A good friend of mine has the most amazing child…

He’s ten years old and smart as a whip.

You can ask him almost any question about the world and he’ll reel off an answer (or give it a very good go!)

Quantum physics… the world’s most venomous spiders… the career of Donald Trump… the rise and fall of rapper P-Diddy… the history of UFOs…

Honestly, I know 40 year olds who would struggle to talk as lucidly about these subjects!

And yet…

His reading age is that of a 6 years old… and he can barely write a coherent sentence – he even gets the letters in his own name the wrong way round.

At school he can’t stop fidgeting…

Then goes into a trance when he powers down…

To the point where he can’t even hear the teacher speak.

So it was something of a relief for his Mum when he was recently diagnosed with autism, including severe dyslexia.

Because it meant that the school would now implement measures to get around his learning challenges…

And they could use an arsenal of tools at home to soothe him when he got jittery… stop him tearing up the furniture… and help him communicate his brilliant ideas on paper.

This sort of thing is not uncommon.

In fact, in the past 5 years there has been a wave of diagnoses for autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and dyscalculia.

Not just children, but adults.

A Shift In the Way We Think About Brains

You see, for most of history, we assumed the human brain came in one standard model.

There was ‘normal’, and then there was everything else, which we unfairly described as odd, difficult or a bit slow.

If you struggled to sit still, to read, to concentrate, to cope with noise, to read people’s facial expressions…. well, that was because there was something wrong with you.

We now know that brains come in different varieties. Some are wired for intense focus, some for restless energy, some see patterns others miss, some find bright lights and loud rooms unbearable.

This is what people mean by ‘neurodiversity’.

The idea is that these are not faults to be fixed, but different operating systems, each with its own strengths and its own struggles.

Around 10 million people in the UK, roughly 15% of us, are now thought to be neurodivergent in some way. It’s a term that covers autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and more. So this includes a huge number of people in every workplace and every family… including, possibly, your own.

For many of these people, this discovery is life-changing.

After years of struggling in silence, thinking they were lazy, or stupid, or broken, they finally have an explanation. With this comes a hunger to understand themselves, find others like them, and get their hands on the tips, tools, stories and support that make life a little easier.

It means that there are millions of people, newly aware of neurodiversity, who are deeply interested in the topic, and actively searching for help.

And there are ethical ways that you could potentially create products and services for them.

I’ve put everything you could possibly need to know into a brand new Trend Report, which is up right now on the What Really Makes Money Substack HERE.

A Market That’s Rising Fast

Referrals for autism and ADHD assessments have rocketed.

Here in England, the number of people waiting for an autism assessment has hit record highs, with well over 170,000 stuck in the queue at one point, and the referral rate for children more than doubling in just a few years.

The biggest surge is not among children but adults.

Grown men and women, often in mid-life, recognise themselves in descriptions of neurodivergent minds, and go looking for answers.

One of the fastest growing of these groups is women.

For decades, these conditions were thought of as something that affected boys. The fidgety lad at the back of the class. The nerdy boy lost in his train spotting timetables. So the criteria and the tests were built around males.

This meant that countless girls and women slipped through the net. They learned to mask, to cope, to blend in, all the while feeling secretly that they were failing at a life everyone else seemed to find easy.

Now the penny is dropping.

ADHD diagnoses among women in their early twenties have more than doubled compared with before the pandemic. And this includes women in their forties, fifties and beyond.

Often this happens after one of their own children is diagnosed and they suddenly see themselves in the description of their children’s psychology.

So why this sudden flood of diagnoses?

Why This Trend Is Happening

It comes down to a number of converging factors.

• Awareness has gone through the roof, driven by social media, by celebrities speaking openly, and by a wave of popular books.
• The criteria doctors use have broadened, so more people now fit in the scale somewhere.
• The pandemic played its part too, as lockdowns stripped away people’s usual routines and coping mechanisms and left their traits suddenly exposed.
• And, quite simply, the stigma has faded. People are no longer ashamed to ask the question.

Now, I’ll be honest. Not every self-diagnosis off the back of a thirty-second Instagram video is the real thing, and there are those who worry the whole thing has been stretched too far.

Even the experts are still debating exactly what’s behind all this.

Is it that more people genuinely have these conditions?

Is it that we are, in some cases, over-diagnosing?

Or is it, as most believe, that there was a huge amount of hidden need all along, and it is finally coming to the surface?

The honest answer is that it is probably a bit of all three.

But for you and me, the debate barely matters. Because whichever way you cut it, the result is the same. Millions upon millions of people, newly curious about how their minds work, actively hunting for information, tools, support and connection.

However, if you want to help these people in an ethical way, you need to understand what is actually going on in their lives.

The Needs of the Neurodiverse Person

Imagine going through your whole life feeling out of step.

Everyone else seems to manage the ordinary business of living… keeping the house tidy… answering emails… remembering birthday… sitting through meetings…. making small talk at parties.

Yet you find it strangely, exhaustingly hard.

You start things and never finish them.

You lose your keys, your train of thought, your temper.

You feel too much, or too little, or the wrong thing at the wrong time.

And all the while you assume that all of this is your fault. That you are lazy, or difficult, or just not trying hard enough.

Then one day, you get an answer. And suddenly it all makes sense.

That’s the experience of a great many neurodivergent people, and it explains the emotional drivers behind this trend. It’s the key that finally unlocks a lifetime of confusion.

So no wonder they fall on every book, video and forum they can find!

Neurodivergence tends to bring a cluster of related struggles with it, and each one of those is a need. Things like:

• Anxiety, which so often rides shotgun with a neurodivergent brain
• Burnout, from years of trying to keep up and mask the effort
• Overwhelm and that horrible ‘too many tabs open’ feeling
• Executive dysfunction, the maddening inability to start or finish tasks
• Poor organisation skills and a tendency to get distracted or head off on side missions
• Rejection sensitivity, where the smallest slight lands like a blow
• Sensory overload, where noise, light and crowds become unbearable
• Poor sleep, racing thoughts
• Brain fog, forgetfulness and losing your thread mid-sentence
• Trouble with focus, organisation, time and money
• And, underneath a lot of it, a bruised sense of self-worth from years of feeling like a failure.

Every one of these issues is something people are desperate for help with.

Calming the anxiety… Beating the overwhelm… Getting things done….

They seek solutions from AI or Google at midnight, and hunt online bookshops for anything that might inform them, and ease the problem.

This has created an exciting opportunity – that is, IF you follow some ethical guidelines which I’ll explain in my report.

Get that right and you could build a business that not only builds something that earns you money, but that helps make other people’s lives a little easier.

To read it for free, CLICK HERE.

I hope you find some inspiration!