this causes a tremendous amount of problems both internally and externally. If I could recommend if I could sit down with the commissioner right now for the of the mayor, I'd say the one thing that we need is mandatory awareness around neurodiversity because it will be a benefit to our staff, and it'll a benefit to the people we meet. So one of the biggest achievements of the ADHD alliance has been trying to fill that knowledge gap. We've probably done over.

Over yeah. Hundreds of hours now of neurodiversity awareness training sessions around the MET. Yeah. I I could not begin to tell you. You name a command. You name a type of place within the the MET, we have probably delivered to them. But beyond that, we've also delivered to people outside of policing. I was had the pleasure to, present at the disability in policing conference both last year and this year. Heathrow's Disability Network, again, how we treat people. National appropriate adult network, important for them because they are often the people that we need to be protecting these people in custody. Home office police powers U unit.

The PCS union, Royal College of Paramedics, and divert bounce back who are brilliant charity. You do a lot of youth diversion work around, you know, in the Met and Met Cussies. They're meeting young people and trying to put things in place to divert them away from criminality. I mentioned earlier on the night problematic language around neurodiversity. So we decided to run a study for my support group. It's only been running since August. And, unfortunately, these examples are real anonymous examples that people have given around problematic language that they hear around neurodiversity. Now this is one I've read on a thousand different police reports. Suffers from. Who are we to say that that person suffers from their condition?

We could just say they have ADHD. We could just say they are autistic. Yep. That was a very old quote from a supervisor. This one, I'm sure people watching it all heard. We're all a little bit ADHD. We're all a little bit autistic. I think people are trying to be empathetic but doing a terrible job of it because it diminishes the experience that we have. You don't look neurodiverse. Supervisor used the term apparent diagnosis. And, again, this goes back to that stigma, doesn't it, about ADHD not existing? This is probably the worst one. Stop throwing a tantrum.

When the person was having an autistic meltdown. And, again, this is why this training is so important. Now this isn't me dissing policing because I think a lot of these stigmas and these things are are exist in society. So one of the biggest achievements that the ADHD Alliance has had, I mentioned earlier on the lack of guidance out there. They this is a list of all of the different guidance documents that we have created that are acceptable for other police officers. I won't go through them all now because I've just had a clock at the time, and I'm sure you've got some questions. I'm lucky enough to be able to represent the ADHD Alliance in a few national forums. I'm a proud committee member of the National Disabled Police Association.

With the the Disabled Police Association is one of the only associations that's recognized by the National Police Chiefs Council. I also get to sit on the neurodiversity group working group with the MPCC, and I sit on the Mets neurodiversity steering group as well to try and get some of these changes put in place. We've engaged with learning and development to try and include some of these lessons within leadership programs. We recently managed to get a pilot of trainee ADHD coaches to come and speak to some of our members for free give give their time for free. And me and my group have attended hundreds of different welfare events across the met and nationally just sort of spreading that message about ADHD awareness.

We have an online support group for accessible for people within the policing. That's every other Thursday. It is quite possibly the most beautiful space I've ever existed in. Just people helping people, and the amount I've learned from my peers in particular is more than I've ever learned from any document or any any lecture because the lived experience of our membership has been absolutely everything. We're running some talks for ADHD awareness month, and I'm actually quite lucky that I've actually decided to promote them on the on the on the national site. On the right, there's a blog I wrote about ADHD and why it's important we know more in policing. And, also, you know, they posted our blog.

And I'll link to the speakers that we've got. I'm gonna be a bit quicker. We've got a match myriad of speakers from internally and externally. If anyone's interested, unfortunately, it's only available and open to police officers or people who work for the police. I'll leave some details at the end if anyone wants to get in contact about that. And as Henry sort of said, from very small beginnings, we now have over 650 members in the map, and we have over 1,000 members nationwide.

And our goal down the long run is to continue to recruit national ambassadors to come and sort of set their own satellite networks and continue to grow. We also we've got a national site and hoping to get that working properly so we can actually share some of our guides and documents. It's also worth pointing out that we've now had access to any funding, not a single penny. The roller banner behind my colleague's head there that says ADHD Alliance on it, we had to buy ourselves. So, yeah, it's quite remarkable. We've managed to do what we've done. Just wanna talk about a few inspirations here as well. This guy is called detective superintendent Brown. He's in the Metropolitan Police.

He co authored the guide that you see there on stop and search around autism. Now that guide is available to anyone. And it is even though it's based on autism, and I think sometimes there is a bit of an autistic bias around guidance and awareness, a lot of what is in it is very relevant to people with ADHD. He's also set up an autism alert card scheme. Again, that's something I would personally like to see expanded to other people, people with ADHD. And he is also behind an ADHD screening pilot in the Met, which has also sort of taken off. So he's a bit of an inspiration to me. This guy is David. Again, I recommend you follow some of these people online. David.

