Reform are surging. The council election results are in and across the UK, a movement built on division, fear, and the reduction of complex human experience to simple enemies is gaining ground.

I’ve been sitting with that. And I want to talk about why, for those of us with ADHD and neurodivergent minds, this particular brand of politics doesn’t just feel wrong. It feels viscerally, physically, overwhelmingly wrong.
This isn’t a party political post. It’s something more fundamental than that.

We think in systems.

ADHD brains are systems thinkers. We see connections others miss. We notice the pattern behind the pattern. We understand intuitively that pulling one thread unravels something larger, that the homeless person and the housing policy and the austerity budget and the generational wealth gap are all the same story told from different angles.

Fascism, and the authoritarian populism that precedes it, depends on the opposite of systems thinking. It depends on simplification. On single causes. On single enemies. On the idea that complex, tangled, centuries-long problems have one solution and one villain.
Our brains reject that instinctively. Not because we’ve read the right books, though many of us have. But because we literally cannot process the world that way. We see too much. We connect too many things. We know, in our bones, that it is never that simple.

We grew up on the outside.

Growing up in a world not made for the ADHD brain creates many repeated injustices that build a particular sensitivity. Every time you’re misunderstood, made to follow rules that make no sense, singled out, or punished while others are not, it sharpens that area of injustice and makes it more sensitive to any other injustice it encounters.

We know what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t fit the system.

We know the shame of being told you’re not trying hard enough when you’re trying harder than anyone can see. We know the exhaustion of performing normality for a world that wasn’t designed for you.
And so when we see a political movement that scapegoats the outsider, that tells people their suffering is caused by the person who is different, that weaponises the fear of the unfamiliar, we don’t just disagree with it intellectually.

We feel it as a threat. Because we have always been the one they were pointing at.
We feel injustice differently

When something feels unfair for those of us with ADHD, we don’t just notice it. We feel it deeply. A news story about injustice. A social media post about discrimination. A video of someone being mistreated. While others may scroll past or move on quickly, a person with ADHD may feel a strong emotional reaction that is hard to ignore.

This is sometimes called justice sensitivity, and it is one of the least discussed but most significant features of ADHD. Research has found that emotional dysregulation is a key feature of ADHD, manifesting in heightened emotional sensitivity that creates an increased sensitivity to injustice, often leading individuals to act passionately when they encounter social inequalities.
That passion is not weakness. It is not irrationality. It is our nervous system correctly identifying a threat to human dignity and responding accordingly.

Dr Ned Hallowell, the world’s leading authority on ADHD, describes the ADHD brain as having extraordinary empathy and emotional depth. He talks about how the capacity for deep feelings is a double-edged sword. The upside of being a person who feels so deeply, with such a high capacity for empathy, is that you’re often the best friend, parent, sibling, and colleague a person can have. You can read people well and understand what they’re feeling even before they express it.

That same capacity that makes us deeply loyal friends makes us deeply troubled by cruelty. We cannot switch it off. We were not built to.
We know humanity is better than this
Hallowell has said throughout his career that he is, at his core, in the business of promoting love, promoting people understanding each other, seeing each other’s side instead of each other’s worst side, drawing out the loving side of people.

That is also, I would argue, what neurodivergent people have always been doing. Imperfectly, chaotically, with too many tabs open and too many feelings to process at once. But doing it nonetheless.

We know instinctively that humanity is better than what is being offered to us right now.

We have seen enough of the world, felt enough of it, connected enough of its dots, to know that the answer to fear is not more fear. That the answer to complexity is not false simplicity. That the answer to pain is not someone to blame.

We have spent our whole lives being told our brains are the problem. We know exactly how that story ends.
And we are not going to let it end that way for anyone else.

Rob Gallagher is the founder of Open Tabs Network, a global community for neurodivergent leaders. Find your people at opentabsnetwork.com