Why the biggest threat for adults with ADHD is denial
Ann Gill
Contributor
The attention span of a student during midterms is a volatile thing. Bouncing from one project to another, your mind is a cluttered mess unable to focus and retain information. This is the everyday reality for a student struggling with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD).
Procrastination isn’t a choice for the ADHD-diagnosed who battle an uncontrollable mental pattern, along with inattention, restlessness, and impulsivity. The Centre for ADHD Awareness (CADDAC) defines ADHD as a neurobiological disorder. It is an illness or deficit of the nervous system most often caused by genetic or biological factors. Despite the occurrence of adult ADHD within the general population, many still confuse it exclusively as a childhood disease. This makes the disorder even more difficult to deal with as university students may be judged for “looking” for a way out of a tough curriculum.
Heidi Bernhardt, national director of CADDAC and mother of three grown children with ADHD, explains the complication of this stigma.
“This is a huge problem,” she says. “The misinformation about ADHD is incredible, the amount of stigma and the number of people that do not understand ADHD is overwhelming. Most people misinterpret it as someone being not caring, and lazy. These things are untrue, causing a lot of adults struggling with ADHD being not diagnosed.”
ADHD is highly hereditary and has its presence in adulthood. If left undiagnosed and untreated, it can have complications on not only the academic years, but can also create setbacks in their post-graduate years. Bernhardt explains; “It can get worse than just failing grades, undiagnosed and untreated ADHD leads to self-medicating, which then leads to substance abuse and eventually, issues with the law. People end up in jobs with lower income, and end up having financial problems. There are huge social-economic costs of untreated ADHD.”
Societal pressures along with the overwhelming amount of stigma around this disorder often prevent parents from seeking aid for their child, taking into consideration the hyped misinformation and preconceptions around ADHD.
“In the 18 years I’ve been doing this, I have never met a parent who wants to put their kids on medication; parents do not want to medicate their kids,” says Bernhardt. “They are being slammed for not disciplining their children, or drugging their children. It’s scary, and it’s based on the misinformation out there”, says Bernhardt.
The symptoms of ADHD can vary from day to day, and even from hour to hour. New research has shown that children and adults suffering with ADHD often have weaknesses in the areas of executive functioning (EF).
Executive functioning is the mental process that allows us to plan ahead, evaluate the past, start and finish a task, and manage our time. EF skills enable us to identify a problem, find solutions, organize ourselves, regulate our behaviour and emotions, control our attention levels, and resist distractions. The lack of these basic essential skills is the fundamental reason behind why students with ADHD experience such difficulty throughout university and especially during exam time.
CADDAC has released the first comprehensive Canadian toolkit for university/college students with ADHD. This toolkit, made up of a self-evaluation checklist, tips of how to achieve success in school with ADHD and, a list of useful resources to help college and university students navigate their condition. The toolkit aims to assist any students that could be struggling with symptoms of ADHD. This toolkit can be found at caddac.ca. CADDAC has developed a list of tips for college/university success that students may refer to during exams.
If you are a student struggling with the symptoms of this disorder, and you only take away a single tip, be sure to set up accommodations! The importance of getting help cannot be stressed enough. “The most imperative thing is to register with your access centre as an exceptional student. We often see students that are bound and determined; yet they do not go to the centre and register themselves. Somewhere in second or third semester of their studies, they crash and burn and eventually along the line, they give up. If the accommodations are available, always register yourself,” stresses Berhardt.
The Centre for ADHD Awareness will have its third annual ADHD conference at York from December 2nd to 4th.
