How Britain’s disability diagnosis epidemic reached Disneyland
Priority queues at the theme park in Paris are full of Britons using their PIP or Disability Living Allowance claims to skip long lines
It’s a sweltering morning at Disneyland Paris and the queue to collect a disabled pass is barely budging. Most of the people in the queue look and sound British: one is holding a letter from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP); many are wearing sunflower lanyards to indicate that their disability is invisible. Behind me, I hear an English woman complaining that the whole point of getting a disability pass is not to have to queue. And yet we inch along.
In order to get one of the two types of accessible passes that Disney grants for free, visitors must produce proof. The list of what counts for Britons, however, is longer than all other countries, and includes documents such as certificates of vision impairment, as well as evidence that the visitor receives the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) or Personal Independence Payments (PIP).
Many claimants of PIP have no mobility issues at all, but suffer from psychological conditions such as anxiety and ADHD: in January, according to DWP data, more than 100 Britons a day were awarded PIP after citing anxiety or depression as their “main disabling condition”.
A friendly Dutch woman in the queue with me is visiting Disney with her two sons – one of whom has autism and severe learning disabilities, and gives me a wave. “You’ll always have people taking advantage,” his mother says serenely of the queue. She has back problems and rests on a nifty fold-out stool in between the brief snatches of forward movement. Inside the park, she warns, the disabled queues are often just as bad as this one: “On one ride, I found that the line for the non-disabled was shorter than the one for the disabled,” she says with a laugh.
Mostly the English
At the kiosk, I show the chirpy Disney employee a garbled NHS document on my phone showing I had an MRI scan in 2024, which found bone erosions on my spine. This NHS app gobbledygook is not on the list of approved documents, but when I say it shows I have ankylosing spondylitis – a form of arthritis – she grants me an easy access pass.
This isn’t the fully-fledged disability pass, but it will allow me to skip lines for rides as long as I go at certain times, and to wait alongside disabled visitors and those who have forked out for a fast-track ticket (on the day I visited, such a ticket would have cost £169). I am also allowed to bring up to four other people with me in the queue, as are those with the “priority access” disability pass. In 2024, the latest period for which figures are available, “more than 230,000 access cards were provided … to welcome guests with disabilities and long-term illnesses”, a Disneyland spokesman says.
Is it just my impression, I ask the employee at the kiosk, or are there tons of Britons collecting their disability passes today? “Oh yes,” she replies with a wide Disney smile. “It’s mostly English people.”
Inside the park, to test out my newfangled pass I subject myself to Orbitron, a ride where you climb into a little rocket and are spun around. The normal queue is 70 minutes under the remorseless heatwave sun, but I zip through the priority queue in three minutes, alongside a handful of other Britons. At the exit, I dizzily ask an Indian woman who did the normal queue with her family whether the 90-second ride was worth the hour-plus wait. “Not at all,” she says. “Not at all.”
An employee manning the Buzz Lightyear ride nearby says he’s noticed British people increasingly using accessible passes. “At the moment there are lots and lots and lots of English people who have priority passes and sunflower lanyards and so on,” he says. Is it just because it’s British half-term? “It’s been this way since Covid,” he says with a shrug. “I have no idea why. There are parks that are on the stricter side but this one is quite lenient.”
Theme parks that have tried to take a stricter approach include Alton Towers, which announced in February that it would not allow people with conditions such as autism, ADHD and anxiety to use its disability queueing system at half term, due to lengthening queues. It then halted the proposed trial, and remains in a period of “engagement with the accessibility community, experts and industry partners”, according to a representative.
Concerns have been growing that Britain is in the grip of an overdiagnosis crisis, with diagnoses of conditions such as ADHD, anxiety and autism soaring. Many of those only have mild forms of the conditions. In March, Dame Uta Frith, the neuroscientist who pioneered much of the research that underpins our present understanding of autism, sounded the alarm, telling the Times Educational Supplement that various cultural factors have led the autism “spectrum” to become “more and more accommodating. And I think now it has come to its collapse.”
In Adventureland, a member of staff tells me that Disneyland Paris gets a lot of English visitors in general, but that “as a proportion compared to the rest, you get more English people with the priority passes than others”. The documents that French visitors have to show, she explains, “are stricter”, with English visitors more able to readily produce official British documents confirming they have autism, she says. “It’s stupid because the disability is basically the same. That’s why there are more English people [in the accessible queue] – because their documents are perhaps more permissive than ours.”
