Gen X and Neurodiversity: Finding the Lost Generation
One of our taglines at FITH is "the assumptions are wrong." Nowhere is that more literal, or more damaging, than in how Gen X has understood neurodiversity.
I'm the partner of someone diagnosed with autism and ADHD: AuDHD, at 59. He's ten years older than me. I'm not telling you that as an age thing, I'm telling you because it's the assumption I made. For years, the ten-year gap was where I put any challenges between us: this is just what happens when two people are a decade apart in outlook. It felt reasonable at the time. And it was also completely wrong.
Tony Attwood, the clinical psychologist who has spent decades working with couples where neurodiversity is present, has a reframe that reaches further than mine did. He describes these relationships less like a difference in personality and more like a cultural exchange: two people fluent in different, equally valid ways of processing the world, each needing to learn the other's language, in a dynamic that runs both ways rather than sitting with one partner alone.
That matters because the easy assumption, in relationships and everywhere else, is that the autistic partner is the odd one out, the one whose behaviour needs explaining or correcting, when it's really a 50/50 exchange between two people who are neurodiverse to each other. Attwood's point is that neither side of that exchange is the correct one, they're just different.
Simon Baron-Cohen, who directs Cambridge's Autism Research Centre, has a name for people like my partner: the lost generation. Adults who missed diagnosis in childhood because the frameworks simply weren't built for them, and who are only now getting the language for what they've lived with all along. Asperger’s (now referred to as ASC Level 1) wasn't added to diagnostic manuals until 1994. The assumption before that wasn't just that fewer people were autistic, it was that autism looked one particular way, and if you didn't match it, you weren't it. UK diagnoses among adults have risen faster than in any other age group over the past two decades. That's less a change in who Gen X is than a correction of what we assumed about them.
The specific assumption doing the most
damage is probably the cinematic one. Rain Man, then years later The Good Doctor, gave a generation a single, savant-shaped idea of what autism looks like, alongside another outdated myth that's proven just as persistent: that autistic people can't lie. Almost nobody fits either image, which is the whole point of an adage that's become common shorthand among people who understand neurodivergence: if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism.
People with ASC can be brilliant maskers, building a version of themselves for the outside world that reads as capable and easy company, because that's what worked. When someone learns of a late diagnosis in a friend or family member, it's very common to assume it can't be true simply because the only version of that person they've ever met is the masked one.
That same faulty logic doesn't stop at diagnosis. People-pleasing taken to an extreme, over-helping, over-apologising, an inability to say no, is a very common, but not very well known, coping strategy among autistic people. It isn't a clinical marker and it rarely gets read as anything other than someone's personality: warm, easy-going, endlessly accommodating. The very opposite of the stereotype of autism: blunt, awkward and socially distant.
Clinical psychologist Dr. Tasha Oswald reads that same warmth differently: a form of masking in its own right, driven less by a desire to please than by a fear of rejection and a need to feel safe, often compounded in ADHD by Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. It's what's sometimes called fawning, alongside fight, flight and freeze, one of the ways autistic and ADHD adults learn to stay safe in environments built for someone else's brain. Read as simple niceness, it's exactly the kind of shortcut that can leave people, and the partners standing next to them, feeling unsupported and disbelieved.
None of these assumptions were made with any malice. They were just the easiest available explanation, built on partial information and an outdated cultural image, repeated until they hardened into fact. Learning to understand neurodiversity taught me something I now use as a forecaster: different lenses and filters produce different motivations, and different motivations produce different behaviour.
That's the same shortcut that runs through most thinking about Gen X generally, neurodivergent or not: what motivates them, what they want, how they behave, all assembled from convenient, widely repeated ideas that were rarely checked against the people actually living them.
This is the gap Fith exists to close, treating assumption as the thing to interrogate first, not the foundation you build a strategy on. If we can get it this wrong about the people we love, inside our own homes, it's worth asking what else about this generation, in boardrooms, briefs and strategy decks, has been assumed rather than actually understood.
As we’re all about rave culture here at Fith here's some little ND Rave nuggets: there's a growing thread of lay evidence linking ADHD to the UK rave movement specifically - rich enough that we've covered it separately in an earlier post.
Attack Magazine has explored how ADHD shapes the making and hearing of dance music, pointing to repetitive rhythm and immersive texture as particularly compelling for neurodiverse listeners, while DJ Mag has looked at how electronic music culture offers both a creative outlet and a focus-supportive environment. Furthermore, a 2022 AFEM industry study surveyed 137 dance music professionals and found 58% showing at least one neurodivergent trait, a striking number for an industry rarely discussed in these terms. Which might explain why so many Gen X-ers needed those nights more than we ever let on, less about the party itself and more about finally being somewhere the noise in your head made sense.
Video Stats:
2022: 1 in 34 kids diagnosed (Shaw et al, 2022)
1966: 4.5 in 10,000 (Lotter, 1966)
Diagnosis rates are now rising fastest among adults (Russell et al, 2022)
1 in 7 are now considered neurodiverse (includes autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and Tourette's syndrome)
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