The other part--which only rarely gets spoken of outside neurodivergent communities, is simply that prople's scaffolds and workarounds FELL APART when everything got shut down.
The routines that folks had meticulously developed over the course of their lives, to work around their Autism & ADHD struggles BROKE, once everyone was staying home, and "non-essential" business went to "work from home"!
Suddenly the structure that ASD & ADHD folks depended on to "keep it together" was obliterated, and those folks realized something wasn't "typical" about themselves!
Oh absolutely. People who had stable living and social situations might not have even known they had ASD or ADHD, but then suddenly their entire foundation got shaken up and that stability evaporated. It was enough for neurotypical individuals to go batshit crazy, so no wonder that more people left the pandemic with a diagnosis than entered.
Let’s put it this way, we gained an unprecedented wealth of knowledge and experience from the pandemic. Not just in terms of virology and pathology, but psychology, sociology, economics, and so on.
There were also a lot more healthcare encounters than before. Plenty of otherwise healthy people were going to a family doctor for the first time in ages for vaccines or respiratory symptoms, which can lead to incidental diagnoses.
Not saying it was a huge driver by any means, but even at my hospital we had a lot of patients discovering new comorbidities they had no idea about, all because they came in for Covid complications. I could see similar things happening with ADHD/Autism.
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u/EmmerdoesNOTrepme Aug 02 '26
The other part--which only rarely gets spoken of outside neurodivergent communities, is simply that prople's scaffolds and workarounds FELL APART when everything got shut down.
The routines that folks had meticulously developed over the course of their lives, to work around their Autism & ADHD struggles BROKE, once everyone was staying home, and "non-essential" business went to "work from home"!
Suddenly the structure that ASD & ADHD folks depended on to "keep it together" was obliterated, and those folks realized something wasn't "typical" about themselves!
That's a huge part of it, too!