A new qualitative study published in JCPP Advances gives voice to adolescents with ADHD and autism, highlighting how distress often emerges from exclusion, masking, and sensory overload rather than from individual flaws.
The authors frame their work as a corrective to research that has largely relied on adult reports of children’s “emotional dysregulation.” They argue that deficit-based models often ignore the social and sensory contexts that give rise to distress. Instead of treating feelings as symptoms, the adolescents frequently described them as reasonable responses to unfairness, stigma, or overwhelming environments.
The project, led by University College London researcher Georgia Pavlopoulou, involved interviews with 57 young people in the United Kingdom, ages 11 to 15, each diagnosed with ADHD, autism, or both. Twenty-four participants had ADHD, 21 had autism, and 12 had a dual diagnosis. The interviews were co-designed with a youth panel, and the analysis followed a reflexive thematic approach.
A 12-year-old autistic girl captured the pain of public narratives that cast autism as a problem to erase:
“When people sum autism up as a negative thing, it makes me feel like I am worthless. When people say it’s something that needs to vanish, I feel like I am an odd species, speaking an unknown language. How am I supposed to feel confident with these thoughts around me? How am I supposed to happily unfold? It slowly starts to hurt me. You can’t fix me ‘cause there is nothing wrong with me and … the only thing to fix is the world’s perspective’.”
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