In over 25 years of working with people, one thing has become very clear to me.
Mental health and neurodiversity rarely sit alone.
Not in the same person. Not in the same life. And not in the same conversation even when that’s what someone comes to me thinking they want to talk about.
Someone arrives saying they’re anxious. We start talking. And gradually something else emerges: a brain that has always worked differently, that has spent years being misread, including by its owner.
Or someone comes wanting to understand their neurodiversity, a recent diagnosis, a growing suspicion, a child’s assessment that made them see themselves differently. And underneath it, quietly, is years of low self-esteem. A persistent sense of not being quite enough. Anxiety that was never named as anxiety because it just felt like life.
The two are woven together in ways that are easy to miss if you’re only looking for one of them.
Why they overlap
Neurodivergent people, those with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and related differences are significantly more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the result of years of navigating a world that wasn’t designed for the way their brain works.
The child who couldn’t sit still and was told they weren’t trying hard enough. The adult who keeps missing deadlines and has started to believe they’re lazy. The person who finds social situations exhausting and has spent decades wondering what’s wrong with them.
By the time many people reach me, they’ve been carrying both for a long time. The mental health difficulty and the unrecognised neurodiversity underneath it. Each one making the other harder to shift.
Understanding one without the other means you’re only ever seeing half the picture
What changes when you hold both
When someone understands that their anxiety isn’t a character flaw but a response to years of working against their own brain something shifts. When they start to recognise their strengths alongside their struggles, and build strategies that actually fit the way they think something shifts again.
That’s what I work towards with every person I sit with. Not treating the mental health difficulty in isolation. Not addressing the neurodiversity without acknowledging what it has cost them emotionally. But holding both because that’s where the real work happens.
We unpick why they do what they do. We build self-awareness. We develop strategies that are personal to them, not lifted from a generic programme. We celebrate small wins, because small wins are how big changes actually happen. And we recognise how far they’ve come which is usually much further than they’ve given themselves credit for.
Why it matters who you work with
Not everyone who supports mental health also understands neurodiversity. And not everyone who specialises in neurodiversity is trained to hold the mental health piece alongside it.
I do both. Not because I set out to be different, but because the people I work with are both. They always have been.
This is the first in a series of posts exploring the relationship between mental health and neurodiversity in people, in workplaces, and in the space where the two meet. I hope something in it is useful to you.
Did something in this resonate?
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