Capstone Conference Presentation Transcript
My portfolio advisor, Dr Charusheela for her steady mentorship and support during my journey at here MACS
My Capstone Advisor Dr. micha cardenas for her constant encouragement, tough love and keeping me on task,
My second reader, Dr, Shannon Cram, without whose insights I would not have seen the immense possibilities in my research.
Today, I am going to to tell you stories about two people, Kim and Ryan. Kim is a bright young Caucasian woman in her twenties. She is very animated; when you talk to her you get this sense of boundless energy and vibrancy, and a sense of a things being in motion! When she was young, she remembers wanting to constantly get up from her chair to go to the water fountain at school. Her teacher figured that it was not just thirst that was driving Kim and she advised Kim’s mother accordingly. Kim was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and put on medication. Kim was in second grade. A few years later, Kim realized how much she did not want medication, did not want to put chemicals in her body and wanted to try and figure things out otherwise."
Following that decision school did not get any easier. She would lose papers the moment she got them. She felt that her brain was foggy and she couldn’t hear directions. For example, at her softball drill, she would need to know where her spot was and what she needed to do. She would tell herself “I want to hear this I need to pay attention and 10 minutes have passed and I would have come back and I haven’t heard a word of what I wanted to listen to.”
Kim said, "I feel like if you have adhd then you are like this defective student. People would tell me, wow it looks like you are making an effort to fail. I couldn’t not fail,” says Kim, “I didn’t know how not to get an F, how to turn my work in on time. It would start off as an accident but then it became a pattern and I couldn’t get out of it. " Kim failed three years of high school and her GPA dropped to 1.6. Then, "In her senior year she had a math teacher who she said,” spoke to her in a way that made sense to her.” She got really good at math and started realizing she could be good at school if she did things differently. Kim is now a math teacher herself!
My second story is about Ryan. Ryan is a middle aged, white, gay man. He is, and I am appropriating a term that is often used in conversations about Autism-- twice exceptional—with an IQ of 163, and has ADHD. Ryan was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. Looking back at his childhood, Ryan remembers being a high functioning child; someone who would finish his math homework while still in class and turn it in, on the way out. Even so he struggled with academics, he struggled to stay in the moment in class. Ryan managed to get through school without any noticeable failures. However, in college, Ryan changed his major several times and took to alcohol. Following college, Ryan went through addiction issues—this time with amphetamine based drugs; looking back, he notes that those were also his best and most successful years at the workplace – the amphetamines in the drugs were giving him the focus he needed-he was a super star at the work place, he was an award winning employee. However, as he watched his friends succumb to addictions and lose their careers, he chose to walk away from that path and became clean. He also quit his job—something he would do time and again over the next few years. He sought refuge in rigorous physical activity; he was exercising two hours a day, six days a week. Post workout, Ryan took to shopping. Finally, when he did seek help, the psychiatrist diagnosed him as bipolar and started him on Depicor, a medication for bi-polar disorder.
Two weeks later Ryan was suicidal. Through all the ups and downs, Ryan had never been suicidal before. He stopped the medication and was afraid to go back for help for the next couple of years. Finally, he met the doctor who diagnosed him with ADHD, got him the right medication and started him on the path to living productively. Ryan is currently a happily married, runs his own business, is an active PTA volunteer and a fierce advocate for kids with learning disabilities.
These two stories have nothing in common except for their race, and the fact that both participants’ lives have been affected by Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It is not a condition they mirror in each other, it is not a condition they developed, it isn’t something that ebbs and flows. There is no blood test that detects ADHD. But it is something that responds to social organizations and power structures that we as humans operate in, and can have brutal effects at the level of individual experience.
So, What is Attention Deficit Disorder?
