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Padlet Reflection : Medicalization of ADHD with women

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Padlet Reflection : Medicalization of ADHD with women

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Following the article "The history of ADHD: A Timeline," a separate essay is dedicated to how women and girls are underdiagnosed with ADHD. The essay briefly talks a bout how gendered expectations likely impact the symptoms of ADHD in women.

"Sex norms may force girls to mask and hide symptoms of ADHD. Stereotypes ... may encourage girls and women to deny or compensate for ADHD symptoms in classrooms and family structures"

This portion of the article was interesting to me as it relates to how medicalization and gendered expectations intersect to impact rates of ADHD diagnosis among women. This resonates with me as while I was pursuing an ADHD diagnosis in middle school, there was an overarching focus on my behavior and academic performance. While I was trying to express how every single task I completed felt disproportionately difficult, most of the doctors focused on my behavior. As I had good grades and none of my teachers reported me interrupting classes by jumping out of my seat and running around, they didn't see how I could be struggling with or expressing symptoms in other ways. The gendered expectations I experienced in my environment (i.e. that I would remain seated and respectful in the classroom) impacted my ADHD diagnosis as the criteria are mainly focused on young boys who demonstrate different symptoms.

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In the Article “Does College Alienate Low Income Students?” by Karen Sternheimer, there is a focus on how economic differences create interpersonal struggles for college students, as those from wealthy backgrounds can often not relate to less affluent students. The opposite of this is also true, and Karen states, “It might be difficult to have roommates or friends who can afford to eat out at restaurants regularly or take trips together over spring break and be unable to join them.” This quote is reflective of some of the often invisible struggles working-class students deal with.

While I am still in high school, I can directly relate to these struggles. In all of my schooling, I have been surrounded by students who come from families far wealthier than mine. This wealth gap was extremely prevalent in my middle school and elementary school, as I attended a private catholic school. While most of my friends were being picked up in Mercedes and new Teslas, my family was driving a barely running Honda and struggling to make school payments, even with financial aid. This gap manifested itself in well-meaning conversations where some of my good friends would complain about not having as much allowance as they thought they should, having to go to a resort in Cancun that they had been to many times over, or coplaining about not having as new of an Iphone as one of tehir siblings. While none of these conversations involved any ill will, they continually reminded me of how i was living a far different life than my peers.

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In the assigned reading “Class in America” by Robert Perrucci and Earl Wyson, I learned that your social class is related to your ability to access resources and not directly to the amount of money you make. This was a completely new concept for me, and it makes far more sense than classes divided by income. It also increases the number of people who would be considered lower class, and this divide is visualized through he example of a diamond

“The top diamond represents the privileged class, composed of those who have stable and secure resources that they can expect will be available to them over time … The bottom diamond is the new working class, composed of those who have unstable and insecure resources over time.”

This explanation resonates with me as both my family and some of my friends earn enough money to be considered middle class while still struggling to afford basic necessities like healthcare. One of my good friends has a dad who works in tech sales, and his income alone was able to support their family. However, when her father experienced a period of unemployment and underemployment, they quickly had to move out of their home, go on food stamps, and they lost all medical care beyond urgent care visits. While they would be considered affluent in most areas, this family is not upper class, as they were quickly stripped of any stable resources. While this contrasting situation is likely prevalent in other areas of the country, I’m sure it is extremely common in the Bay Area. Families could be making double the median household income, and they would still never be able to buy a house or afford most necessities.

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Through the reading “The Medicalization of Deviance” by Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider the historical shift in definitions of deviance is explained.

“Historically there have been great transformations in the definition of deviance—from religious to state-legal to medical-scientific …  Along with the change in sanctions and social control agent there is a corresponding change in definition or conceptualization of deviant behavior. “

The writers focus on how different types of deviance have been created or have changed in their treatment. For example, treatment of mentally ill people has become far more focused on improving their well-being instead of simply locking them up and ignoring them. This creates a trend where conditions that were previously deemed criminal and morally wrong are now medicalized instead of criminalized.

