Almost all of our clients are neurodivergent.
I say that carefully, because it is an observation rather than a dataset. Some clients tell us outright. Some know they are different in some way and are waiting on a formal diagnosis that may take years to arrive. Others I recognise from experience, and from how I experience life myself. It is usually apparent from the first conversation.
It is never a judgement. It is part of understanding what a client needs, and why they think about their case the way they do.
What follows is not a claim that neurodivergent professionals are more likely to fall short. It is a claim about the process — that a system designed around a standardised idea of how people explain themselves will predictably disadvantage anyone who explains themselves differently, without anyone in that system intending it.
The mismatch starts immediately
Neurodivergent registrants are often more impulsive, and want the process to move faster than it ever will. I have a great deal of sympathy with that.
They also tend to hold, more strongly than most, the belief that an honest explanation offered early will make the problem go away. That belief is wrong for every registrant — regulatory investigations do not work that way — but it is held with particular conviction here, and it is genuinely difficult for a neurodivergent client to understand why the process does not behave the way their brain expects it to.
A large part of the early work is reassurance of a specific kind: it isn’t you, it’s the process.
Where it becomes serious: belief, and the Ivey test
Neurodivergent clients frequently have very logical, deeply and honestly held reasons for why they acted as they did. Those reasons often fail to land with a neurotypical listener — or, more precisely, with a standardised regulatory process.
This matters most in allegations of dishonesty, and it deserves more attention than it currently gets.
The current thinking is that dishonesty is not driven by neurodivergence. But the way a person perceives a situation is quite particular if you are neurodivergent, and perception is precisely what the legal test turns on. The Ivey test asks first what the registrant actually knew and believed, and then whether their conduct was dishonest by the standards of ordinary decent people.
Both stages create difficulty. Panels often find it hard to accept what the registrant genuinely believed, when that belief was shaped by a way of processing the world the panel does not share. And having struggled with that first question, they must then measure it against a standard — “ordinary decent people” — built on the assumption that perception is broadly held in common.
This is an area where far more research is needed, particularly around honesty and integrity. It is not a plea for a lower standard. It is a question about whether the first limb of the test is being applied accurately when the belief in question is one the panel finds unfamiliar.
What we do differently — which is mostly not treating people differently
We don’t have a separate track for neurodivergent clients. What we do is recognise specific needs and acknowledge them.
I speak to a lot of prospective clients who are working hard to explain how their neurodivergence affects them, bracing for scepticism. They find it disarming when I explain that we are a neurodivergent team, and that we start from the position that everyone is different. That recognition is very often enough on its own.
The place it makes the most practical difference is insight. Insight is decisive in fitness-to-practise cases, and it is where a purely internal, purely logical account of one’s own conduct tends to fall short — however honest it is.
So we move the reflection away from what happened, and toward the wider consequences: the ethical impact on patients, on colleagues, on public confidence in the profession. We ask clients to look beyond themselves. That advice lands very differently when a client knows we are not doubting their account of their own mind, but trying to bring their thinking to the bigger picture.
The point
Neurodivergence isn’t an inconvenience in a regulatory case, and it isn’t an excuse in one either. It simply makes plain why a registrant needs proper support — and it reinforces exactly what the job of a lawyer is: to make one person’s genuinely held reasoning intelligible to a panel that does not share it.
Sequentus Legal Services represents healthcare registrants before the GMC, GPhC, NMC and other regulators, on fixed fees. All our clients have access to free one-to-one counselling through our separate mental health team — no referral, no waiting list.
