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

I don’t think the binary options are the correct approach.

For example the press around the autistic worker who had been working at Waitrose for three years volunteering and how awful it was that they didn’t pay him for a full time role didn’t acknowledge that he may not have been adding the same amount of value as a typically full time worker

Companies need to develop a fair approach to allow them to pay less for a worker that can only work at 50% of others. Reasonable accommodations which leave others who are paid the same doing more work are problematic.

Because the UK has a generally shit work culture that’s very crabs in a bucket mentality.

Plus to a certain extent, those who need RAs can be less productive - and with many management teams, that means giving their work to other people as to hiring enough staff to adequately cover. Hence, it breeds resentment if others feel they are overloaded. They’re not looking at it from the perspective of “it’s either this or the disabled colleague needs to claim benefits or can’t eat”. They’re simply looking at it from their own perspective

As a parent of someone who will always need reasonable adjustments, I can see both sides of this.

If your exam has a fixed pass mark - ie it is criterion based - then your extra time / doing your exam in a different location has no bearing on anyone else’s results.

On the other hand, there is a fixed or habitual proportion of students who can pass, or can get a specific grade, then your mark does affect others. If your accommodation is perceived as ‘reasonable’ by others, then they will understand that this is only raising you from disadvantage to the same situation as others; if it is seen as ‘surprisingly more than expected, given you have always otherwise functioned perfectly in all other aspects of the course’, then they may query the degree of accommodation.

I have been interested to see how carefully accommodations for my child have been calibrated - x, but not y, as y pushes over into ‘possible advantage’.

Within the workplace, as others have said, it depends both on the nature of the job and the impact on others: if you cannot do x, and others therefore take on more work, that’s not reasonable. If you cannot do x, and that is accommodated within the overall team without additional workload, that’s reasonable. So if you cannot make phone calls but you take on the written admin for the person who does them instead, that’s ok. If you do 3 days and someone else is employed for the other 2, that’s ok.

In terms of the nature of the job, there’s a difference between someone saying (to give an absurd example) ‘my dream is to be a pilot, so you have to make reasonable accommodations for the fact I have poor eyesight’ and someone saying ‘I can’t be a pilot, but I can be a flight attendant if the menu is printed in large print white on black and if fluorescent tape is installed at key thresholds to avoid me tripping’. I do think resentment is caused if someone’s ‘want’ to have a particular career, supported by extreme adjustments, is seen as the ultimate thing to be achieved - it’s not ‘employed or not’, it’s ‘employed in a suitable job or not’. I say this with a heavy heart, as my child has accepted that they will need to follow a very different career oath from their dreams, but I equally don’t think that it is reasonable for employers ir colleagues to have to go to extreme lengths to modify the job ‘as it is’.

It’s because the adjustments for autism are always the things that everyone wants. Everybody wants to not have to queue, to have extra time in exams, to come in late to work, to not do the shit jobs. So, whilst it might not be right, it’s an absolutely understandable frustration.

now i know you'Re just being goady and confrontational. You want to moan, that is fine.
But you asked a question and pages and pages and pages of responses have told you why people can't go to management? (nobody mentioned hating the colleague, you are imagining that yourself) Management generally have their hands tied in terms of headcount and budget. So they can't help anyone who now has to handle all the phonecalls instead of only 50% of the calls.

And again: seeing how you talk to people here gives us all the information we need about why people are resentful of you. Moaning is fine.
Asking a question then ignoring the overwhelming consensus of the answers is not.

I would think it’s the amount of people with diagnoses or waiting for a diagnosis. If I think of the adults I’ve talked to recently a high number of them have either been recently diagnosed with ASD or ADHD or are waiting to see someone to be diagnosed. It leads to a feeling that everyone is trying to find a reason why they can’t do things, leaving the rest of us to pick up the weight.

They said they would be unhappy, not that they would be "hating on" their colleague. Not taking everything quite so personally would help.

so its envy of the autistic person

So why are they in a job that involves answering the phone? I would not seek work that involved public speaking (I include teaching) as it makes me incredibly anxious and panicky and my brain shuts down. Would you consider it reasonable if I had such a job, to expect my colleagues to do those parts of my job for me? I would also be lousy be a lousy scaffolder as I’m small and have no upper body strength. We do not all have the same strengths

I can see both sides. RA's need to be made as it is better that people are in employment. However, where I work, one person with autism that really struggles with queries that are complicated in a certain way so I always get asked to do them. How is that fair? We are even on the same pay!

I think it’s also because there is very possibly huge numbers of people who are undiagnosed. They’ve had to cope/mask their whole lives and didn’t really know it. What if most people are ND? It’s only been in the past decade or so that it’s been talked about so there are swathes of adults thinking ‘hang on a minute, I needed decompression time too.’

