Carley MacAdam-Thompson

Graduate Project: Understanding ADHD

What’s your understanding of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? My Design for Health graduate project draws focus to the health challenges surrounding ADHD that deserve our attention. Driven by an auto-ethnographic approach that combines personal narratives and explorations with research and perspectives of ADHD experts and members of the community, this project uncovers and clarifies misunderstandings of ADHD through knowledge translation and storytelling. Storytelling is critical to meaningfully understanding the lived experience of ADHD, as sharing experiences can expose misconceptions, reduce stigma, and alleviate barriers to care, support, and recognition that the ADHD community faces. I challenged myself to be openly honest and vulnerable through every step of the emotional journey that went into creating www.understandADHD.org – a website designed to widely communicate accessible ADHD knowledge, share stories of my experience of living with ADHD, and offer my perspective on the relationships between ADHD and environments. This project hopes to build community and inspire others to share, reflect and take collective action towards transforming the perspectives of anyone that has negative attitudes towards or thinks ADHD is something it isn’t.

“I hope you'll visit www.understandadhd.org to check out what I've shared so far”