“I Have Always Felt Different”: Going to College with a Diagnosis
February 6, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
A new study from the Journal of Pediatric Nursing called I Have Always Felt Different reports on the experiences of sixteen college students (aged 18-25) who were diagnosed with ADHD as children. The study is by Assistant Professors Robin Bartlett and Mona M. Shattell, of the School of Nursing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Tracie Rowe. The students (who were primarily non-Hispanic white college-enrolled women) talked about how having ADHD affected their life at home and at school, and friendships:
Although participants had trouble getting along with their parents, many perceived their parents as supportive. Participants also had a degree of sympathy or understanding for how their behavior affected their parents. For example, one said, “I’m forgetful. And she’d get home from a hard day at work and I’d bug the crap out of her. She’d tell me to do something and I’d forget it.”
Participants’ experiences of having ADHD within the context of school was expressed in three figural themes: “I was different, “I missed a lot of stuff,” and “I learned how to manage.”
Even participants who had friends experienced interpersonal difficulties with them. ADHD symptoms such as distractibility, difficulty focusing, and hyperactivity had an impact on their communication. For example, one said, “Interacting with friends is a very complex area for me… the problem I have is communicating with them.”
The New York Times Well blog summarizes the study, along with discussion from readers (the first of whom noted “This is something I couldn’t find in health books”).
Each year, my husband Jim who teaches history and religion at Fordham University and I have noted that there is at leastone student who we think might be on the autism spectrum in one of our classes, and I think this will happen more and more. The NYTimes’ Well blog opens with the question “What does it feel like to have attention deficit disorder?”—–I think we can already starting asking the same question of students today.
(Some of whom read this weblog and have taught me more than a little.)
