July is the month of the consciousness for mental health from Moore Campbell.
As a child and young adult, Stephanie Robertson seemed to be the ideal student. She earned almost perfect grades throughout the high school and visited some of the country’s top universities. She graduated from the legal faculty in her mid -20s and started her career at a law firm in New York.
Inside, however, Robertson fought to keep everything together. It was difficult to fit into the same age and classmates and fought with the management of fixed schedules and routines. She hyperfixes certain topics before she lost interest, a pattern that made it difficult for her to concentrate in some classes and at the workplace.
While Robertson was able to channel the racing ideas in her head as a child in her school work, these coping strategies were stopped working as an adult. She tried to maintain jobs and pay for her bills. For a while she started drinking hard to suppress the endless thoughts that ran through her head, and the overwhelming feeling of frustration she felt about her life.
In 2009, a therapist proposed that she could possibly have attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder or ADHD. Robertson released the idea because she had never met a black person, let alone a black woman with ADHD. For another 13 years she would see several doctors and experience as many false diagnoses before she received an official ADHD diagnosis in 2023.
Robertson knows whether she had more examples of blacks with ADHD that she had identified her own symptoms and used to seek help. For this reason, she joined the National Alliance on Mental Illness (Nami) as a director of Equity innovation for mental health in order to combat differences in the field of mental health.
“When I was diagnosed with ADHD, I excited this time of feeling so that everything began to click and made sense,” said Robertson. “The knowledge and the ability to understand the reasons for these things make a big difference.”
Differences in ADHD diagnoses
Robertson had a good reason to reject the ADHD proposal. In a study from 1997, the year in which she completed the high school, found how only 16 articles or studies of ADHD concentrated under thousands on black children.
In black women and girls, ADHD was least diagnosed, while white women and girls were least diagnosed with behavioral disorders.
A recent review of the racial and gender differences in ADHD and behavioral disorders showed that whites with ADHD were diagnosed 26% more often, and 61% less frequently received a diagnosis for behavioral disorders than their black counterparts.
The authors suggested that differences with teachers and providers could be connected, who consider ADHD symptoms as intentional misconduct in black children, which leads to the label for behavioral disorder. Subdiagnoses can also be attributed to social and cultural differences – such as the lack of awareness of ADHD symptoms, lack of access to treatment, misunderstandings about the condition and treatment and the stigma to help with psychological health problems.
Read: think you know what ADHD is? Think again. >>
ADHD symptoms tend to occur differently in women than in men, which makes it easy to be diagnosed incorrectly or completely missed. For example, the behavior of women is more inattentive than hyperactive. Robertson said that she had directed her impulsive tendencies in the educational environments inwards by hyperfixed certain goals or tasks, e.g. B. jewelry or immersion in learning the German language.
“Because it was always quirky and/or pedagogical things that I was obsessed with, nobody really questioned it,” said Robertson. “I was a calm person who thought was, so the reaction was only” she is fine “when I was absolutely not fine.”
Although Robertson acquired her Bachelor’s degree at Duke University and had completed with an average of 3.4 points, more cracks began to show up in college. She got a bad grade for the first time in her life, although she looked back, she knows that she was not interested in the topic and could not concentrate. At the legal faculty she failed a class in her first year and tried to manage the whirlwind of teaching and job recruitment interviews.
Stephanie Robertson, 2025 (Photo/Corey Pilson)
After Robertson ended the legal faculty, it bumped through jobs, relationships and responsibilities and burned on the way for more than a decade. She would start a job and concentrate intensively on her duties at the beginning, but after losing interest, she would have difficulty doing tasks. She often decided to stop before she was fired and handled with anxiety and depression.
“This is another piece of ADHD that I learned from,” she said. “You become really intense and if you lose interest, you forget and you stop.”
The spiral continued when Robertson drank strongly. Health service providers thought they had manic episodes and diagnosed them with Bipolar II disorder. She began to take a mood -enhanced drug that had the potential for dangerous side effects, but still didn’t feel better.
Robertson was angry – angry that the treatment did not help, angry that her life fell apart and was angry that the employers did not seem to understand why she had difficulty doing work. The Robertson is the “angry black woman”, who represents black women as unusually hostile or aggressive aggressive women, how many black women are unjustly stigmatized with this label because their needs of intellectual health are not met.
“I was probably angry because I was just unable to communicate as I wanted, and people were not ready to listen,” she said. “I was angry with the lack of accommodation in society in general.”
After all, Robertson won the confidence of becoming more open with her colleagues, and someone suggested that her symptoms sound like ADHD rather than bipolar. Finally, in 2023 she underwent a psychological assessment that led to an ADHD diagnosis.
Fight for you
Robertson is still fighting with daily activities that could seem easy for others and wishes that she would have the opportunity to develop better management skills and strategies that are previously in life. That is why she is sensitized to an advocate of the stronger consciousness for ADHD symptoms for colored, especially in women.
“I’m miserable for half a time because my mind is everywhere,” she said. “I always ask myself:” Did I pay that? “” Do I have to get that? “” I forgot 10 articles in this shop. “” I have 10 million things to do. “” I opened 10 million tabs. “It’s so overwhelming and exhausting.”
Medicines can also be helpful to deal with mindfulness exercises, physical exercises and techniques such as cognitive behavioral therapy to deal with thoughts and overwhelming tasks. Finding support in the workplace is crucial, and Robertson now tells the employers that she is able to do great work, but not always in a traditional 9-to-5 time frame. She was always like that – in the high school she often woke up at 4 a.m. to do the school work.
In recent years, Robertson has also been open to her experiences to help others better master their own mental health and to look for treatment if necessary. Before she came to Nami, she was an assistant to Duke and worked on making space for students to share her concerns.
“Fight for you,” said Robertson. “If you have the feeling that something is different and you are not heard, find out about ADHD and other concerns of mental health and become an advocate for yourself and your needs.”
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