Neuro-inclusion Article One: The Research Project That Led to My ADHD Diagnosis

From the end of 2023, until the beginning of 2025, I was leading a piece of research titled Appreciating and Supporting Neurodiversity for the New Zealand-based Construction and Infrastructure Centre of Vocational Excellence; the Food & Fibre Centre of Vocational Excellence; and Skills Group. The focus of the research was looking at what was being done in the vocational and work spaces to support neurodivergent individuals, with a specific focus on the construction, infrastructure, and food & fibre sectors. There was both a domestic review within New Zealand (where the funding and research took place), alongside exploring how neurodiversity was supported across seven different countries, including Australia, Greece, Singapore, and the UK.

The research started entirely normally, it was just another project, a very interesting project, but still just another piece of research. The ultimate aim was to conclude the findings with a set of recommendations and clear calls to action to better support and appreciate neurodiverse learners and workers within New Zealand. As the research would be freely available (and it still is), the hope was that these insights could also be picked up and adapted by any other country/organisation.

As the research progressed, however, something unexpected began to happen. I was conducting more and more interviews with experts and practitioners, and spending hours diving into the academic literature on the subject. I was talking to a practitioner and the way that they were describing what some of these learners were like I was thinking “hang on, the way they’re describing them as children was a lot like how I was”.

I’d read a description of executive dysfunction (planning, focus etc), and it made me think, “this description really does feel like how I am now”. It was an incredibly interesting, yet almost frightening experience, slowly connecting the dots, re-evaluating my entire life, finally resulting in asking myself “Am I neurodiverse?”

After doing more research into the space, it led me to go to my GP in late 2024. Until the beginning of 2026, GPs in New Zealand weren’t allowed to officially diagnose someone with a neurodiverse condition. To make a quick side track (another classic ADHD trait, sorry!) I do believe that allowing GPs to diagnose someone with a neurodiverse condition is a brilliant change by the government, making it significantly quicker and cheaper for someone to get a diagnosis. There are many situations in which a formal diagnosis is required to be able to get support, so being able to get that quicker, and therefore, the support quicker, will be genuinely life changing for many.

For me, I had to get a referral from my GP to talk to a psychiatrist. If I had been forced to wait for an appointment through the public healthcare system, I would have been waiting for literally years. I was incredibly lucky that I was able to pay for private appointments (thankfully not many but still), so I only had to wait for about 3.5 months. At the first appointment, the psychiatrist asked me some questions and reviewed an assessment that I had had to complete prior to the appointment, and it was then that he told me he believed that I did have ADHD, for which he recommended a prescription.

It’s one of those things where, for me at the time, the diagnosis itself was the most important part. I had desperately wanted to know what it was that was ‘wrong’ with me. Why did I find it so difficult to concentrate? Was it my fault? A lack of discipline? Or was it just the way my brain was wired, something entirely out of my control? Receiving the diagnosis at 35 years old was a very complex, tangled web of emotions and something that I’m still very much working through. It felt both profoundly affirming and, in a very real way, deeply depressing. It was affirming because I finally knew why I was the way that I was. The medication might help, or it might not, but at the very least I knew that the endless distracting thoughts, the absolute difficulty in maintaining focus on mundane tasks, it wasn’t just me being a bit useless, there was a genuine, neurological reason. On the deeply depressing side, my thoughts were turning to the ‘what ifs’. What could I have accomplished? How much better, smoother, and less stressful could my life have been if I had received this diagnosis when I was significantly younger? How much more would I know and understand about myself? Amidst this, however, I didn’t forget how lucky I was that I had at least received a formal diagnosis. As for why I didn’t receive one decades ago, there are a few easy reasons: when I was a child, terms like ADHD and neurodiversity simply weren’t major, known terms in the mainstream. I also didn’t present with all of the symptoms that are regarded as ‘common’, such as physical hyperactivity. I was exceptionally good at masking my symptoms, I had figured out how to wrangle my endless distractions, I had built my own scaffolding to survive.

In the midst of receiving the diagnosis, and working through what it meant, I mentioned it to a previous employer. He laughed and said, in effect, that he hadn’t needed the diagnosis to know I was neurodiverse, as though it had always been obvious that I was somehow ‘different’, ‘other’. It’s the only time since my diagnosis that something someone said has made me feel bad about myself in relation to the condition. He laughed it off at the time, but it has stayed with me. It made me feel ‘less than’, very self-conscious, but also angry too, if he thought I was ‘different’, as my employer, where was the support? Why didn’t he help?

That conversation, among other things, pushed me to dig deeper once the report was published in January 2025: to work out what I could actually do, drawing on my own experience, my understanding of the condition, and the research I had done, and was continuing to do, to make things genuinely better for others. After a lot of work, I launched something at the 5th Paris Conference on Education in June 2026 that I believe can drive real societal change in how we support and value neurodiversity and push for a more neuro-inclusive society: the Neurodiversity-Supportive Standard (NSS), which I’ll be exploring further in the next article of this series.

By Stuart Martin, the Founder of George Angus Consulting and of the Neurodiversity-Supportive Standard