When the National Health Service was founded in 1948, the then Health Secretary Aneurin Bevan optimistically argued that expenditure would fall over time, as the population grew healthier and technology advanced.
Within a few years this early optimism proved displaced, as improved public health and medical innovations led to a population living ever longer and with increasingly complicated demands on a health service originally designed to stop people dying from pneumonia and tuberculosis.
As once happened in the realm of physical illnesses and disease, there is now a similar process underway with psychiatry and mental health, with a vast increase in diagnoses of autism, ADHD and related disorders, and a health service designed for a time, only a few years ago, when the prevalence of these conditions was believed to be much rarer.
According to new NHS data, the number of patients waiting for an autism assessment in England is at its highest level since current records began in April 2019, with over 172,040 people on waiting lists, compared with just 32,220 in December 2019.
There is plenty of debate around the reasons for this increase in diagnoses, and many people with autism or ADHD report that Covid-era lockdowns exacerbated their symptoms, whilst providing others with a great deal more time for internet research and self-diagnosis.
There has also been a wave of high-profile adult diagnoses among various celebrities, with barely a week going by without a footballer, model, or MMA fighter talking about their experiences with autism, ADHD, or both.
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