There is a pattern I see often enough now that it is worth describing in plain terms.
Adults working in finance, often senior, often successful, often in their late thirties or forties or fifties, start to suspect they may be autistic, may have ADHD, or both. Sometimes the suspicion arrives because a child has been assessed. Sometimes because a sibling or partner is. Sometimes because a particular phrase in something they read recently set into focus something that had been blurred for thirty years. Whatever the trigger, the question lands in the middle of a career that the person has built carefully and at some cost.
What happens next is rarely the simple step it might be in other professions.
Why the overlap exists
I do not want to overstate this, but the overlap between neurodivergence and certain kinds of finance work is real and probably underdescribed.
Some finance roles select for traits that overlap meaningfully with autistic profiles: an unusually high tolerance for repetitive, detail-heavy work; pattern recognition across noisy data; the ability to hold a complex model in your head and notice when something is off; strong systematising; comfort with solitude. Other finance roles, particularly trading-floor roles, select for some of the things ADHD brains can be unusually good at: rapid scanning, novelty-seeking, high stimulation tolerance, fast pattern-matching under time pressure.
This is not the same as saying that everyone in finance is neurodivergent. It is to say that finance has been, for some people, an environment that paid them well for traits they did not have a name for. The arrangement worked for a while. The cost it carried was hidden.
Why the masking is unusually expensive in finance
If you are autistic or ADHD and have not yet been diagnosed, you have probably been masking. Masking is the conscious or unconscious effort to perform neurotypical behaviour: maintaining eye contact when it costs you, using small talk you do not feel, suppressing stims, pre-planning conversations, regulating tone and pace, hiding what you actually find tiring or overwhelming or boring.
Most workplaces require some of this from most people. Finance requires more.
Client meetings need a particular calibration of presence. The trading floor's social rhythms are dense and fast. Networking events are unavoidable. Performance reviews involve being read by people whose sense of you you cannot directly access. The dress code, the dinners, the conferences, the management chain. Each of these draws on the same effortful processing that masking uses, and they accumulate.
The finance professionals who come to see me having recently begun to suspect they are neurodivergent are typically not in mild distress. They are tired in a way that is structural rather than situational. The thing that has worked for years has stopped working, and the diagnostic possibility offers an explanation that fits the data better than the explanations they have been using.
The late-diagnosis moment
When a finance professional starts to suspect, the experience is often discordant. Part of them is curious, sometimes excited. Part of them is angry that no one noticed sooner. Part of them resists the label, partly because of what they assume it means, partly because they have built an identity around being capable in a way the label seems to threaten.
The first few weeks of the suspicion are often a period of intense reading and self-reinterpretation. Memories of childhood, friendships, school, university, early career, all start to look slightly different. The phrase "I always assumed everyone felt that way" comes up a lot.
This is a vulnerable moment, and one in which people sometimes make decisions that do not need to be made yet.
The decisions that come next
A late-diagnosis period in finance often produces four real decisions, none of which are urgent but all of which feel urgent at the time.
Disclosure. Whether to tell HR, your manager, your team, your clients, your partner. The right answer is highly individual, depends on the firm and the role, and is not always the same answer for everyone you might disclose to.
Accommodations. Some adjustments are inexpensive and humane (quieter workspace, written rather than verbal handovers, longer notice on calendar changes). Others may have financial implications (reduced client load, change of role). The Equality Act 2010 protects disability-related accommodations in the UK; whether to invoke it formally is a separate question from whether to ask informally.
Career trajectory. Some people, after diagnosis, find their existing role becomes more workable with the right adjustments and self-knowledge. Others realise the role had been costing more than it was worth, and start to plan toward something else: a different specialism, a different firm, a different industry, sometimes a different life.
Treatment. ADHD has well-evidenced medication options that often dramatically reduce the daily friction. Autism does not have a corresponding pharmacological treatment, but the diagnostic clarity itself often produces meaningful change. Therapy can support the integration of either.
None of these decisions has to be made in the first three months.
What therapy and assessment can do alongside the work
This is where having both a formal assessment and an ongoing therapeutic relationship becomes useful.
A neuro-affirming assessment provides the diagnostic clarity, the structured account of how your particular profile shows up, and the document that supports any disclosure or accommodation conversations. I have written about that process in detail elsewhere.
Therapy alongside or after assessment can do several different things. It can hold the emotional fallout of the discovery itself. It can support the practical decisions about disclosure and accommodation. It can address the long-running cost of years of masking, which often surfaces as burnout, identity confusion, or relationship strain. And it can engage with the work content directly, in finance-fluent language, without me needing the basics translated to me.
Why having a clinician who knows finance matters here
Most therapists are not equipped to engage with the specifics of fund management, equity research, actuarial work, capital markets, regulatory pressure, or the rhythms of a trading floor. They will try, and they will do their best, but the translation cost is real and it slows the work.
In my experience, clients who have moved from a generalist therapist to a finance-fluent one often describe a sense of relief: the early sessions are no longer about teaching the therapist what your job is. The work moves directly to what is happening to you in it.
The same applies, with a different layer, to neurodivergent finance professionals. A clinician who is fluent in both can engage with how your particular wiring interacts with your particular workplace without needing either side translated.
How to start
If something here resonated and you would like to explore an assessment, therapy, or both, the first step is a free ten-minute consultation. I am currently waitlisted, with new clients from 1 August 2026.