The ADHD Experience

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This is my second action project for my STEAM class Disease. In this unit, which is called Mind, we studied mental disorders, brain waves, and how the mind and body are interconnected. We took a trip to UIC to talk to Dr. Ronayne about his work and to walk through how doctors diagnose both mental and physical diseases and disorders. The purpose of this action project was to create a simulation to demonstrate what a daily experience of someone with a mental disorder could be like. I chose to simulate Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, because I personally have ADHD so I already had an idea of how to display it. I had enjoyed this project immensely, mostly because I was able to accurately explain the way my brain works to my classmates on a scientific and personal level.

A quote that feel perfectly my experience with ADHD was spoken by Rowan Moon, the sister of a YouTuber I watch regularly:
"It’s like you’re in a corridor, most people get an empty one, they can think in straight lines, but when you have ADHD it’s like your corridor is full of stuff. Objects you have to look at, obstacles that slow you down when getting from one end to the other. Medication clears but also shrinks the corridor. It means you can work faster but you’re muted. To a certain extent the creativity is gone" 
  
For my lesson/simulation I decided to give a fairly generic presentation about what ADHD is, but while doing this I gave everyone a distracting and mildly irritating task to work on. The purpose of this was to see how much they could remember of what I had said, while having a distractions affecting multiple parts of the brain and multiple senses.

The distractions I used were, ripping a paper into the smallest possible pieces, jumping up and down, a basic multiplication worksheet I had created, counting down from 100 by writing out each number, and organizing colored pencils by color. I chose these activities because I wanted to demonstrate how difficult it can be for someone with ADHD to focus on multiple stimulants all at once. I tried to get the people in my class to feel frustrated, confused and stressed. 




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