Everything is Connected to Everything

Ask almost any neurodivergent woman about her health history and a familiar list comes out. Stomach problems since childhood. Hypermobile joints. Feeling faint when she stands up. Skin that reacts to everything. Periods that floor her. Migraines. Chronic fatigue. A long, exhausted sentence that ends with “…but the doctors say all my tests are normal.”

For decades each of these has been treated as a separate puzzle: a gastroenterologist for the gut, a rheumatologist for the joints, a cardiologist for the dizziness, a gynaecologist for the periods, a GP gently suggesting the rest is anxiety. Patients are bounced between specialists, sent home with conflicting advice, and quietly told – often for years – that they are over-reporting, somatising, or “complicated.”

The US non-profit All Brains Belong VT, founded by autistic family physician Dr Mel Houser, has done something different: they have named the pattern, mapped it, and built a clinical model around treating it as one connected system rather than twelve separate problems. They call their project Everything is Connected to Everything, and their core insight is devastating in its simplicity:

Autistic and ADHD adults often have multiple intertwined health conditions. The healthcare system often gets in the way of clinicians addressing multiple medical problems at a time. Yet by treating these intertwined medical conditions as separate, this may result in a person not getting better.

All Brains Belong VT

This is not a niche idea. Their free clinical resource has now been used by tens of thousands of patients and clinicians worldwide

The conditions that cluster together in autistic and ADHD people span almost every body system. Not everyone has all of them, and the picture varies hugely from person to person, but the tendency to cluster is now well-established in the research literature. The grouping commonly includes:

The constellation, broadly:

• Hypermobility & Ehlers-Danlos / hEDS / HSD
• POTS and other forms of dysautonomia
• Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS)
• Allergies, eczema, asthma, food sensitivities
• Functional gut disorders (IBS, reflux, gastroparesis)
• Chronic pain & fibromyalgia
• Chronic fatigue / ME / Long COVID
• PMDD and severe menstrual difficulty
• Endometriosis & PCOS
• Migraine
• Sleep disorders
• Autoimmune conditions
• Thyroid dysfunction
• Sensory processing differences
• Tics & Tourette syndrome
• Dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia

One mechanism doesn’t explain all of it. Researchers are tracing several overlapping threads – connective-tissue differences affecting both joints and the autonomic nervous system, immune and mast-cell dysregulation, hormonal sensitivity, autonomic instability – and how each one feeds the others. What is clear is that treating one in isolation often makes the others worse. A medication that calms one system can flare another. An exercise plan designed for a typical body can wreck a hypermobile one. A “low-FODMAP, low-histamine, low-stress” trio of advice from three different clinics that don’t talk to each other quietly becomes impossible to live.

The constellation is not exclusive to women and girls, but the evidence keeps pointing the same way: autistic and ADHD girls and women carry a disproportionate share of it, and are diagnosed last.

Key statistics:

• 39% of autistic people meet clinical criteria for EDS or Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder, according to a 2025 review of twenty studies, against roughly 20% in the general population.
• 5.6× more likely to have an ADHD diagnosis if you have EDS, in a population-matched Swedish cohort of 1,771 people. (Cederlöf et al.)
• 74% of children with ADHD in one study had generalised joint hypermobility, against 13% of comparison children. (Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2022)
• 69% of autistic adults have untreated health problems, flagged by All Brains Belong as a public-health emergency, not a coincidence. (Doherty et al.)

Why women and girls especially

Several pieces fit together. Autistic & ADHD women are much more likely to be late-diagnosed because they mask. Connective-tissue and hormonal conditions are themselves more common in women. Mast-cell, autoimmune and pain conditions are statistically female-skewed. PMDD and severe menstrual symptoms are wildly more common in autistic and ADHD women than the general population. And the diagnostic system treats each piece on its own, so a teenage girl who is hypermobile, anxious, exhausted, in pain, can’t tolerate her uniform’s seams, and is missing school every other Monday is rarely seen as a young person with a recognisable, treatable pattern. She’s seen as a young person with a behaviour problem.

Many of the young people we work with at The Haven and in our groups arrive with some version of this list, even if no one has ever connected the dots for them. Many of their mothers, themselves often newly self-identified as autistic or ADHD, recognise the picture in the moment we describe it.

