Why are ADHD referrals rising?

The only way to find out if you have ADHD is to get a diagnosis. But there has been a huge uptick in referrals in many nations, with one prominent health think-tank here in the UK saying that demand has overtaken the capacity to meet it. Thea Stein is the chief executive of the Nuffield Trust…

Thea - One of the first things I asked the organisation to look at when I arrived was actually statistics around ADHD and autism because I was really aware, having come from a job where for nine years I was leading the services for children around diagnosis for autism and ADHD, what a significant issue it was. And I felt that the facts and figures weren't out there in the public domain as clearly as the figures, for example, for waiting for surgery, and I wanted us to do some work.

Chris - What did the figures for children show? And we should also emphasise this is not just a problem of children, is it? We know that a lot of adults, almost certainly children, turn into adults who have ADHD, but some adults are newly diagnosed as well. So what is the scale of the problem?

Thea - Well, interestingly, the data isn't collected at a national level in terms of the waiting list data. So whilst I've got really good waiting list data for assessment for autism, there actually isn't a similar figure for ADHD. What we did though was use a proxy, something to help us understand that, which was prescribing data for ADHD medication and what we could see there between 2019/20 to 2022/23. So those years between that, we had a 51% increase in the prescription medication for ADHD. So we know that something is going on by looking at that because a lot of people, children and adults who have ADHD do get a prescription for medication. And so we thought by looking at that, it would give us some idea of the scale of what was happening. We also know through a petitions committee that there are a lot of people who are waiting really, really long periods of time, and at least 10% of adults and children are waiting between two and three years. Final fact, which I think is really interesting, is that the biggest increase in patients getting the prescription medications for ADHD are between 25 and 44, and the biggest increase in that group is between 30 and 34. So yeah, there's a lot going on.