Also, the assumption that non autistic people never get stressed. The hostility comes from the fact that because of the explosion in diagnosis of autism or even self-diagnosis of it by so many people, it is suddenly assumed that nobody who is neurotypical can get burnt out or stressed.

They absolutely, can it just takes a heck of a lot more to do it.

I was talking about being in employment, not is school but the Wfh thing is actually a good example. There are all kinds benefits to many people to Wfh and if the business requires people to attend the office but some people are excused this as a reasonable adjustment, I can see this not going down well. Equally if you are simply slow in exams, but not diagnosed as having a disability, I can see why allowing some people extra time but not others, can be seen as unjust.

This and put much better than I did!

Do they pick up things you can’t do / are less good at?

I know in my team we all tend to pick up different things, through a combination of RA and just general strengths and weaknesses.

A lot of the resentment could probably be addressed by better workplace practices to be honest.

no it isn't.

So many posters have made the point that a lot of reasonable adjustments for many people would benefit everyone.

The pp who worked in the call centre and was subsequently the only one allowed to WFH? EVERYONE in that call centre could have benefitted from one or more days WFH per week. But no. One person got it.

Not taking phone calls? For sure, that sounds great. But you have to make notes, make referrals, give advice, arrange follow up. It's not just a chat with someone and that is it. So if you aren't making phone calls, what are you doing to alleviate the person who is making your phone calls? or is it just tough tits for them because they aren't ND? Everyone has pressures in their lives that adjustments at work could make better.

Lots of workplaces have been making huge progress on making the workplace better for everyone, improving work-life balance etc. And some of those improvements have come from seeing how reasonable adjustments for some people, can be widened out to more people, or adapted for everyone else to benefit the whole company. And that, to me, is one of the best advantages of being inclusive in the workplace, there are often improvements to be made for everyone for very very little effort.

But someone marching in demanding not to do calls, or take notes, or to have a private office because they are ND or whatever? .... meh.

I think part of the problem is that everyone now knows at least one person who's got an ADHD or autism diagnosis that they simply should not have got, and that's breeding suspicion.

It's very easy to find out what you need to say at the assessment - and if you pass you get free drugs and possibly free money and various other benefits that everyone else has to pay for.

The overdiagnosis is a massive issue that's probably going to blow up in the next few years.

You missed half of what I said. It is hard for many people to see someone getting something when they are struggling, even if it doesn’t impact them, it’s just worse if it does. However many places grade on a curve, so actually if someone has extra time and you perceive that means they can do better than you in the exam, get a better grade, better qualification maybe have a better chance in the job market then yeah, they feel like it does impact them.

If your friend was suddenly gifted a million pounds, you might be happy for them, you might even agree they are more deserving or need it more than you, but you might also be a bit jealous. I don’t feel like that’s a hard concept to understand. Add in the lack of understanding of disabilities and it’s quite easy to see why people are upset surely, even though I don’t personally agree with them.

For me, the issue is the self diagnosed.

I'm thinking of one person I know in particular. Who's joined a neurodiversity group at work and uses it as an excuse for many things. This person does not have a diagnosis, and just says it's obvious.

They should not be allowed to get away with that. We don't work together I hasten to our thank goodness.

Let's face it - we all know someone whose autism or ADHD flares up whenever they have to do something they don't want to do.

Need to be somewhere for work? ADHD meant they missed the train.

Need to be at airport to go on a holiday. Oddly, the ADHD didn't kick in at that point.

Let's get better at properly diagnosing and then the trust might come back.

Because loads of people get lower grades because they didn’t finish the paper and thus got 0 for that question, bringing their grades down. They are then competing against someone who was given extra time and finished every question. They don’t have to disclose they had extra time, so the prospective employee is looking at the A vs the B. It is a completely understandable frustration.

I've met more than one person like this as well. Bad behaviour is blamed on undiagnosed ADHD.

I remember a Rory Bremner documentary about his ADHD a few years ago. He would behave like a dick - his wife would be talking and he'd get up and leave the room because he wasn't interested in listening. And then would say it's his ADHD and he's the victim.

It's no surprise that every narcissistic celebrity now says they have ADHD.

what a strangely extreme reaction. I'm all for workplace adjustments for disabilities - both physical and neurological - but that doesn't mean all jobs are right for all people. Luckily, I've never particularly wanted a phsical job as I couldn't do it with my disability. It just is what it is. Some ND conditions might mean certain jobs are off the table.

I'm fine with a doctor who is disabled. But not one where the adjustments are so significant it might impact my care, for example.

I got spoken to really aggressively by a member of our council because I kept asking why and because he hadn't been clear in his instructions to me I'm the past, therefore I had no idea what his problem was. Apparently asking for clarity and understanding is a massive insult to NTs. Horrible man.

It's very easy to find out what you need to say at the assessment - and if you pass you get free drugs

Damn, I must have missed the stall on the way out where they were handing out the free drugs. Can I complain?