Disclosure
When openness creates intimacy vs hierarchy
Disclosure possesses a unique power to meaningfully shift informational asymmetry. Once private vulnerabilities become socially accessible, observers gain additional interpretive leverage over behaviour and emotional positioning. Whether this opens the door for increased intimacy or potential exploitation cannot be easily foreseen.
But informational asymmetry is not distributed equally to begin with. Some individuals possess far greater control over how visible or interpretable they become within social and institutional systems. In some ways, opacity itself can function as a form of privilege. High-status eccentricity is often reframed as brilliance, while the same irregularities expressed under different economic, social, or institutional conditions may become grounds for surveillance, exclusion, or excessive control.
Systemically, admitting a weakness means shifting your position within an unspoken hierarchy. In personal relationships, it shifts the emotional dynamic.
Both can sometimes be necessary.
The question is: how do you decide when disclosure is meaningful, and when you are simply handing someone structural or interpersonal ammunition?
The consequences of disclosure also vary dramatically depending on context. Within intimate relationships, vulnerability may deepen trust and emotional recognition. Within workplaces, educational systems, insurance structures, or bureaucratic environments, the same disclosure can alter perceptions of reliability, promotability, and risk.
Even so, pathologising cognitive labels are now prescribed with unprecedented looseness and at concerning rates. In both the UK and the US, demand for adult ADHD assessments has risen sharply over the last decade. NHS England data published in 2026 estimated that up to 735,157 open referrals may currently relate to ADHD assessment, with referral rates continuing to increase year-on-year.
While this has undoubtedly helped many people gain clarity and support that historically may have been inaccessible, concerns have also emerged around rushed or poorly governed private assessments that later prove questionable or insufficient. In some parts of England, NHS reports have documented assessment waiting times stretching beyond two years, and in certain regions even reaching 10–15 years.
Often, clinics operating within a mental health system increasingly shaped by commercial incentives can end up medicalising what should not be medicalised at all, leaving some patients destabilised, stigmatised, or inaccurately understood.
Public anxieties surrounding diagnostic reliability were further amplified by the BBC Panorama investigation “Private ADHD Clinics Exposed” in 2023, in which an undercover reporter received multiple private ADHD diagnoses before later undergoing a more extensive NHS assessment that reportedly concluded he did not meet the criteria for the condition. The programme sparked significant backlash and debate, not only around the ethics and consistency of some private assessment models, but also around the broader instability of a system struggling to manage overwhelming demand, commercial pressures, and increasingly blurred boundaries between genuine support, over-identification, and institutional mistrust.
This brings us to the quiet but growing stratification between neurotypical and atypical populations. And any system that begins organising people primarily around perceived deficits rather than variation inevitably risks becoming reductive.
Modern psychological categorisation systems do not merely describe cognitive variability. Increasingly, they also shape perceived competence, employability, and legitimacy. And once certain labels become attached to an individual, behaviour that might otherwise appear neutral can become reinterpreted through a pathological lens. In this sense, diagnosis can function not only as supportive infrastructure, but also as a form of informational divide: reorganising individuals into categories that subtly alter how their cognition is socially interpreted and institutionally managed.
This overlaps with concerns raised by Michel Foucault in works such as The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and Discipline and Punish (1975), where systems of observation, classification, and institutional knowledge gradually become mechanisms of social regulation rather than neutral description.
Consider the person who works in intense, irregular bursts yet consistently produces high-level outcomes. Disclosure of that irregularity can quietly recode competence as instability, shifting attention away from the result and toward the perceived abnormality behind it.
If someone whose cognition falls outside the statistical middle of the bell curve completes mainstream tasks equally well, or better than someone closer to the middle, is anything necessarily gained by disclosing the internal mechanics behind the scenes? Or does disclosure sometimes simply redirect attention away from the result itself?
For individuals who suspect certain ADHD traits without formal diagnosis, even casual disclosure can begin subtly reorganising how they are later socially perceived. These dynamics are also shaped by gendered expectations around behaviour, emotional regulation, and social acceptability. Traits interpreted as eccentric, driven, or intellectually intense in some individuals may be pathologised, destabilised, or dismissed in others, depending on who is expressing them and within which social context.
Access to diagnosis, treatment, and even the ability to safely disclose psychological difference is also unevenly distributed across class and institutional structures. For some, diagnosis serves as a pathway toward support and a deepened understanding of self. For others, particularly within precarious economic or professional conditions, the same visibility may carry reputational consequences that are difficult to reverse.
