I want to tell you about a boy who was always wrong.
Not wrong in the way children sometimes are – naughty, difficult, testing boundaries. Wrong in a deeper, more bewildering way. He was wrong in how he sat, how he spoke, how he reacted to noise, and how he struggled to understand what was expected of him in rooms full of people who all seemed to understand instinctively what he could not grasp at all. He got the belt at primary school so often it became unremarkable. Then he was removed from primary school altogether, handed to social workers and educational psychologists, and sent to a special school for children with behavioural problems.
That school decided he was too much trouble as well.
He was sent to Forteviot House Hospital, a children’s unit at 14-16 Hope Terrace in Edinburgh, part of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children. This was his first experience of being ripped away from the only predictability and routine he’d ever known and deposited, without explanation, into a busy, noisy, confusing institution that made no sense to him whatsoever. From there, he was transferred to Harmeny School in Balerno, then a boarding school for children categorised as having behavioural problems, run at the time by Save the Children.
There, the staff regularly mocked and berated him for stimming. Stimming is self-regulating behaviour that is entirely natural to neurodivergent people, entirely mysterious to those who aren’t, and entirely unthreatening to anyone. He was told it was stupid. He was told it was attention-seeking. He was told he was just ignoring adults. Nobody once asked why he was doing it. Nobody once considered that there might be a reason.
One member of staff did considerably worse than mock him. He beat the boy so severely that hand-shaped welts rose halfway up his back, leaving him barely able to walk. When his parents complained, they were told the marks were simply the result of a hot shower.
A system that punished difference instead of understanding it
He eventually returned to mainstream secondary school, knowing nobody, belonging to no friend group that had formed in primary school, enduring what felt like an eternity of sensory hell and extreme boredom, until at 14 every institution that had tried to manage him quietly gave up and left him to get on with it.
That boy was me. I’m Jason Boyd. I’m fifty-two years old, autistic, and physically disabled. I grew up in an era when neurodivergence didn’t exist as a concept in any room I ever occupied. What existed instead was the assumption that I was a problem, difficult, disruptive, and a drain on patience and resources. Nobody at any point asked what was actually happening inside my head, because in the Scotland of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, that wasn’t a question anyone thought to ask of a working-class boy in West Lothian who wouldn’t sit still and wouldn’t behave.
I’m writing this article because, in too many ways that matter, the Scotland of 2026 is still not asking that question with anywhere near the urgency it deserves.
Who we are and how many of us there are
Let’s get the scale of this clear, because it’s still not widely understood.
Current estimates suggest that between 10% and 20% of Scotland’s population is neurodivergent. Neurodivergence covers a range of conditions, including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, Tourette’s syndrome, and others. These are not mental health conditions, though neurodivergent people are significantly more likely to develop mental health problems as a direct result of living in a world that wasn’t designed for them and frequently punishes them for existing as they are.
Scotland’s National Autism Implementation Team estimates that at a conservative 10% prevalence, around 440,000 adults in Scotland meet the criteria for one or more neurodevelopmental diagnoses. The true figure is almost certainly higher.
This article is primarily about those adults. I lived through the consequences of failing to diagnose and support neurodivergent children, and I’ll touch on that where it’s directly relevant. But the lives, the barriers, and the political invisibility of neurodivergent adults in contemporary Scotland is where the focus belongs. It’s a focus that is long overdue.
The diagnosis crisis: adults locked out
With the Scottish Parliament election approaching on 7 May 2026, and parties across the political spectrum making their pitches to voters, neurodivergent adults in Scotland are looking at a system in serious and worsening crisis.
The waiting list figures alone should embarrass every party that has held or shared power at Holyrood. Adults seeking a neurodevelopmental assessment in NHS Lothian currently wait an average of 37.25 months, more than three years, simply to be assessed. NHS Tayside’s children’s neurodevelopmental services reported average waits of 154 weeks. Across just nine of Scotland’s 14 health board areas, over 23,000 adults are currently on waiting lists. And because not all boards even publish this data, the true national figure is unknown.
It gets worse. SPICe confirmed in June 2025 that over 1.3 million adults, nearly 30% of Scotland’s adult population, live in areas where they cannot access any adult neurodevelopmental assessment through the NHS at all. In parts of NHS Grampian, the adult autism assessment team was simply disbanded in February 2025.
When diagnosis depends on luck, money, or endurance
The ADHD situation is particularly acute. Between 2018 and 2021, referrals for adult ADHD assessment to Community Mental Health Teams in Glasgow rose by 1,000%. The system was entirely unprepared for this surge, which experts attribute not to any genuine increase in ADHD prevalence but to a long-overdue increase in public awareness of how the condition actually presents, particularly in women and girls, who have been systematically under-diagnosed for decades.
My niece has been on the waiting list for an ADHD assessment for almost five years. She’s not an unusual case. She is Scotland in 2026.
But the cruelty goes deeper than the waiting times alone. I looked into paying for a private ADHD assessment for her, because watching someone you love struggle without support or answers year after year is intolerable. A private assessment costs between £1,500 and £2,500. I would pay that, if it would actually help. But it won’t, at least not in the way that matters most.
Virtually no NHS boards in Scotland now offer shared care agreements. That means a private ADHD diagnosis doesn’t entitle a patient to NHS prescriptions for ADHD medication. The NHS won’t prescribe without its own diagnosis. My niece would still be left without medication, without the disabled students’ allowance she needs to access proper support at college, and without the reasonable adjustments she is legally entitled to in examinations, all because she can’t get an NHS assessment. The private diagnosis would be, for all practical purposes, a very expensive piece of paper.
This isn’t a system that’s struggling to cope. It’s a system that’s been allowed to fail, repeatedly, because the people it fails don’t have sufficient political voice or visibility to make that failure a political cost.
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