Some of the criteria that go into the defining ADHD are, and I quote from the DSM iv or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: difficulty-sustaining attention, frequently distracted by external stimuli, difficulty in organization, fidgeting, ‘on the go’ and so on. However, the bottom line for diagnosis requires evidence of “functional impairment,” or, as a neuropsychologist clarified to me, “Functional impairment refers to how symptoms negatively impact the ability to be successful in different areas of life (e.g., peer relations, academic achievement, completing
daily tasks). It is required for an ADHD diagnosis”
And why is it so difficult to diagnose?
ADHD is a complex, multi-sited, and contested field that, as Claudia Malacrida says, occurs within the intersections of private lives and public discourse (Malacrida, 15) For example, a psychiatrist told me that
“Concentration can be like a common cold: it can be caused by bacteria, virus or allergies; you could have inattention because you are depressed, you are thinking too much….or, you could have ADHD. And, you could have other things going on. Or, you could be impulsive because you are bipolar or, you could be impulsive or because you have ADHD”
Compound this with other cultural undercurrents within the sites of diagnosis such as teacher bias or family beliefs, within the school setting: Do teachers believe in ADHD? What happens when teachers think it’s a behavioral problem? A psychologist told me about her conversations with a patient’s parent whose kid has been labeled as the “behaviorally problem child.” According to the psychologist, “he is really severe ADHD” and she was figuring out other interventions for him, but “these teachers don’t even care; they are like, he’s a bad kid, he doesn’t even care, he is intentionally not doing his homework, and just wants to be a problem”
Why does it matter?
It matters not just because of the examples I have given, not just because research shows that undiagnosed ADHD can lead to depression, self harm particularly in women, substance abuse, higher crime and road accidents,
It matters not just because we know that for every girl who is diagnosed, 3 boys have a diagnosis of ADHD.
It matters because of what we don’t know.
We don’t know, how ADHD interacts with what Elizabeth Jung calls the “axes of difference, such as gender, sexuality, age, level of ability, type of disability, race, and ethnicity” (Jung, 264).
We don’t know how ADHD complicates matters for those who do not fit the gender binary;
We don’t know how communities of color, or immigrant families are impacted by adhd or, how they navigate the social field.
To make the topic and its conundrum more accessible, let’s look closely at the site within the social field where ADHD resides the most. It is found and diagnosed most frequently within the domain of our education structures, places that in turn have various cultural dynamics influencing them. Underlying the diagnosis of ADHD is what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls the “normate—the corporeal incarnation of culture’s collective, unmarked, normative characteristics”—the standard that we measure deviation from (in Hall, 23). Why did Kim think she was ‘defective?” She was measuring herself against the privileged positions of “intelligent, competent and normal.” Why didn’t Ryan think he was defective? He always spoke from the privileged position of a highly intelligent person. And yet he was measuring himself up to other standards of performance: a steady job, an occupation which enabled him to live his life to its fullest potential.
Edward Comstock, author of "The End of Drugging Children: Toward the Genealogy of the ADHD Subject," says this of ADHD: “The disorder is no longer even fundamentally about hyperactivity or attention—and it is widely accepted that ADHD-types pay perfect attention to some things and not enough other things—…ADHD is no longer construed through the ability to represent universal moral truth, but rather through an ability to create and regulate one’s self as a self-interested individual…the goal is no longer to identify deviant individuals or to control deviant behaviors—both of which extend from an intelligibility that ascribes absolute (moral) value to behaviors—but to produce new possibilities of behavior and identity by changing the ethical relationship” Man (humans) have with has with him/herself (themselves) (67).
So what needs to change? How do we produce those new possibilities of behavior and identity?
I invite you to imagine our social institutions as spaces where, to quote Kathy Ferguson, “cerebrodiversity” is appreciated as an “evolutionary asset.”
Where schools ensure “effective instruction” not special education.
Where teachers are taught to recognize cerebrodiversity and intervene.
Where, as Dan Goodley says, instead of making children less intrusive we make schools more inclusive.
The questions we need to ask of our students are, not what is wrong with you? But what is wrong with our social arrangements? What is wrong with the educational structure? Who benefits? And who’s responsibility is it?