Why so much hostility toward reasonable adjustments for autistic/ADHD students/workers?

[KeenTaupeDog]

I keep seeing backlash whenever someone with autism/ADHD asks for reasonable adjustments. Things like:
• being accused of cheating or getting “special treatment”
• people assuming you're lying or gaming the system
• resentment for accommodations that simply level the playing field

Why do so many people react this way?
Is it ignorance about what these conditions actually mean?
Envy?
Fear that fairness is “zero-sum”?
Or something deeper around stigma toward invisible disabilities?

Would be interested in honest perspectives — especially from those who’ve witnessed or experienced this dynamic.

If you dont think adhders etc. should be employed if they cant stay in work due to their adhd, then are you happy with them sitting at home and claiming benefits? Or dying of hunger?

Not looking to fight — just trying to understand where this reaction comes from.
Am a apsergers sufferer and people at uni accused me of cheating when they found out i had remote exams

Perhaps they just haven't sought a diagnosis? I'm assuming you're very young, because it's only very recently that it is being looked for and diagnoses routinely and earlier in life. A decade earlier perhaps even you would have gone through life oblivious to your disability.

I am tired of having to defend my ds and the conversations well we are all have a bit of ADHD in us

I understand now why my ds is ashamed of his diagnoses, why it has taken him so lone to accept it not only did he have to deal with his feelings but to be openly questioned all the bloody time its tiresome

There are swathes of people on the spectrum who did not have developmental lags.

That is the problem which such a cover all diagnosis.

My friends daughter's issues became apparent only during the additional stresses of COVID school closures, at 16. It's as clear as daylight she inherited it from her father and he has no diagnosis and would vehemently deny being disabled.

Difficulty is not the same as disability.

YES - exactly. Thank you

I don’t have confidence in your understanding of statistics because you misunderstood the figures about the ASRS.

Please post a link.

I have family members who have been officially diagnosed (both ADHD and autism). All of them have good-paying professional careers, families, children etc. In general I'd described my extended family as privileged - life has been much easier for us than for many others.

I'm a teacher. Yes, neuro divergence plays a role but what has a bigger impact imo is the home environment - some kids have engaged parents with the resources to help them, others unfortunately don't.

Then of course there's IQ which is something no one likes to talk about. Some people are simply more intelligent than others. A high-IQ ND person has a better chance of doing well at school/future workplace than a low-IQ NT person.

We're all different. We will never have a perfectly even playing field. That doesn't mean we shouldn't offer any accomodations at all, but I do think OP you're too fixated on thinking you've got it hard. Many others do too, in fact even harder, even if they aren't ND.

Part of the difficulty is that the people who decide or forecast reasonable adjustments aren't the people who need them. This isn't work related, but it will do as an example:

DD2 needed to do her driving theory test. She has ASD, generalized and social anxiety disorders (diagnosed, treated, medicated), and an expressive language disorder. She goes to a special school with 1:1 support but is cognitively able.

The rules say that you must attend the test centre alone, arrive 15 minutes early, and sit in a set of chairs waiting until the start. This is a problem. She also wears noise cancelling headphones and they're not allowed.

The theory test website gives a list of reasonable adjustments you can ask for:

• Someone to sit beside you during the test - well if it's a stranger, no. Obviously, though, it can't be a family member in case you cheat.
• British Sign Language. She's not deaf
• Subtitles. Not needed
• Voice over. She can read
• Someone to read the questions out and reword them. Not needed.

They didn't mention that the test centre has a private room that can be booked. That would have helped.

In the end, I went to the centre an hour early and explained to the lady that none of the RA applied, and that DD2 would be fine in the test itself. However, getting her into the test would be an issue because her SN means she finds talking to strangers really difficult.

The lady decided that DD1 could arrive at the time of the test instead of 15 minutes early, that I could go with her and get her security checks done before leaving, that they would allocate her a booth in the corner so she only had one person next to her, and they would give her ear plugs and headphones.