This dichotomy of treatment has influenced my understanding of homelessness and the opinions of the people around me. While I have always been extremely saddened by how some people are forced to live on the streets, I have frequently come across people who do not feel the same. Many of them believe that homeless people choose to live on the street, so they can commit crimes, do drugs, and destroy cities in peace. In turn, these individuals have a hostile perception of them and often support initiatives to detain and relocate these people in mass, so people with houses do not have to see or think about them. This approach has never made sense to me, partly because I know people who were homeless (none of them by choice or out of criminality). This transfers to the provided reading as people seem to either think homelessness should be criminalized en masse, destroying these people’s lives, or people think that homelessness and its causes should be medicalized, resulting in more resources and support for the homeless.

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In the reading “Bathroom Battlegrounds and Penis Panic” by Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook there is a discussion on how the policing of womens restrooms is built off fo the idea that people with penises are sexual predators and that women need to be separate and protected from these individuals. There is also a discussion of how laws that try to bar trans people from bathrooms just lead to increased policing of women’s bodies in an attempt to detect trans women.

“Opponents repeatedly expressed their belief that public restrooms have to be segregated on the basis of gender and that people’s genitals, not their gender identities, should determine bathroom access … In actuality, the segregation of public bathrooms on the basis of gender is a relatively recent phenomenon in the United States.”

These specific laws are unreasonable to me, both because they are transphobic and because they are based on a reality that does not exist. I work as a nanny and I often take the boys that I watch into the women's restroom. They need to be supervised in the restroom as they are too young to reach sinks, close doors, or function in these spaces. My situation is one of many where someone of the opposite gender may need to use the women's restroom. Additionally, trans women do not present a threat to cis women, and I have never felt that it was my business to question what bathroom a person chooses to use. These laws rely on the belief in a threat that has no basis in reality.

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In the reading “‘New racism,’ Color-Blind RAcism, and the Future of Whiteness in America,” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva explores how past racism has changed forms.

“Instead, new racism practices have replaced Jim Crow ones in all areas of life. In terms of social interaction among the races in neighborhoods, schools, stores, and other areas, whites and minorities (but blacks in particular) have very limited and regimented interactions.”

This quote talks about how racism is no longer as visible and is tied more directly to limited economic access and neighborhood segregation/ inability to get certain jobs. This discrimination is systemic but not tied to explicit laws and bans like it once was. This belief is also reliant on the narrative that white and black people simply choose not to interact, that people like to ‘keep to their own’.

Racism like this was explicitly tied to my experience in private school. While our school was open to all, there were almost no black families and a disproportionate number of white families for the area we were in. In order to compensate for this, the few non white students were overtly featured in the school's fliers and posters. This environment also created a space where some white parents felt more comfortable expressing their racist thoughts, as they felt they were in a group of their own.  Often, a few families from the school would get together and you would hear (mostly the fathers) talking about how indians were taking over tech sales and how you couldn’t trust Chinese businessmen, as they weren’t catholic and had no moral compass. While my family never fed into these discussions, get-togethers like this were not an uncommon thing. The white people in our parish felt like they belonged at our school and that those around them must all feel the same.

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Neoliberalism by Johanna Bockman explains the history and modern implications of neoliberalism and its policies. The article dives into specific politicians who facilitated the spread of neoliberalism and how neoliberalism’s policies became so widely accepted even though the practice as a whole hurts the large majority of Americans.

“In the United States, politicians transformed criticisms of public housing into the destruction of public housing so that low-income people might be allowed to make 'choices' in expensive rental markets. In this way, neoliberalism can be very appealing; it embodies local criticisms, desires, and experiments in distorted form. Neoliberalism often fuses genuine citizen input with the devastating effects of capitalism.”

While I had heard people talk about neoliberalism and its false narratives of improvement and betterment for society, I did not fully understand its implications. I had also heard about how truly destructive Ronald Reagan’s presidency was for Americans, but I had never seen some of his ideas explained beyond his trickle-down tax cuts. The provided quote explains how Neoliberalism specifically impacted Americans’ perception of housing and wheter or not poor people deserve it. I have also been around people who believe that everybody can get housing if they work hard enough and that the government has no obligation to provide any kind of housing or support for its people. This belief always confused me, as the people around me who held it were always closer to homelessness than they were to benefiting from policies that reduced housing rights. Having a more robust understanding of Neoliberalism makes me understand where these ideas came from a little bit more, but I still thik theyre wrong and hur everybody besides the 1%.

