The right’s mental-health overdiagnosis bandwagon is rolling. Wes Streeting should not be on it | John Harris

Thankfully, we now know more about conditions such as autism and ADHD. The health secretary must not be part of this attempt to turn back the clock

Wes Streeting is a politician whose keen interest in the zeitgeist is only matched by his seeming drive to be as close to the heart of it as possible. It is, therefore, not much of a surprise that the secretary of state for health and social care should end the year by announcing what the official blurb calls an “independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism”. Many of the resulting headlines put it more pithily: in keeping with an increasingly deafening media din, this will seemingly be an investigation into “overdiagnosis”.

Candidates for 2025’s word of the year have so far included “rage bait” and “parasocial”, but overdiagnosis is surely the term that perfectly captures the intellectual and political fashions of the past 12 months. The mess of ideas it crystallises now has a set text, published back in March: The Age Of Diagnosis by the neurologist and epilepsy expert Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan. Having been pronounced on, with his usual belligerent ignorance, by Nigel Farage, overdiagnosis has become an obsession of the Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice, who now holds forth about why some children with special educational needs shouldn’t be entitled to dedicated school transport, and claims that the sight of kids with sensory issues wearing ear defenders at school is “insane”.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist. His book Maybe I’m Amazed: A Story of Love and Connection in Ten Songs is available from the Guardian bookshop

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