Those adjustments wouldn't have made any difference to anyone else, and they probably didn't even know they were made. She would have just looked like someone who was running a bit late. But they allowed her to take her test.

I can see that a RA to not answer the phone is a burden for people that take up the slack, but I think employers could be more flexible and have roles where phone answering is a core part of the job, and roles where email answering is the core part of the job, for instance.

But an NT person can put up with the discomfort - that’s the whole point. Yes, lots of people find work stressful and just want to zonk out in front of the TV, but the autistic person has no choice. If they don’t zonk out voluntarily, they will go into involuntary burnout that can last years.

Using myself as an example - if I work full-time I can cope for a while, but then I will start having shutdowns where I cannot speak for hours on end. I won’t be able to brush my teeth without being sick, I won’t be able to tolerate a windy and rainy day without having a meltdown. I’ll no longer be able to manage popping in to pay for petrol or travelling in a car.

If I want to work, it needs to be part-time, otherwise I will end up burnt out I spend weeks in bed doing nothing but staring at a wall or sleeping.

I know lots of people have already replied to this and I have not read it all but I think that the main issue is that adjustments for one person can often mean more work for someone else. Over an extended period of time that becomes wearing and causes resentment.
I don’t know what the answer is. Very few people want to take on extra work in order to accommodate another person.

But you need to then be careful that you aren’t just creating a different set of issues and assumptions. For instance, there is a stereotype that autistic people are overrepresented in both IT and actuarial jobs. That’s great, but what if you’re an autistic person who doesn’t like computers and is rubbish at maths? You won’t fit into those particular “holes” either.

I do think that some people expect adjustments that aren’t reasonable - but then I blame management / HR for agreeing to them, really.

I think the only adjustment that I have that impacts my colleagues is that I don’t take or make unplanned phone calls (I am not in a customer-facing role). What this means in practice is that they need to drop me an IM asking if I’m free to talk about X. Which is pretty much what most of my colleagues would do naturally anyway given the age and demographics. Or I will send a quick email or IM asking something rather than calling - again, not unusual in our company culture.

I do have an adjustment that I don’t travel in peak times, but we don’t have set hours so my early start / early finish on office days is no more disruptive than my colleague who turns up at 10.30 most days (and stays late) because she doesn’t like mornings, or another colleague who has a 2 hour break at school pick up time (again, making up his hours).

I don't think people can understand that. It's not a 'don't want to' it's a 'can't'.

I still think that employers could make work work for disabled people. The problem is that they want everyone to do everything. DD2 saw a Zoo keeper apprenticeship. She would be amazing. She's kept sheep before, animals are her passion. But they want someone who will have fantastic ideas for progressing the farm, public facing, leading tours and educating visitors. No can do. She would be fantastic with the animals but can't do the public.

True. Exactly. Children with additional needs struggle in mainstream schools because often, full needs can’t be met due to underfunding and staffing, not the right qualifications for the job (while there are now SEND qualified people in every school these days) there are not enough ‘special education’ schools for these children, they’re oversubscribed up and down the country. So, children have no choice but to attend mainstream. Or, they go without an education, which isn’t fair. So, people must accept that it’s just the way, there’s no room for parents of NT children to be upset that their child has to share a classroom with a ND child when it’s out of our control (as parents) it’s the LA and like you said, government funding. It’s hard on everyone, agree. But like OP, I have seen the hostility and frustration from one side and it plays out like that, like it’s somehow pandering (to allow them into a school they “shouldn’t” be at)

I think it is purposely a broad defenition as we want to support people to work, shield them from discrimination and ensure they can access services. Its purposely inclusive so people who need it arent excluded by some quirk.

Its not supposed to suggest that noone outside of that definition has difficulties, or that those difficulties arent even more significant.

It purpose was to ensure that someone who is finding life difficult as a direct result of an issue that meets the disability definition in the act, can ask for reasonable adjustments that will help with that specific issue. Reasonable is a really important word here.

