The Neurodiversity Book takes the epidemic of autism and ADHD diagnoses at its word (the numbers are real, after all) and then asks what is actually spreading. The answer is not a condition but a demand and a response to it: a world that runs on participation whether or not anything coheres, while it measures everyone against a standard nobody meets. This, and more, is why I am increasingly of the opinion that it is through the subject of neurodiversity that the spirit of the times can be seen seeing itself.
Inside, the prevailing vernacular of the discourse is taken apart, word by word, because it has already lost its meanings. “Neurotypical”, first coined as satire and now employed in every HR deck, describes a person who has never existed (there are no neurotypicals; nor is that imaginary population the beneficiary of a world optimised for them). And “neurodivergent” is a word quietly on its way to describing everyone, because it actually does.
Across three parts, this book shows how we got here, who we are when attention is understood as what it actually is — not a resource the world competes for or a description of capacity for compliance with external loops, but, simply, the substance of the self — and where we are going. It is written not as prediction but from structural analysis of that which does not change.
Second edition, published 11 September 2026. Substantially rewritten and expanded.
View on Amazon ↗Neurodivergent individuals in need of coherence, not chaos.
Partners, parents and leaders who want to understand how human systems actually operate.
Anyone who suspects the “neurodiversity movement” has failed to move anywhere.
Part One — The Round Hole
Where the line through the population came from, and when. The moving baseline and the statistical ghost it produced; “neurotypical” as a reification of an abstraction; the three routes by which people arrive at a diagnosis; why the medical model arrived when it did; and the economics that make the sorting inevitable without anyone intending it.
Part Two — On Human Attention
The same failure at the scale of a nervous system, with the machinery named accurately: the autonomic nervous system, interoception and neuroception, the salience network, the default mode network, executive function. Two kinds of attention — one regulated from within, one from outside — and what it means that the second is winning.
Part Three — The Way of What Is To Come
The recognition that these were never two failures. Where the trajectory goes if uninterrupted, what the words are doing to us on the way there, and what remains.
Ronnie Cane is the founder of The Neurodiversity Directory CIC and the author of The Neurodiversity Book. Late-diagnosed autistic and ADHD at 21, he built a marketing company staffed entirely by neurodivergent people, sold it three years later, and has since written and published over 150 articles on the research and industry of neurodiversity. He holds a Certificate of Higher Education in Psychology from the University of Salford and is completing a BPS-accredited BSc Psychology at The Open University.
Title: The Neurodiversity Book: How We Got Here and Where We’re Going
Author: Ronnie Cane
Edition: Second edition
Published: 11 September 2026
Formats: Paperback and Kindle
Paperback ISBN-13: 979-8171058302
Print length: 202 pages
Dimensions: 15.24 × 1.3 × 22.86 cm
Language: English
Front matter
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction
What This Book Is Not
Part One — The Round Hole
The Epidemic Is Real
What’s Actually Spreading
The Moving Baseline
Neurotypical As Reification of the Abstract
Universal Cognitive Mechanisms
Three Doors Into One Room
From How We Are to Who We Are
The Round Hole Has a History
Why the Medical Model Arose When It Did
The Economics of Inevitability
Part Two — On Human Attention
The Old Regulator
Two Competing Attentions
The Substrate and the Window
The Hijacked Salience Network
Wanting Without Liking
The Default Mode
Human Will and What It Runs On
External Regulation At Scale
Part Three — The Way of What Is To Come
This Time Last
Words Outliving Their Meaning
The Direction of Travel
What Remains
Back matter
Notes and References
The Neurodiversity Book: How We Got Here and Where We’re Going, second edition (11 September 2026; ISBN 9798171058302).
A book that argues about measurement should be measured too. This section records every place where the printed text has since been made more precise, brought up to date, or corrected. The book itself is not reissued; this is where its text is kept accurate. Each entry gives the chapter, the printed words, what the evidence shows, and how the passage should now be read.
Precision: the claim stands, but the printed wording reaches further than the evidence behind it.
Update: the claim was accurate when printed, and the data has since moved on.
Correction: the printed wording says something the source does not support.