The difference can grate on local visitors, she adds with a wry smile. “There are lots of really bitter French people who see the people in the disabled queue and ask, ‘Well why do they have a disabled card?’ That does happen.”
But she has also noticed that French visitors are generally more sanguine than English ones if their request to get a disabled pass is turned down by the park authorities. “When the French are refused a pass they can get annoyed about it – but less than the English. I don’t know if it’s because they’re here or because that’s how it’s done in England.”
Many French visitors, however, clearly believe that the set-up is fair. Melissa, a young French woman who’s had a yearly pass for five years, says the fact that one disabled person is able to bring four others “can really increase the queue”; but she thinks it’s morally right to wait: “It’s not equal but it’s equitable.”
A godsend for those in need
It’s abundantly clear that many people in the disabled queues at Disney badly need the support – and the commendable provisions at this park for those with disabilities set a high standard for others to follow. But the apparent increase in the number of British visitors in these queues appears to chime with the post-Covid spike in PIP and Disability Living Allowance claims and suggests that the diagnosis epidemic in Britain is spilling over here. At Crush’s Coaster, the Finding Nemo attraction, I notice the normal estimated queue time is 75 minutes, while the priority queue is only a mite shorter, at 60 minutes.
Of course, for many people visiting Disneyland, the two access passes on offer are a godsend. Outside the park, I meet the Marriott family who have come over from Bristol. Natasha, the mother of the family, has fibromyalgia, while her thirteen-year-old daughter Katie has autism and uses a wheelchair, and her daughter Jacqueline, eight, has autism and ADHD. “I don’t think I’d have made it without the passes,” Natasha says. Still, even with the passes the experience has been challenging: “I am dying, not going to lie,” Natasha says. “I’ve taken ibuprofen and paracetamol throughout the day.”
But news of the generosity of Disneyland Paris’s rules appears to be spreading. In the (normal) queue for the Avengers Assemble ride, I meet a father from Wales who is waiting in line with his two boys. Normally, he says, they’d be whizzing through the accessible queue, because “their gran has got a disabled pass. She picked it up from City Hall just for this.” They got the idea from another relative, who had gone to Disneyland and seen the wait-times. “We had a lot of tips off him, what to do and what not to do. Gran has been on every ride today so far – except this one.”
Still, there are those who know they could qualify for a pass – but decline to get one. In the 30-minute wait for RC Racer, a U-shaped roller-coaster, a father from Stansted tells me he reckons he could get a disabled pass for his eight-year-old son Ozzy, who is bouncing around beside us, because he has ADHD, “but I choose not to”.
“I’ve got dyslexia,” the father explains, “and over the years I’ve found ways to cope with it and it’s stood me in good stead. It’s annoying sometimes that others aren’t taking the same approach. No one likes standing in queues in the heat, let’s face it. I think you have to learn to cope with who you are, because there’s no magic wand that is going to change that.”
Overwhelmed without it
Not everyone approaches the queues so philosophically. I talk to a mother and her friend from Leeds, who have brought three children with them, two of whom are autistic and clearly having the time of their lives. “Children have trouble waiting anyway, but these two have trouble waiting at all,” the mother explains. In the queue for Hyperspace Mountain – which thrusts visitors up at an angle, reaching 0 to 44mph in under two seconds - an American visitor tells me he has autism and is glad to have his pass. “I worry I’d get overwhelmed without it,” he says, “and too hot.”
As the warmth of the day is abating, I meet Emma Steinbach and her brother William, who has Down’s Syndrome. They had rather a tough day, Emma says, that included a two-hour queue because there was a technical failure at one of the rides.
“We didn’t have a disability pass,” she says. “I didn’t really know how to get one.” In England, people tend to see her brother, realise immediately that he is severely disabled and let him use disabled facilities. “But we tried once to go through a disabled queue and the man said: ‘No, you need the pass.’” So at lunchtime, Emma tried to get a disabled pass, as she knew her brother would qualify for one. It didn’t work, she says. “They told me they’d run out.”
Data reporting by Ollie Corfe
