Making a Difference: A Selection of Neurodiverse Poets is a new anthology of work by writers from West Yorkshire which I have edited as part of the NHS West Yorkshire Neurodiversity (Autism & ADHD) Review.

The Review itself was set up to obtain an overview of what life is like for people in West Yorkshire living with Autism and ADHD, with a particular view to improving health and wellbeing for this often-overlooked community. Being autistic myself – and, furthermore, having a job which brings me into contact with a whole range of wonderful neurodiverse people – it’s something very close to my heart, and I’ve joined interesting discussions on topics from healthcare to the language we use around neurodivergence.

There’s more to the review than just gathering information, though. Following a deep dive into people’s lived experience, it was found that a significant fundamental issue is the lack of understanding from the neuro-majority around neurodivergent people’s experience of the world we share, causing barriers to the provision of adequate healthcare and support.   

This is where poetry comes in. Poetry, when we talk about it in isolation, can bring up images of something remote or even forbidding. It may be the stuff we had to write essays on at school, even though we didn’t really understand it; or it could be the stuff that some people study at university, though we’re not sure why, or what they do with it.

Yet, as soon as we stop thinking of poetry as something monumental and ‘over there’, we realise that we’ve been carrying it around all our lives and bringing it out at key events such as weddings, funerals, celebrations, and occasions of collective grief. It leaps up on us unbidden: I’m going for a weekend away shortly and even though it’ll be October, I can guarantee that Wordsworth’s daffodils will ambush me at least once. Poetry does this. It gets into our lives and even if we don’t think about it often, it’s there when it knows we need it.

Poetry, too, is good for us. Both reading it and writing it have been shown in many studies to benefit us, not only psychologically, but even physically. The latter will take someone with a very different area of expertise than mine to explain, but the former has something to do with the rhythms to which we respond from birth. I suspect it’s also because poetry allows us to push language beyond its everyday usage and, if it’s not too grandiose a claim, begin to communicate things that words alone can’t convey.

With this suggestion in mind, a poetry anthology seemed an ideal way of bridging the gap in understanding of neurodivergent people’s experiences in a way that complements more conventional presentation of information. Rhiannon Oliver, the Co-production Coordinator of the Review, believes it can “offer insight into the social, emotional and sensory experiences of neurodivergent people through the universal language of poetry, whilst simultaneously celebrating the creativity that so often goes hand in hand with neurodivergence.”

Though sharing identities shaped by autism and or ADHD, the writers in Making a Difference are very diverse indeed, in both poetic terms and in terms of individual perspectives on – and approaches to – their unique personal experiences. It’s an eye-opening and engaging anthology which, rather than looking at the ‘issue’ of neurodivergence, speaks from points within lived experience and it’s been immensely rewarding to work with this mix of established and new writers.

Print copies of ‘Making a Difference: A Selection of Neurodiverse Poets’ have been circulated to libraries and public services across the region, and a digital version is available online.

Professor Oz Hardwick is a Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.