A song can make a claim before its writer notices that it has done so. A number fits the beat, a sentence sounds convincing, and the chorus returns often enough for the wording to feel settled. Writing Dying for a Diagnosis, about waiting for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental care, made me look more closely at that process. Research was useful, but not because it could certify everything I felt. It was useful because it could tell me where the song needed to stop claiming more than it knew. 

My own experience was part of the starting point. It gave the subject its urgency, but it could not tell me how common that experience was, or explain somebody else’s history. I needed to keep those questions separate. A personal account can describe what happened to one person. A published study can investigate a defined population. Neither becomes the other simply because they appear in the same verse. 

I kept a research dossier behind the song, separating official data, academic research, charity surveys, reporting and personal testimony. That sounds rather dry beside a track about frustration and exhaustion. In practice, it helped with the writing. A line had to answer two different questions: does it convey the experience, and does its factual claim survive outside the music? Getting the first answer right did not excuse getting the second wrong. 

Take the waiting-list number. NHS England’s May 2025 publication said that up to 549,000 people might have been waiting for an ADHD assessment in England in March that year. It was an estimate, not a precise count of everyone needing care today. That distinction does important work. The lyric’s compressed number needs its accompanying research context: otherwise, a memorable rhythmic phrase can turn a qualified historical finding into an apparently certain statement about the present. 

There is a similar problem with dramatic comparisons. A figure from a survey is not automatically a national rate. An account of a very long local wait does not establish the average wait everywhere. Research can support concern while refusing the strongest possible version of a sentence. That refusal need not weaken the song. It can make the anger more specific: this is the barrier being described, this is where the evidence comes from, and this is what it does not establish. 

The hardest boundary concerned mortality. A Swedish observational study published in JAMA found an association between starting ADHD medication and lower mortality during follow-up. It did not establish that a particular delay caused a particular death, or that its findings predict an individual’s future. The lyric says “Association, not causality”. I wanted the qualification to be part of the language, rather than a correction waiting somewhere the listener might never see. 

That does not make a song a research paper. A lyric cannot carry a study’s entire design, exclusions and limitations. The accompanying sources matter because somebody should be able to leave the song, read the finding and discover what was compressed. The musical phrase can point towards evidence. It should not make the evidence inaccessible behind its own confidence. 

Personal testimony needs a different kind of care. Two anonymous accounts do not become a single representative patient because combining them would make a smoother story. Their details may be vivid, but vividness is not verification. Keeping separate accounts separate was a writing decision as well as an ethical one. It left room for the people behind them to have lives larger than the details useful to my argument. 

The same restraint applies to people I know. Concern does not give me unrestricted access to somebody else’s story. Removing a name would not be enough if the remaining details identified them. There are things a song can leave out without becoming dishonest. It can describe the pressure of a system without offering an intimate life as proof. 

Administrative language gave the work another way to make its point. A referral can be acknowledged while help remains unavailable. The song places that orderly vocabulary beside a life that does not pause for the next message. In that contrast, research and experience have different jobs. Research helps identify the limits of the factual claim; the song explores what the interval between an acknowledgement and usable care can feel like. 

I don’t think the track can diagnose anyone, demonstrate a treatment effect or establish how every patient experiences waiting. What it can do is offer a particular way into the subject. A listener may recognise something; another may disagree with the interpretation. Neither response turns the song into clinical evidence. 

Checking the sources did not remove the feeling from the writing. It gave that feeling boundaries. A strong statement can still make room for uncertainty, and a qualification can belong inside a line rather than outside the conversation. For me, that is the useful relationship between research and a song about illness: not permission to speak for everyone, but help in knowing what I can responsibly say. 

Sources and song 
NHS England. ADHD Management Information — May 2025. 29 May 2025.
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/mi-adhd/may-2025 

Li L, Zhu N, Zhang L, et al. ADHD pharmacotherapy and mortality in individuals with ADHD. JAMA. 2024;331(10):850–860.
https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2024.0851 

Song and public background: https://kieransimkin.co.uk/dying-for-a-diagnosis/ 

Verified research dossier: 
https://kieransimkin.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Dying_for_a_Diagnosis_Research_Dossier_Verified.pdf 

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©2026 Kieran Simkin