When I first heard the term “neurodivergence” about fifteen years ago, I thought it might be the latest sci-fi dystopia from the author William Gibson. It actually means, well, whatever you want it to mean. But generally, people who talk about neurodivergence are referring to a range of conditions such as autism, ADHD, Asperger’s syndrome, Tourette’s, etc.—things that often used to be called learning difficulties.

Nowadays, everyone has it. It’s cool to have a dash of neurodivergence, and it is one of the first things people tell you about themselves at middle-class dinner parties. But for others less privileged, it is a route to a lifetime languishing on what the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch MP, has dubbed “Benefits Street”.  

Neurodivergence has become a key to accessing the United Kingdom’s uniquely generous system of disability payments. Benefits such as Personal Independence Payments, which help people with mental and behavioural health conditions, have been awarded for about as long as neurodivergence has existed. But this system of subsidized living is now out of control .

The number of working-age recipients of disability benefits in the UK has reached nearly four million, up 40 percent in the last five years alone. Disability payments used to go to people with observable physical disabilities such as blindness, physical incapacity, and severe mental distress. Now, increasingly, they go to people with disorders such as anxiety, depression, and autism spectrum conditions. 

Last year, 44 percent of disability payments went to claimants with mental and behavioural illnesses that, in many cases, barely existed 30 years ago. Seventy percent of new sickness claimants under 25 years of age cite mental or behavioural conditions, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. One in 10 people of working age in Britain is now claiming at least one kind of sickness or disability benefit. Everyone knows this is unsustainable.

The cost of this neurodemic is catastrophic. The bill for incapacity and disability benefits is already higher than the amount spent on defence and is expected to reach £100 billion ($129 billion) by 2030. It is now a major component of Britain’s massive £330 billion ($440 billion) welfare bill which has doubled since the financial crisis.

The Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said the benefits bill is “unsustainable, indefensible, and unfair.” He has hired the veteran former Labour minister from the Tony Blair era, Alan Milburn, to “think the unthinkable.”

But when the Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves tried to trim sickness benefits by a modest £5 billion earlier this year, she had to back down because of a threatened backbench rebellion by Labour MPs.

Yet everyone agrees that having working-age people languishing on benefits does no one any good, especially not young people with self-diagnosed psychological conditions. Neurodivergence is very much a young person’s disease. One in five British children between the ages of 8 and 25 claim to have a mental health disorder. 

One million young people aged 16–24 in Britain are now officially NEET—not in employment, education or training. That is one in eight young people. Half of them have a disability, according to the Youth Futures Foundation, and most of those cite mental and behavioural issues. Half of all secondary-school pupils have taken time off school in the past year for anxiety. 

Neurodiversity is not, of course, unique to Britain. The term was coined by an Australian sociologist, Judy Singer, in the late 1990s and became a touchstone of American therapy culture. But the scale of it in Britain is unique. No other Western country has experienced a similar rise in mental health–related benefit claims since the pandemic. 

The right says this is simply because benefits are too easily claimed. Claimants are gaming the system. And it is true that it seems easy to get onto the benefits process after a brief telephone interview. The left says, rather, that many psychological disorders that were once stigmatized, such as depression, have now been recognized as the serious medical conditions they truly are. These illnesses are real—doctors say so—and so they must be treated like any other medical condition.

There is something in both accounts, but fraud and undiagnosed illness does not account for what is happening in Britain. This mental health crisis is underpinned by a collapse of national morale and self-worth similar to defeat in wartime. 

People with neurodivergent conditions can often be spectacularly successful. The Virgin boss, Richard Branson, is dyslexic. Great national leaders such as Winston Churchill were depressives. ADHD used to be classed as hyperactivity and was claimed by the Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps as the source of his drive to win. 

This is not to say that these mental conditions are always a gift in disguise, but there is a noticeable decline in resilience in the UK. It looks rather as if young people in Britain, instead of engaging with the world, are hiding in their bedrooms haunted by nameless dread, often over the state of the planet.

There is an economic dimension too. If people see nothing worth getting out of bed for, they simply will not. Britain compounded its psychological malaise during Covid by conducting what looks like the world’s greatest experiment in universal basic income (UBI). It was not a success.

At the height of the pandemic, after the entire nation was placed under effective house arrest called “lockdown”, the Conservative Chancellor Rishi Sunak introduced a furlough scheme that gave people 80 per cent of their previous income to stay at home. 

By late 2020, the UK government was paying the wages of more than half of all adults if you include those on benefits and public-sector workers. Britain had become a socialist country by default. 

Free furlough money was, of course, an invitation to fraud, which has cost the Exchequer an estimated £11 billion. But it was also a test of the theory, beloved of many left-wing academics, that if you paid people not to work, they would turn into gifted artists, philosophers, and bedroom businessmen. It didn’t happen that way.

The UK may have proved conclusively that UBI is not a liberator of universal creativity and is more likely to lead to inactivity, purposelessness, and anomie. That the name of Britain’s welfare system, Universal Credit, echoes “universal basic income” is perhaps no accident.

Many young people simply gave up on the whole idea of getting a job. Why bother when you can get almost as much on benefits? Young women with children and a neurodivergent condition can earn far more than the national minimum wage, according to the Centre for Social Justice.

But there may also be a cultural dimension to this malaise. Britons have always been a notoriously apologetic people. They say “sorry" when you bump into them in the street. The country’s intelligentsia is saturated with guilt and is addicted to apologizing for Britain’s imperial past.

Schools lecture children on the evils of  racism, colonialism and inequality—even though Britain was the first empire in history to abolish slavery and despite the fact that the UK is one of the least racially prejudiced nations in Europe, as repeatedly confirmed even  by research from the EU-funded European Social Survey.

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Yet every museum exhibit now seems to carry a lecture about the iniquities of slavery. Anticolonialist academics such as David Olusoga are feted by the BBC. Edinburgh University even cancelled one of the country’s greatest philosophers, David Hume, because of a racially offensive footnote in an essay from the 18th century.

Britain seems to lack any sense of national destiny or purpose, and sees very little worth celebrating in its own culture. Raising the English flag is condemned as racially offensive. Little girls are sent home if they wear dresses depicting the Union Jack as an expression of their cultural identity. More seriously, the mass rape of young white girls by Pakistani grooming gangs in northern towns such as Rochdale was covered up by the authorities terrified of appearing racist.

There it is: a country that no longer believes in itself, a workforce that has come to expect the state to provide, and a society in thrall to mental illness. A collision with reality cannot be far off for Benefits Britain. As the national debt approaches 100 per cent of GDP, there is simply no money to fund this neurodivergent lifestyle. 
Yet there is no political will to change the system or to restore a sense of national self-worth. Indeed, Britain’s “self-loathing” cultural elites seem to rather approve of living in a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown.