“I Don’t Want Them to Know”: Stigma and Neurodivergent Students

A 10-year-old with ADHD and dyslexia recently told me about a moment at school. After changing medication, she had begun experiencing periods of anxiety and panic. One day, the noise in the classroom built up until she was shivering and needed to step outside. Her teacher let her take a friend with her.

When they returned, classmates asked why they had been gone so long. Her friend answered for her: “That’s because she has ADHD.”

“I felt so humiliated. Now everyone in my class will think of me as ‘the ADHD girl’. I never ever want them to know about my dyslexia. It’s enough that they have given me the ADHD label.”

We do not know what her classmates thought. They may not have judged her at all. But her fear matters. In that moment, the distress was no longer only the noise, the panic or the uncertainty of a medication change. It was also the possibility that one word might replace everything else her classmates knew about her.

The burden of being reduced to a label

A diagnosis can offer language, understanding and access to support. It can help a child make sense of experiences that once felt confusing. But when other people use that diagnosis without permission, or treat it as an explanation for the whole person, it can become an unwanted public identity.

That is the difference between having ADHD and being turned into “the ADHD girl”. One describes part of a person’s experience. The other risks making that experience the first thing everyone sees.

For a child who is also dyslexic, the lesson can arrive quickly: if this label changed how people see me, perhaps the safest choice is to conceal the next one. “I don’t want them to know” is not evidence that a child rejects who they are. It may be evidence that the social environment has not yet shown them it is safe to be known.

What stigma can add to an already difficult moment

Research on neurodivergent young people describes how upsetting experiences can accumulate: feeling different, being misunderstood, exclusion, bullying, academic pressure and adults responding to behaviour without understanding what sits beneath it. Work led by Professor Edmund Sonuga-Barke and colleagues through the RE-STAR programme has examined these experiences in adolescents with ADHD and/or autism, alongside the role of emotional dysregulation in mental health.

Longitudinal research also links difficulties regulating emotion with the pathway between ADHD symptoms and later anxiety or depression. This does not mean that ADHD inevitably leads to poor mental health. It means that what happens around a young person — and how supported, understood and safe they feel — deserves serious attention.

For students with dyslexia, reviews have similarly identified low self-esteem, stigma and bullying as possible pathways to anxiety and depression. The diagnosis itself is not the whole story. Other people’s responses to difference can become part of the burden.

The classmates are part of this story too

A classroom can hear a term such as ADHD with little or no context. Some children may ask thoughtful questions. Some may repeat something inaccurate they have heard. Some may assume it is an illness. Others may turn the word into a joke or shorthand for behaviour. Silence leaves those meanings to chance.

That does not mean announcing a child’s diagnosis to educate everyone else. Personal information belongs to the child and family, and disclosure should be handled with care, consent and respect. It means building understanding before one student is placed in the position of having to explain or defend themselves.

Age-appropriate teaching can help children understand that brains process attention, language, sensory information and emotion in different ways. It can teach them that support is not unfair, that leaving a noisy room is not a privilege, and that a diagnosis is never an invitation to define someone by one characteristic.

From individual accommodation to a whole-school approach

The teacher in this story responded to immediate distress by allowing the student to leave the room with a trusted friend. That practical flexibility mattered. But individual accommodations alone cannot determine what happens when the student returns.

A systemic approach asks wider questions:

• Do students learn about neurodiversity before a classmate’s private information becomes the lesson?
• Do staff understand sensory overload, emotional dysregulation and the different ways distress can appear?
• Are children asked what language they prefer and who may know about a diagnosis?
• Do anti-bullying and inclusion practices address casual labels, jokes and assumptions as well as overt cruelty?
• Can a student access support without having to disclose more than they want to?

This is not about giving every class a clinical lecture. It is about creating a shared, humane understanding of difference — one that protects privacy while making belonging visible.

The aim is not simply awareness. It is safety.

Awareness matters only if it changes what a child experiences next. A neurodivergent student should not have to choose between getting support and controlling their own story. They should not have to hide one part of themselves because of what happened when another part became visible.

Schools cannot prevent every awkward question or upsetting moment. They can shape the culture in which those moments happen. They can give staff and students accurate language, make room for individual needs, protect confidentiality and respond early when labels become prejudice.

The most important question is not only, “What support does this child need?” It is also, “What does this community need to understand so that this child does not carry the work of belonging alone?”

Evidence informing this article

This article draws on published work from the RE-STAR programme on upsetting experiences in neurodivergent young people; longitudinal research by Antony and colleagues on emotional dysregulation, ADHD symptoms and internalising problems; a UCL and Anna Freud Centre review of dyslexia and mental health; and systematic reviews of bullying and school-based anti-stigma interventions. These findings describe patterns across groups, not the experience or future of any individual child. The recordings of the Global ADHD Conference 2026, hosted by ADHD UK on 1–2 October, are freely available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARO2vgRc3jk