Attention Deficit Hyper-Activity Disorder (ADHD) affects 11% of the American children population (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018). That means that the average person will work with a person who is ADHD, birth one, or even fall in love with one. Our brains make all of our decisions, so of course, our behavior is affected by our brain. ADHD is one of the most researched conditions. There are three primary groups of people: the inattentive, the impulsive, and the hyperactive. Along with those are the ones who are medicated, unmedicated, diagnosed, and the undiagnosed. My focus is on African-American, school-aged children who have ADHD. As a child, growing up around children who had ADHD, those particular kids were labeled as bad and untrained. Per this experience, I actually heard those words again. My perceptions about this group have and are changing as I work with them more. This experience will explain the dialogues I shared with both a personal and professional reference and the critical analysis of professionals regarding Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Immersion Activities:
As a substitute teacher, I have easy access to children classrooms. I originally planned to do a part of my observation on September 10th but there weren’t any notes about there being any ADHD students in that classroom. The classrooms I worked in from the 10th until the observation on the 25th didn’t have any students with the disorder, so you can imagine my despair. Luckily, I had the opportunity to observe and substitute on September 25th, 28th, and on October 1st with ADHD students. I worked in an elementary school, middle school, and the local high school. The children received me well, as most children do, and gave me more than enough information regarding their diagnoses.
I substituted at L.J. Bell Elementary School in Rockingham, NC in a first-grade classroom. I had two black male students in this class who were diagnosed with ADHD. One student was labeled as bad, the teacher told me this upon the student’s arrival. All of the kids called him bad and one of the students actually lied to get him sent out of class. The other student with ADHD completely ignored me the entire time I was in the classroom and even sat underneath the table and fidgeted until lunch. These two students were significant because they showed completely different symptoms of having ADHD. I actually knew one of the students personally and his behavior is the same in church. Once he’s disciplined in church, the misbehavior stops.
I had an assignment at Cordova Middle School in Rockingham, NC in a 6th grade class. My first block class had one child who has ADHD. The student was a class disruption at its finest. He was a white male. His first words to me were “I have ADHD and I’m on medication for it and I’m allowed to talk and walk around in class”. I didn’t even have to ask the teacher if there were any students who had ADHD, he told me. He definitely talked, and the teacher left me a note about him saying he was talkative and disruptive. I’m including him in my observation because it shows how the student’s family and his peers give him a pass for being disruptive. I also know this student’s mom (small county). I would’ve never thought in a million years that he would be hers. I also learned that his older brother acts the same way but is not being treated for ADHD.
I was also assigned to substitute at Richmond Senior High School in a 10th grade class. I personally asked these students if there was anyone who had been diagnosed with ADHD, instead of relying on the teacher to tell me. One student told me he was diagnosed in the 3rd grade. I also had to tell this same student to get back in his seat seven times in an hour and a half. The other two students who told me they had ADHD behaved fairly. I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish their behaviors from the other students who didn’t have the disorder. I wanted to observe a high school student with ADHD, so I could see how the student acts years after their diagnosis.
I decided to do a personal dialogue with my twin brother. It wasn’t as simple as it sounds because he’s currently in prison. My brother, Damien, was diagnosed with ADHD when we were in the 2nd grade. I remember the day his teacher called our home and gave us the referral. My mother acted immediately by getting tests ran on my brother which ultimately led to him being put on Adderall. Once my brother was medicated, he turned into a completely different person. He was no longer the busy body we knew him as.
He eventually got adjusted to the medication and started to succeed in the classroom until the 8th grade. We often had classes together in middle school and the teachers would compare him to me, which wasn’t fair to him because I was considered “exceptional”. The teachers would ask him why he couldn’t be “smart and well-behaved” like me. They turned me into his parent in school. They would run to me when he misbehaved and assumed that something was wrong in my home. My brothers and I grew up in an awesome home and my brother’s choices were his own. Unfortunately, he associated himself with the wrong kind of people, people who weren’t raised like us. Damien eventually stopped taking his medication and even got expelled from school and his life has spiraled out of control since then (hence him currently being incarcerated).