There are lots of other workplace things for everyone, like the right to ask for flexible working, health and safety at work, maternity, redundancy, minimum wage, annual leave, working hours, capability procedures. There are other bits of the equalities act as well that protect against discrimination on other grounds.

I disagree. All children deserve an education and the same rights to one. Granted, some children won’t be able to achieve that, but the opportunity should still present itself to them.
People ‘earn’ the rights to things later on in life, through the choices and decisions they make themselves. Everyone should have an equal footing when starting out though. And yes, I will go as far as saying, all children are entitled to education.
To deny that to some, is so unfair and unjust. It might not be the schools fault, or individuals fault, but the issue is still and hand and needs addressing so we are not forfeiting kids futures because of disabilities. Adaptations and needs must be met. We have to work towards a better society that allows for this, we have so much more work to do to get there, but it’s the right thing to do.

Of course they deserve an education. But that is not quite the same as saying they deserve the same opportunities as everyone else. That is a very specific and not at all realistic statement.

The Autism Act 2009 disagrees with you. It is legally a disability.

I think there is an element of competition/concern for their own child in it.

Some people think “reasonable adjustments” for time mgt/organisation/working memory etc might give someone a perceived unfair advantage, overall, over their own child when some students with ADHD can be very clever, more focused on topics they find interesting, creative, high energy etc.

Essentially it comes down to a focus on their own circumstances and child rather than the other student or the bigger society picture. Which I think we can all be a little guilty of at times.

A diagnosis can only be given if it causes "Significant impairment:

• The symptoms must be sufficient to cause significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

If you don't have significant Impairment, you shouldn't have been diagnosed.

Well yes it would be good if more employers could become ND friendly. I have actually often read that ND friendly policies in workplaces and in education actually benefit everyone. For example, my DC2 who has very bad languag processing issues due to ADHD, cannot take in anything in a lecture but can if
they are watching a recording and can pause it every few minutes. The university’s policy of recording all lectures is helpful to all students.

But there just aren’t enough employers that are good for ND people. Also anyone of my generation (late 50s) would have started their career long before it was possible to get a diagnosis.

Nobody is completely NT. Many people can have quite severe ND traits and not qualify for a diagnosis as they aren't expressed in a way that fits within a diagnostic model. The idea that a so called 'NT' person can automatically tolerate something more than an ND person can is nonsense.

For example, it's totally possible that a so called NT person suffering with misophonia could struggle more with noises than someone with Autism that also struggles with noise but to a lesser extent.

Neurotypical people also experience burnout and this can manifest in a similar way to what you describe. It can be involuntarily and last long time. What individuals can tolerate differs and lots of so called NT people struggle to cope with the demands of FT work. 1/5 people in the UK are coping with a common mental health condition in the last week. I would argue working FT is very unnatural for most people and today's fast pace of living is challenging for the majority of the population.

As I say continuously, the idea that there are two almost separate species of ND/NT is so so damaging. The kinds of sweeping statements and assumptions in your post are terrible because it completely undermines and belittles the struggles of so called NT people because the underlying assumption is that it's impossible for them to struggle as much as ND people when we know this isn't true. There are an awful lot of people (most I would argue) living in the grey. They don't qualify for adjustments and help but they certainly don't fit the NT, completely healthy model that so many ND people compare themselves to.

if she has difficulties from this, surely she can get a diagnosis? and if she is diagnosed, why won't you accept that she can get RA at work?

Yes, exactly. The whole point of a diagnosis is that you have significant impairment!

but the NT people who have similar problems to ND people can still get diagnosed with other disorders... maybe not autism but other stuff like ocd, a personality disorder etc., anxiety and depression that they can get workplace adjustments for

She does.

My comment was in relation to someone who suggested that all people with an ASD diagnosis will have had developments delays as that is part off what gets a diagnosis. That isn't true.

I didn't say one word about RA at work, never mind fail to accept anything about reasonable adjustments.