Quick summary: Waiting for an ADHD assessment is not a brief administrative delay but a prolonged experience that becomes part of illness, uncertainty and exclusion, with consequences for mental health, well being, work, rent and relationships. Referral estimates of up to 549,000 in May 2025 and 803,000 in May 2026 are not exact national waiting list counts, and a diagnosis still may not lead to treatment if shared care is refused or private costs cannot be sustained. Healthcare practice and public policy therefore need continuous, accessible care rather than fragmented pathways, plus statistics used with their limits so patients are believed before they reach crisis.
I did not begin Dying for a Diagnosis by asking how to write an awareness song. I began with a more awkward question: what does waiting sound like when it has stopped being a temporary inconvenience and become part of your life?
I know that question through my own experience of ADHD, diagnostic delay and difficulty accessing treatment. Waiting is rarely silent. It has a vocabulary: referral received, estimated wait unavailable, shared care declined, prescription awaiting payment. It has rhythms too: the repeated explanation, the new form, the transferred call, the pause before somebody tells you that you are in the wrong queue.
Those phrases became the raw material for the track. It runs at 85 beats per minute, with detuned piano, sub-bass and dry drums, but the most important parts are often the interruptions. Automated messages cut across the verses. Beats drop away. A sentence ends in silence. The hold line is not decoration around the story; it is one of the forces shaping it.
When ADHD diagnosis becomes a waiting game
That choice mattered because administrative language can make distress sound abstract. A person becomes a referral, a pathway or an open case. The vocabulary may be necessary for running a service, but living inside it feels different.
Rent is still due while somebody waits. Work still expects consistency. Relationships and everyday responsibilities do not pause because an assessment has been delayed. A diagnosis obtained privately may not resolve access to ADHD medication if a shared care arrangement is refused or the costs cannot be sustained.
This is why the waiting list is not simply an administrative issue. For people seeking an ADHD assessment or treatment, the time spent waiting can become part of the experience of illness, uncertainty and exclusion.
The song is not an argument against clinicians, diagnosis or medication. My target is the gap between recognising a need and providing care that a person can actually access.
It is possible for staff to be doing their best within a strained service while patients are still harmed by delay and fragmentation. Both things can be true.
Why the numbers about ADHD waiting lists need careful handling
Writing about this also created a responsibility. Statistics can give a lyric weight, but they can also flatten people or become more definite each time they are repeated. I built a source-audited research dossier alongside the track so I could separate what the evidence said from what I felt.
For example, NHS England’s May 2025 management information estimated that up to 549,000 open referrals might represent people waiting for an ADHD assessment. ADHD UK later pointed me to a May 2026 snapshot of up to 803,000 open referrals that might be for ADHD diagnosis.
Neither figure is an exact national waiting-list count. They are different dated estimates with important limits. The qualification is less dramatic than a slogan, but it is more honest.
That distinction matters when discussing the NHS ADHD waiting list. An open referral is not necessarily the same thing as a person who has been formally placed on a confirmed national waiting list, and an estimate of referrals that might relate to ADHD should not be presented as an exact count of people waiting for diagnosis.
The temptation is to simplify a complicated statistic because a simple number makes a stronger headline. But if the purpose is to draw attention to diagnostic delays and access to treatment, accuracy matters more than rhetorical impact.
The difference between diagnosis and access to treatment
The same care is needed when discussing treatment. Receiving an ADHD diagnosis does not necessarily mean that medication or other support will immediately become available.
A person can move from one form of uncertainty to another. They may spend months waiting for an assessment, finally receive a diagnosis, and then encounter another barrier when trying to obtain treatment. A shared care arrangement may be declined. Medication may be difficult to obtain or afford privately. A patient can therefore reach the point that was supposed to resolve the problem and still find that access to care is fragmented.
That is one of the experiences behind Dying for a Diagnosis.
The song is concerned with the space between recognising that somebody needs help and that person being able to receive care that is accessible, continuous and sustainable.
Why statistics about ADHD and suicide need context
The same care is needed with research about mortality, suicide attempts and treatment. An association is not proof that one factor directly caused another. A statistic from a Canadian survey is not automatically a forecast for a person in Britain. Registration dates are not always the dates on which deaths occurred.
Those distinctions do not make the human problem smaller. They stop the song from using vulnerable people as rhetorical material.
There is a particular responsibility when writing about suicide and mental health. Strong claims can attract attention, but attention is not the same as understanding. Evidence needs to be presented with its limitations, particularly when the people represented by those statistics may already be dealing with stigma, uncertainty or barriers to care.
How music can make healthcare waiting visible
This is where music and evidence can help each other.
Research tells us what has been measured, how it was measured and with what uncertainty. Music can make the time inside those measurements emotionally legible.
Five minutes of interrupted rhythm cannot reproduce years of waiting, but it can refuse the comforting idea that a queue is neutral simply because it is orderly on a spreadsheet.
That is why the interruptions in Dying for a Diagnosis matter. The automated messages, missing beats and moments of silence are not simply production choices. They represent the experience of being repeatedly redirected, placed on hold and asked to wait for something that can feel increasingly distant.
The language of healthcare administration can be precise while the experience of navigating it can feel profoundly uncertain.
Why the song does not offer an easy ending
The track ends without resolution.
An appointment is finally approaching, but the automated system reports that the patient is unavailable. I chose that ending because crisis should not become the shortcut by which a person finally qualifies for attention.
Survival is not the same as treatment, and a referral is not the same as care.
The ending is deliberately uncomfortable. There is no neat moment in which the waiting list disappears and everything is fixed. That would not reflect the experience that inspired the song.
What needs to change about ADHD diagnosis and care
I hope the song makes room for a conversation that is more precise than blame and more urgent than sympathy.
Patients need to be believed without having to become a crisis. Clinicians need systems that allow continuity rather than repeated rejection and hand-off. Public discussion needs facts sturdy enough to withstand scrutiny, alongside language that remembers who the facts describe.
The problem is not simply that people are waiting. It is what happens to people while they wait, and what happens when one stage of care ends without the next stage being available.
Sometimes a waiting list sounds like hold music. Sometimes it sounds like silence. The danger is becoming so used to both that we stop hearing the person still on the line.
Listen to Dying for a Diagnosis
The song, private pre-release preview and verified research dossier are available through the Dying for a Diagnosis EPK (https://kieransimkin.co.uk/dying-for-a-diagnosis/).
Dying for a Diagnosis is released on 11th September 2026.
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If this subject brings up difficult feelings, Samaritans can be contacted free in the UK and ROI on 116 123, 24 hours a day.
Kieran Simkin is an independent British songwriter and producer in Brighton creating lyrically driven conscious hip-hop with cinematic texture and social observation.