Basically has had a life in a coming in inside inside and out of and out of prison. He is one of these people that is a testament to how you can turn your life around when you've got a diagnosis and you understand your neurodivergence. He now works for the charity revolving doors and is heavily involved in prison reform. And after being failed by the education system, he's gonna soon be doing a master's degree at Buckinghamshire New University. Revolving doors are a charity that support people leaving prison. And finally, Carl. Carl, what did work in the Met with me, and now working for a company called Crease Puddle. It's fair to say that Carl was one of the people that had pushed the ADHD alliance forward. We've.

Done a lot of presentations together. He raises a lot of money for charity. I think he's just come down from. But, yeah, he's a wonderful human being. I'm very lucky to have met him as a neurodiverse advocate. And Caroline, who runs this company, Puddle, do a lot of training around neurodiversity. She was formerly a police officer herself and set up Chris Puddle, and we're lucky that they actually came and did some training for the Met. It wasn't mandatory training, though. And, yeah, as great as it was and it was with great training, we need it to be mandatory. So that's something me and the, MET steering group are looking at.

And I just want to take an opportunity to celebrate all of the volunteers that work with me and our group. I hope some of them are watching here today because no one no one gets much time to do this work. I have a full time job as well as running this group, and that's also the case of a lot of our ambassadors and volunteers. And it's fair to say a lot of the charitable sector and support groups for any any, you know, any industry are volunteers. So my opportunity is say thank you for the work you do because none of these things would ever happen without you. Just a very quick. As I said earlier on, I talked at the disability.

And policing conference. Well, the 2024 edition was Monday and Tuesday this week, and I was very lucky to have been awarded the disability advocate of the year in policing. So little wider boast there. It was nice to get recognition. The person presenting me with the award there is is Caroline on the left, but the girl on the right of the picture there is called Tilly Lucky who is called the bionic girl. She has robotic arms, so she's the coolest person I've ever met in my entire life.

And I believe that slide on the screen be well, I can circulate that information later on because I realize the time is very quickly sped up. But if anyone would like to policing would like to get in contact with us, there's our policing email address there to come along to, you know, join in. And if anyone would like to contact me personally, that is my email address there. And I'm now gonna stop talking and wonder if anyone has any questions at all.

You have so many questions. That was amazing. Congrats on the award. I didn't know about this.

Like, was absolutely It was I think it was lit well, it was literally done on the night. Yeah. So pretty recent.

Yes. Exactly. The, yeah, big big big congrats. Right. You've got a lot of questions. So this is gonna be quick fire around because we don't have much time. We've got the wonderful Thank you. The Hugh keyed up ready to roll. So, yeah, we are running to time. I learned the lesson from. To be you have to be very firm on this ADHD rabble that turn up and have terrible time management run by my rabble who also has terrible time management.

Cats, herds, and cats.

The right. Yeah. We are doing this quick file. Right. From Claire. It's on globaladhd.com. She's put in these questions. Our NHS Trust has neurodiversity support group. We're struggling to get the basic information across regarding reasonable adjustments and access work process. Do you have any advice for us?

We need some adjustments and access to work process. Yeah. I I do actually because we wrote a guide for police officers explaining what the access to work program and process is, which I'm happy to share and be more than willing to share, Claire. I'm I'm sure we can get my email address out to you. I don't know quite how we do that. Yeah. I don't Yes.

Or email hello@adhduk.co.uk, and we will forward it to I presume you're getting us here in The UK. This is not not one to you, but it's Elaine. These sessions are fantastic. I can't stay awake for twenty four hours. Don't worry. We don't expect you to. The the recordings stay they they stay on. We'll put them off on YouTube as we have for 2023 and 2022, where they will live at. The how do they contact other groups? Someone wants to know. Like, how do you have a contact for the police, ADHD, or neurodiversity group in York? How do we get like, how do how does someone do that protecting that kind of group?

Well, see, a lot of the groups will be internal working groups. So if you work within the policing, I'd be able to give find out someone who works within there because we have representation in every single force. In terms of people externally, I don't think it's quite that simple, obviously, because these are we're mostly talking about internal groups. But, yeah, again.

Yeah. We could I'm sure I could put you into contact with someone in Yorkshire if anyone's yeah. Not a problem. Okay. So well, that's very kind to do the direct contact. Otherwise, I think the point is these are internal groups, and you then need to talk to I'd actually I was gonna say HR. Does that is that how it works? And is that Yeah. So are you yeah. We we have got to be careful with the information we give out, obviously. But, yeah, these are internal groups.

They say but, essentially, you need to go to the management structure within the police and go ask. And if you're internal, that would be much easier. And for external, then different this is a good question. They're all good questions. I don't want you to think that we value some questions less than others. Just saying, although we value this one a bit. With the benefit of hindsight, what were your top three tips for setting up an ADHD workplace group? Someone read the title. Good job.