Adding another layer to an already complicated dynamic is the rise of algorithmic mental health culture. Bite-sized TikTok videos and highly shareable online content routinely invite people to indulge in the mystique of “otherness” or to feel less alone in it. Neither impulse is inherently harmful. But problems emerge when unsubstantiated claims begin functioning as social truth, and when highly complex cognitive or psychiatric labels become flattened into identity shorthand.
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A 2026 study examining ADHD-related TikTok content found that 52% of analysed ADHD videos contained misleading or unsubstantiated information, while earlier research found that fewer than half of highly viewed ADHD claims aligned with recognised clinical diagnostic criteria. Unsurprisingly, algorithms reward simplification and relatability far more effectively than nuance.
Contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han, particularly in works such as Psychopolitics (2017) and The Transparency Society (2015), has argued that modern transparency culture increasingly encourages voluntary self-exposure, where visibility itself becomes both social currency and a subtle mechanism of behavioural regulation.
And if cognitive differences can be exploited for clicks and mass consumption, it can also be exploited elsewhere: institutionally, socially, professionally, or financially.
Recent controversy surrounding NHS England’s partnership with the US data analytics company Palantir has only intensified broader public anxieties around disclosure, institutional trust, and informational vulnerability. Reports published in 2026 revealed growing concern over external contractors potentially receiving extensive access to identifiable patient data within the NHS Federated Data Platform, prompting criticism from MPs, clinicians, and privacy advocates alike.
While NHS England maintains that strict safeguards, audits, and legal controls remain in place, the backlash itself is revealing. The discomfort is not simply technological. It reflects something psychologically deeper: an increasing unease around who gets to interpret, store, categorise, and potentially operationalise highly sensitive psychological information once it leaves the private interior of an individual and enters institutional systems.
On the other hand, it is worth noting that interpretive asymmetry is not inherently exploitative in nature. In many contexts, a deepened understanding of another person’s vulnerabilities allows for patience, accommodation, and emotional attunement that would otherwise remain impossible. That same informational openness that creates exposure can also deepen care and interpersonal understanding.
At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that wider psychological discourse has expanded the possibility of self-recognition for many people who historically remained misunderstood, mischaracterised, or systemically unseen. A wide spectrum of neurodevelopmental conditions were long underdiagnosed, particularly among adults and women, leaving many individuals without explanatory frameworks for experiences that had shaped large parts of their lives.
The tension lies in the fact that disclosure in the digital era simultaneously increases both social and interpersonal legibility while also increasing vulnerability to interpretation, exposure, and institutional permanence. Navigating that tension requires care and discernment: not simply around what is revealed, but around which people, systems, and institutions are granted interpretive access in the first place.
Despite the common distortions, asymmetries, and ambiguities surrounding modern systems of disclosure, this negotiation remains deeply human. And when approached with discernment, it may still be one of the most meaningful forms of connection we have.
NHS England ADHD data publication (2026)
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/mi-adhd/february-2026
NHS England ADHD Taskforce Report
https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/plain-english-summary-of-the-adhd-taskforce-report/
Independent Review into Mental Health Conditions: ADHD and Autism
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69cbdb2369dd81b3f213c660/independent-review-into-mental-health-conditions-ADHD-and-autism-interim-report.pdf
BBC Panorama — Private ADHD Clinics Exposed (2023)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEklX-n1ibw
ADHD UK response to Panorama investigation
https://adhduk.co.uk/panorama-adhd-uk-response/
Research examining ADHD-related misinformation on TikTok
https://merseynewslive.co.uk/2026/04/30/why-tiktok-is-driving-uk-waiting-lists-to-2026-record-highs/
Reuters reporting on NHS patient data access concerns
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britains-nhs-grant-palantir-contractors-unlimited-access-patient-data-ft-reports-2026-05-11/
The Guardian reporting on MPs’ concerns over Palantir access
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/11/palantir-access-nhs-england-patient-data
NHS England Federated Data Platform privacy and safeguards explainer
https://www.england.nhs.uk/digitaltechnology/nhs-federated-data-platform/security-privacy/contract-explainer/
Foucault, M. The Birth of the Clinic (1963)
Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish (1975)
Han, B.-C. Psychopolitics (2017)
Han, B.-C. The Transparency Society (2015)