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The reading “How To Do Gender” by Lisa Wade and Myra Marx Fereee explores the onset of gendered perception, how people police gender rules on themselves and on others, and what breaking rules intentionally and unintentionally looks like. A protion of the reading also focuses on how queer people and trans people are already testing rules of conformity through their identity and trough how they present in society.

“The kind of policing we receive will depend on the situation. It’s certainly dangerous to be queer in some contexts, for instance, but it can be quite fun at Halloween, at raves, or at gay-friendly bars. In contexts antagonistic to queer identities and expression, sexual and gender minorities may feel that their safety depends on hyperconforming.”

This portion of the article was interesting to me as my girlfriend and I both deal with our gendered expectations in different ways. While she only ever wears masculine clothing and keeps her hair short, I have longer hair and change how feminine or masculine I dress frequently. While neither of us wears what would generally be expected of women, we don't face pushback, and it would be more noteworthy if one of us showed up to school ultra-feminine. As we are both noticebly queer (partly because of how we dress) our gendered expectations are opposite to what they would be if we were straight. In contrast, one of my friends, who is a gay man, doesn’t have the same expectations. He does dress slightly more femininely than straight men do; however, as feminine men are less accepted than masculine women, he still feels expected to dress in a more typical way. My friend’s different experiences are indicative of how misogyny, homophobia, and progress all overlap to shape the space that we exist in.

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Within the reading The Making of Modern Sexuality by Jeffrey Weeks, there is a focus on how we can only define and view sexuality within our own historical and social context. This is sumarized in the quote “Against the historical unification we would stress that sex is relational, is shaped in social interaction, and can only be understood in its historical context, in terms of the cultural meanings assigned to it, and in terms of the internal, subjective meanings of the sexed individuals that emerge.” While I was aware of how different cultures and societies had drastically different views of sexuality, most of them not even having the idea of a gay person, I had never heard it explained like this.

This previous information, combined with my personal experience, has given me a new perspective on much of the religion and culture I was exposed to earlier in life. When I was growing up in my catholic school and church, gay people were never directly addressed, likley because we live in a more liberal area where outright condemnation of queer peoiple would not have been supported. The only time queer people were was in my religious class where we learned that mairrage was between a man and a woman, no exceptions. This combination of silent homophobia and homilies that focused on loving thy neighbor, no matter what, now makes more sense to me. While the Catholic church historically condemned any type of relationship excluding a married man and a married woman, they are now taking a more lenient stance due to external pressures. Through Pope Francis’ teachings about how parents should not abandon their queer children and the rapid loss of young followers, most catholic churches have adopted a policy of silence, ignoring the morality of queerness as a whole. This further context explains the confusing culture that I grew up in.

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Allan G. Johnson’s “The Forest and the Trees” explores how all human interaction is shaped through the lens of a performer and their audience in the book’s final chapter. The section explores how everybody is constantly changing roles as they move through various settings and as they consider the audience they find themselves in front of. This interaction is highlighted through an example of a man performing incorrectly for his audience by making a sexist remark.

“A man might say something sexist but then distance himself from it by saying that it doesn’t mean that he is sexist. Or, as Goffman points out, he might react with embarrassment that lets people know that his performance may have failed this time, but he’s still committed to doing better next time.”

This perspective of interaction helps me understand my friends and family’s behavior. While some of the people in my direct family only slightly change their behavior depending on their environment and roles (this behavior is likely influenced by them being nerodivergent), other people around me seem like completely different people. Specifically, my mom always seemed like she was switching between different personalities, performing as the god honoring mother in front of my grandma while getting home and taking on the role of the career woman, locking out her children in order to meet deadlines. This continual shifting always left me confused as a child; I felt like I was the only person who saw my mom as she was 90% of the time. Considering this behavior through the lens of my mom taking on different performances explains why she behaved as she did. Like the sexist man who said something out of character for what he wanted to appear as, my mother also explained away any poor decisions she made infront of other people.