This article first appeared on 26 June 2026 in #NDChat, my newsletter on LinkedIn.

Your diagnosis was the beginning of the story. Some people are making a lot of money keeping you on that first page.

This is for anyone who has recently been diagnosed. Anyone waiting for a diagnosis. Anyone who loves someone navigating either.

And it is dedicated to a close family member who, after recently receiving an ADHD diagnosis, found himself overwhelmed by competing claims, contradictory information, and voices that spoke with a certainty the evidence simply doesn’t support.

This one’s for him.

Five years ago I received my own diagnosis. For many people that moment shifts everything. For me it was different.

Twenty five years in education meant I had spent my career working alongside neurodivergent children and young people. My very first school as a newly qualified teacher had an integrated resource for autistic students — a genuinely inclusive unit, woven into the life of a mainstream school, run by a quiet and exceptional team doing transformative work. This was twenty years before neurodiversity became a content category. Before the podcasts and the coaching packages and the LinkedIn thought leaders. They weren’t making noise. They were just getting it right.

So when my diagnosis came, I had context. What I didn’t have was perspective on myself.

Psychologists call it identity fusion — the process by which a label, a group, or an experience becomes so deeply merged with your sense of self that it stops being something you have and becomes something you are. We see it in religion, in political movements, in recovery communities, in grief. The diagnosis, the ideology, the trauma — all capable of shifting from context to cornerstone.

For neurodivergent people, it often looks like this: the engulfment phase, where the diagnosis stops being a discovery and starts becoming a definition. Every memory gets reframed through it. Every relationship reexamined. Every difficulty explained, every strength attributed, every part of yourself filed under one label.

It feels like clarity. It can actually be a narrowing.

Tony Lloyd PhD FRSA said something to me, quietly, in response to one of my early articles. It stopped me in my tracks.

He pointed out that our identity is multi-faceted, multi-layered. Our neurodivergence shapes our lives considerably. But it is only part of who we are.

I needed to hear that. I had been using my diagnosis as a lens so heavily that I’d stopped seeing what was around it.

The research backs this up. Strong identity fusion is associated with reduced self-efficacy and poorer long-term outcomes. Understanding your neurology is genuinely useful. Becoming it is a different thing entirely.

Here’s what very few people will tell you…

The people most vulnerable to engulfment are the recently diagnosed and the late diagnosed. Both groups are navigating something genuinely significant — years of unexplained difficulty suddenly making sense, an identity being reconstructed in real time.

They need good support.

What too many of them get instead is a belief system.

Platforms, communities, coaching programmes and commercial operations have built substantial audiences — and revenues — by targeting exactly these people at exactly this moment. The neurodiversity coaching industry in particular has expanded rapidly, with very little regulation, highly variable quality, and a financial model that in some cases depends on clients remaining defined by their diagnosis rather than developing beyond it.

The most concerning voices are often the most strident ones — people whose own diagnosis arrived a couple of years before yours, who had no connection to this field beforehand, and who have since recast themselves as authorities. Lived experience is valuable. It is not, on its own, expertise.

I see this acutely in education. People with little or no experience of actually working in schools, confidently advising schools on how to support neurodivergent children. Vocal. Occasionally influential. Rarely accountable when the advice doesn’t survive contact with a real classroom.

And if you are still waiting for a diagnosis — still in that exhausting place of knowing something but not yet having the word for it — you are just as vulnerable to this. The communities will welcome you before the assessment does. That warmth is real. What sits behind it commercially is worth examining.

What good guidance looks like is different. It helps you make your own meaning of your diagnosis. It doesn’t hand you someone else’s. It holds the complexity rather than flattening it into a framework someone can sell.

When my family member received his diagnosis, I pointed him straight towards Matt Gupwell — because I’ve yet to come across anyone in this field who will guide people through all the noise and confusion with the authenticity and honesty that he does. This is something that is sometimes painfully lacking amongst the loudest voices in this space.

That kind of grounded, honest guidance is what actually helps.

Not a community that needs you to stay lost in order to keep you engaged.

You are not your diagnosis. You are not someone else’s lived experience of it, however loudly and profitably they broadcast it.

You are not a category, a community, a content niche.

You are a person who processes, experiences and moves through the world differently — in mind and body, in nervous system and senses. That shapes you profoundly. It colours everything. But it is one thread in something far richer and more complex than any single label can hold.

The diagnosis opens a door.

What you walk towards is still yours to decide.

If you’ve been through this — or you’re in the middle of it right now — I’d genuinely like to know: what or who actually helped? Not the loudest voice. Not the most followed account. The thing that actually made a difference.

Email me at chris@headfirstconsulting.com