Last updated 12 October 2026.
Precision
Printed
“On the diagnostic referral forms of the national health system there is a box to tick — before any assessment is granted — confirming consent for life-long medication.”
What the source shows
Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Integrated Care Board’s ADHD Assessment request form is the form a patient completes, via their GP, to request an NHS-funded assessment through Right to Choose. NHS Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit triages it before any referral is made. The form asks, as a tick box on its first page and again on its third: “Are you willing to take life-long medication if you are given a diagnosis of ADHD?”
It instructs anyone unwilling not to complete it, and to ask their GP for a referral to the local mental health service instead. It states that a Right to Choose provider’s only available treatment is medication. Its signed declaration includes: “I agree to try ADHD medication if this is offered to me as a treatment option.”
Read as
“On at least one integrated care board’s Right to Choose referral form there is a box to tick — before any assessment is granted — asking whether the patient is willing to take life-long medication; those who are not are told not to complete the form.”
The substance of the passage stands: willingness to take the remedy is collected at the door, before the condition is assessed. The printed wording generalised one documented form to “the national health system”, and used “consent” where the form asks about willingness. Whether other boards’ forms carry the same item has not yet been surveyed.
Update and Precision
Printed
“Freedom-of-information data across all forty-two English integrated care boards puts NHS private spend on these assessments at no less than £512 million, more than doubling in a single year; of the forty-two, only four could say what that money actually bought, and only four could report their waiting times — one of them recording an average wait, referral to assessment, of six and a half years.”
What the source shows
The book was written from an earlier cut of the same freedom-of-information dataset. On 8 October 2026 every figure was rechecked against each integrated care board’s own written reply.
Requests went to all forty-two boards; thirty-eight provided spending data for at least one year. Their spend with private and independent ADHD and autism providers comes to at least £523.5 million across 2023/24, 2024/25 and part of 2025/26, up 122% year on year among the boards reporting both years. In some boards the figure covers the treatment and medication that follow an assessment, not the assessment alone.
Asked how many assessments that spending paid for, eight of the forty-two gave any figure, and only two, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, gave one for all three years. Asked for the average wait from referral to assessment, only Northamptonshire gave figures for every year and every service; Nottingham and Nottinghamshire gave adult averages for each year, and about eight more gave partial figures. Derby and Derbyshire gave a single average for 2025/26: 2,321 days, which is 6.4 years.
Read as
“Freedom-of-information data from thirty-eight of the forty-two English integrated care boards puts NHS spend with private and independent providers — for these assessments and, in some boards, the treatment that follows — at no less than £523.5 million, more than doubling in a single year; of the forty-two, only eight could say how many assessments that money bought (two for every year asked), and only one could report its waiting times in full — while another recorded an average wait, referral to assessment, of 6.4 years.”
The claim stands: the spending more than doubled, and most boards could not say what it bought or how long patients waited for it. The current figures, with each board’s basis and its own reply, are on the NHS private spending map and the national Right to Choose briefing.
Correction
Printed
“Cumulative years on the molecule (something only recently being studied) carry a cardiovascular price that compounds with each year of exposure — published, quantified, and absorbed by the machine as a cost of doing business.”
What the source shows
Zhang and colleagues, “ADHD pharmacotherapy and long-term risk of cardiovascular disease”, JAMA Psychiatry (2024), is a nested case–control study of 278,027 people in Sweden aged 6 to 64, followed from 2007 to 2020. Risk of cardiovascular disease rose with cumulative ADHD medication use over roughly the first three years, then levelled off and persisted across follow-up. More than five years of use was associated with about 23% higher odds than no use. The associations were mainly with hypertension and arterial disease, with none found for arrhythmias. The design is observational.
“Compounds with each year” overstates the finding: the rise was concentrated in the early years, not repeated year on year.
Read as
“Cumulative years on the molecule (something only recently being studied) carry a cardiovascular price, one that rises over the first years of exposure and persists: published, quantified, and absorbed by the machine as a cost of doing business.”
Found something else? Corrections and challenges are welcome at ronnie@neurodiversity.directory, and every one that holds will be recorded here, dated, with its source.