27% of Australian students now have an adjustment for disability at school. Why are we seeing this growth?

20% of people worldwide are disabled in some way. Most disabilities, if caught and managed early, can be worked around decently well in adult life.

So, it isn’t too surprising theyre finding kids that are disabled. And it’s good they’re receiving help.

This is the kind of number that, in isolation, makes people clutch their pearls. But a lot of these are very small adjustments, the same kind you might get if you break a finger before an exam (rest breaks, use of a computer). Some of them are things as simple as having fewer distracting things on a wall in front of certain students so they can focus more.

If a teacher knows that a student struggles with auditory processing, or visual processing, then they can adjust how they deliver information. The student will be more focused since they can actually access the material; this also means they are less likely to disturb the rest of the class, meaning everybody benefits.

Also, when we see that this is something increasing globally as we start to look more for people with less obvious disabilities, we can see that this is not something “caused” by our own Australian government policies.

In the past, for example, we tended only to diagnose people with autism if it was accompanied by an intellectual disability. This is quite a small number of people, but there are many more people who have some degree of autism, who will struggle more than others, but also might be very hyper performing in some areas. These people often just used to get bullied or regarded as strange, and no adjustments were made for things that made them perform less well than they could have.

Another one is ADHD; it used to be that only those children with a high level of hyperactivity got diagnosed. Even then, a lot of children just got classified as naughty or disruptive, as still happens today. Those with inattentive ADHD were called lazy or unmotivated or disorganised, and usually thought that about themselves, without any awareness that the reason they could not organise a study plan or remain focused in class was because of their brain chemistry. Diagnosing these people early can really help with their achievement in school, but also with their emotional development, since they are less likely to spend half their lives blaming themselves for underperforming. This is especially a big problem because of how ADHD contributes to emotional dysregulation, leading to excessive self blame.

The only downside that any of this increased diagnosis MIGHT have(I stress the ‘might’ deliberately) is if some people learn to blame their diagnosis and so don’t develop the skills that some people in earlier generations were forced to develop. But this is a matter of education, and hiding a diagnosis does not help. And importantly, it is really easy to romanticise older generations and imagine that we (I am one of those older generations) all learned great adaptations because we had things harder. One of my pet theories, although I have no idea how to test it, is that the decline of alcohol use and alcoholism amongst younger people is partly due to the fact that they are diagnosed and then treated earlier, and better, for various issues; one of the adaptations that many people in earlier generations learnt as a way to deal with their issues, whether a disability or trauma, was just to self-medicate by consuming a lot of booze. It’s very noticeable how many adults who are diagnosed with ADHD, and medicated, overcome alcohol use issues as a result. Not all, but for some it’s night and day – I was talking to a psychiatrist recently who told me about a client who went from multiple bottles of wine every day to a few drinks a week after being on Vyvanse. She said that this was just a more extreme example of a progression she sees a lot.

So overall, the number in a headline is deliberately designed to provoke a reaction, but it should not be surprising, and it is beneficial for society as a whole that people are getting better help, both in schools and in life.

Why doesn’t childhood vaccination prevent this?