During our dialogue, Damien expressed that he knows he doesn’t have the neurotypical brain. He expressed that he has a million things going on in his brain at a time and that’s why he gets distracted or does the things of most importance (to him) first. We discussed, for the first time ever, his tenure at a behavioral center in Leland, NC. The psychiatrist there claimed that Damien did not have ADHD but ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder). This was a turning point for my entire family. The psychiatrist basically told us that there was nothing wrong with his brain and he was just bad, but we knew better. Unfortunately, he took the psychiatrist for her word and started to fit the description. Had my brother taken his disorder more seriously, I believe half of the negative events that have transpired in his life wouldn’t have occurred.
Reaction/Critical Analysis:
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a brain disorder marked by an ongoing pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning and/or development (NIH, 2016). Inattention implies that a person will get off tasks, need constancy, and is scattered. However, this is not linked to defiance or lack of comprehension. Hyperactivity means a person appears to constantly move around, sometimes in situations that aren’t appropriate. This person fidgets excessively, taps, or walks. Impulsivity implies that a person makes hurried decisions without thinking about it or the repercussions. An impulsive person may be socially awkward and excessively interrupts other people.
Researchers don't know what causes ADHD. In the same way as other different ailments, various things can add to ADHD. For example, genes, cigarette smoking, alcohol use, or drug use during pregnancy, exposure to environmental toxins during pregnancy, exposure to environmental toxins, such as high levels of lead, at a young age, and low birth weight. ADHD is more typical in males than females (partly because of overdiagnosis), and females with ADHD will probably have issues fundamentally with inattentiveness. Different conditions, for example, learning incapacities, nervousness issue, direct confusion, gloom, and substance misuse, are regular in individuals with ADHD. On that same note, African American children are over diagnosed compared to Caucasian children.
The evidence of racial and ethnic disparities in ADHD says that medication disparities were more likely due to under diagnosis or under treatment of African-American and Latino children. It was also hypothesized that this occurs because some therapist do not adhere to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and International Classifications of Diseases (Bruchmuller, Margraf, & Schneider, 2012). That same article stated that therapist diagnose patients with the disorder if they resemble the idea of an ADHD child. In my opinion, a lot of African American children are considered hyperactive because they are known for being energetic and physical, Dr. Donna Ford from elite daily says those characteristics are praised in the African American community and considered normal and healthy but not necessarily so in the schools. Also, according to elite daily, there isn’t a clinical procedure to diagnose ADHD because it’s a general problem (Milford, 2016). I can attest to this because I share some of the characteristics of a hyperactive child. Ford also claims that the occurrence of African American children being over diagnosed is a product of prejudice and discrimination that is intentional by some and unintentional by others.
African American children who have ADHD are often labeled with derogatory terms that follow them throughout life. After having a professional dialogue with local social worker, Eboni Jones, I was informed that children who have ADHD often times have trouble being placed in homes because of their behavior. The children who are medicated won’t have the suspension history compared to the unmedicated. In her experience, the children being misdiagnosed actually are experiencing some sort of stress or trauma as a reflection of them being placed in an unfamiliar home.
Some diagnoses of African-American ADHD recipients are over diagnosed because of their behavior. The Principal Deputy Director of the CDC made a claim that these children need behavior therapy (CDC, 2016). He also claimed that parents may feel overwhelmed with decisions about their child’s treatment and don’t want to result to medication. The two behavioral interventions offered for children with ADHD are Parent Trainings and School Interventions (Miller, 2018). Both of these interventions involve the teacher and the familial system working together to create goals for school behavior, give daily feedback, and reward the children for meeting their goals successfully. Typically, the therapy primarily depends on the parents because they make the rules at home. The social worker assigned to these particular families will run the sessions with the parents.