Researchers have begun mapping sub-clusters within the constellation. The combinations that keep appearing in the literature include:

The connective-tissue / autonomic cluster: hypermobility plus dysautonomia (often POTS) plus chronic pain plus neurodivergence. Csecs and colleagues mapped this in a large 2022 study.

The immune / mast-cell cluster: hypermobility plus dysautonomia plus mast-cell activation plus allergic conditions. Mast cells sit at the crossroads of the immune and nervous systems, and when they are over-reactive almost everything downstream behaves badly.

The gut-and-allergy cluster: hypermobility plus dysautonomia plus GI conditions plus allergic conditions. Brooks and colleagues described this pattern in 2021. The vagus nerve, the gut, the skin and the immune system are not separate departments to the body; the medical system just files them that way.

The point of naming sub-clusters isn’t taxonomy for its own sake. It’s that once a clinician sees the pattern, the management plan changes. You don’t keep adding stimulants on top of a body that is already running on cortisol. You don’t prescribe a generic exercise programme to someone whose joints sublux. You don’t tell a teenager with severe PMDD that she “just” has anxiety. You stop doing harm.

There are individual UK clinicians, orgs and researchers doing brilliant work on pieces of this too – SEDSconnective & Dr Jessica Eccles are just two examples. However, most autistic and ADHD young people in the UK (and in the US too) still cycle through specialty after specialty being told their tests are fine. Their families know something is wrong. Increasingly, so do the young people themselves.

Until the NHS catches up, the most useful thing we can do at AGN is point people firmly at the work that does exist, and help families bring it to their own clinicians.

All Brains Belong VT is a small Vermont non-profit founded by Dr Mel Houser, an autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, dyspraxic, dyscalculic family physician who launched the organisation in November 2021 after realising the average life expectancy for an autistic adult is between 58 and 75 years. She decided that wasn’t acceptable and built something different.

Their model integrates medical care with social connection, education and community. Most of their resources are free. The flagship project below was built with a task force of clinicians, patients and over a hundred autistic and ADHD community members, peer-reviewed by primary-care physicians, and funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

If you’re a parent or a young person:

• Everything is Connected to Everything — main project page → The whole picture in one place. Plain-language summaries, video introductions, and a one-page letter you can take to your next GP or paediatrician appointment to start the conversation. (allbrainsbelong.org/all-the-things)
• Get Connected → All the ways into the All Brains Belong community, including their free programmes for neurodivergent kids and adults. (allbrainsbelong.org/get-connected)
• Brain Club → A weekly community-shaped learning space where brain science meets everyday life. Over 2,200 people have taken part. (allbrainsbelong.org/brain-club)
• Kid Connections → Their programme for neurodivergent children — a sister sensibility to what we’re building at The Haven. (allbrainsbelong.org/kid-connections)
• Sign up for their newsletter → The simplest way to stay close to the work. Their book on how to replicate the model is due September 2026 — join the book list at allbrainsbelong.org/book-list. (allbrainsbelong.org/newsletter)

If you’re a clinician, SENCO, EP or LA caseworker:

• Clinician Guide → A primer for primary-care clinicians on screening, working up and managing the constellation. The strategies described are mostly inexpensive, safe and effective. Bring this into your CPD, your supervision, your team meeting. (allbrainsbelong.org/clinician-resources)
• Education programmes → All Brains Belong offers training for healthcare practices, employers and any organisation looking to be more genuinely neuroinclusive. Worth knowing about for your service. (allbrainsbelong.org/education)

If you’re a UK clinician reading this and recognising your patient list, that recognition is the most useful thing you can do today. The next most useful thing is taking the Clinician Guide to your next team meeting.

We are not a medical organisation. We can’t diagnose, treat or prescribe. But we can name the pattern out loud, in language families and young people recognise, and we can keep saying it until enough UK clinicians, schools and commissioners stop sending people home without answers.

Many of the families who reach AGN come to us because of a school crisis. Once we start talking, the medical picture comes out: the gut, the joints, the fatigue, the periods, the sensory load. We don’t think the educational and the medical pictures are separate any more than All Brains Belong does. A young person whose body is fighting her every day cannot learn in a noisy classroom for six hours. A young person whose pattern has finally been recognised, whose teachers know, whose parents have been heard, often can.

If this page describes your daughter, or yourself, or a young person you work with: you are not making it up, you are not over-reporting, and you are not alone. This is a recognised constellation. Read the All Brains Belong materials. Take their letter to your GP. And if school has become impossible, come and talk to us.