Excellent. Because I've got ADHD, we just did. There was no time to sit down and actually have a plan. People started to, so what kind of happened? We were meant to be just a met group, And then what we found is that there wasn't anything that existed like us nationwide. So people said, can we come along? Can we join in? And we just said yes, which is great. And I I I don't regret it in a way because we wouldn't have expanded as quickly as we did, but have a plan. Get help. Early doors, it was just me and Alex. And even now, we don't have enough help, but definitely get help. And if you can find a senior sponsor, someone who is sympathetic to your.

Needs and the wants of your, you know, your tribe, your your support group, that means everything. Because, unfortunately, in a ranking organization like the police, it still is the case that I am at the bottom tier of the ladder, and sometimes people feel they don't have to listen to me. So that's three tips, wasn't it, Henry? I think I just about noticed that one.

No. Honestly, not I was not counting. I was reading new questions. The I thought it was quite interesting though, what you jumped to, which I think is an example of your situation, is that you would like jump to how do we set this up? We need you need an advocate. This is what it was the sort of the real fundamentals. And I do think that sort of internal advocate to help you do it, someone in a leadership position ideally can make a huge difference in terms of helping think I it's also role models. Have impact.

Yeah. I think it's also role models as well, Henry, because I talked about that stigma and fear about ADHD neurodiverse conditions. And I'm lucky that I have met a few now senior officers who are willing to talk about their ADHD, but that means everything. Means the world. Look look you know, I was recently at a talk, and I think her I think she superintendent Sarah Johnson. I think she leads the race action plan nationally. And she was doing a presentation about something else, and she just started talking about her ADHD and how it benefits her at work. And I'm sitting there going, wow. A senior officer is talking not just about neurodiversity, but talking about the benefits of her neurodiversity.

And that that, again, that meant everything to me. And, yeah, just more of that, please.

It's a big it's a big deal, people coming out and and talking about it. And, obviously, when celebrities come out, they normally just get this constant of, oh, they're just jumping on the bandwagon. It's just like and you're like, you know, it's a big deal. Right? There's no benefit from coming out. Right? If you think people give us, like, nice presents, that's that's not how it works. I'm like, we do not right. We had a few, you know, in the chat. We're still on fast rounds. We've got just a few minutes. What are your thoughts on the police neurodiversity, in particular professional standards? The struggles of ADHD and policing from my personal perception do not work. Like, cry. I lost my job with GMP.

Due to the emotional dis due to an emotional dysregulation incident a few years ago.

That's a fantastic question, and I wasn't obviously able to cover everything within my presentation, but we have engaged with professional standards units, certainly the MET one, about the fact that you need to have neurodiversity awareness training. Because if if you don't understand that things like undiagnosed ADHD can potentially get people into trouble, then you're not taking that into mitigation. So excellent question. It's something we have raised and I've raised at a national level as well.

K. On screen, Claire Preston Davis. I agree with the mandatory If you don't understand ADHD, you don't understand our public, also, hi.

Yes. Claire is the one who's gonna be doing the talk about ADHD the menopause for my group, and she's wonderful. And another example of a fantastic police officer with ADHD.

Question for Daley. How do you feel about a ADHD and ASD being put on an individual's PNC reports as a warning signal?

Right. There's a difference here. On PNC, if anyone doesn't know, PNC is the police national computer. It's the national database. Great. I did not know. So that's good. It's a national database. So yeah. Very quickly, there's two different markers or markers you can have. You can have a warning signal, which is things like weapons or you know, we often see neurodivergent conditions stuck on there as ailments. I think that's problematic. Having on there as an information marker, however, I think that is good because you want to be able to I I'd like to know that someone's potentially got ADHD or autism. Now I don't think it's.

Because I would know that I might have to have some consideration for reasonable adjustments, but that's nothing if you don't have the training to back it up.

Okay. Last question, and then we do sadly have to say goodbye. The oh, I've managed to get rid of the the question, Someone was saying talking about the problems in school. Like, how basically, how do you suggest we protect young people in school?

Well, very, very quickly, I've talked about mandatory neurodiversity awareness training in police. It's not mandatory for all teachers. So I think that's a good starting point, understanding that people learn differently and, you know, trying our best to not kick people out of mainstream schooling or giving them the specialist help they need to keep them within education and give them the best chance and start at life. I hope that's a good answer.

That's great. Thank you. That was amazing. Dave, congrats on your award. Very well deserved. Like, it is a testament to Thank you very much. Years of work and doing something extremely important and special. We've got to move on, sadly, so I need to say goodbye to you. But thank you so much for being a part of this, for sharing your knowledge and Thank you, Henry. What you've done. You.

Thank you, Henry. All the best. Thanks, everybody.

Bye, Daley. Thank you very much indeed.