Our goal is for health and education leaders to pledge to ensure that by the year 2025, anyone in the UK who has ADHD can have timely access to quality treatment and support.

We know that achieving equality for people with ADHD in UK will take decades. The first step to achieving it, however, starts with beating the stigma around ADHD, and that’s something that we can begin to do now.

#AttentionUK is campaigning for formal recognition from the elected government about the scale of this problem, to be followed by their pledge that by 2025, every person with ADHD in the UK will be able to access the treatment and support that the National Guidelines for this condition recommend, and which commissioners have a legal requirement to follow.

Step 1:

The first step is to raise awareness of ADHD as a legitimate psychiatric condition – because the stigma against it is still so entrenched that it’s even being perpetuated by educational and clinical training standards, which don’t require knowledge of ADHD. By not training educational professionals about ADHD, and not tackling the poor GP and mental health professional awareness of ADHD, it continues to be stereotyped and misidentified as malingering, bad behaviour, or symptomatic of another mental health condition.

Our voices are being ignored, and that’s why we need the pressure of the wider general public to help us fight our corner.

Step 2:

There should be an ADHD service in every community, so we should be asking our MPs for an explanation if there isn’t. 

In 2017-18, we worked with other ADHD groups to campaign successfully for an All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on ADHD, so ADHD is finally getting talked about at a governmental level. However, the APPG needs better management and representation from all parties, as membership is currently dominated by Labour MPs. At the time of writing (2022) the APPG has not yet brought about any observable changes, however we hope that this might change soon.

Please, help us get our voices heard.