When she was finally diagnosed with ADHD — after more than three decades of wondering what was wrong with her — Janel Dillard, of Clinton, Maryland, did what countless others before her have done: She threw herself into research.
She watched online videos, read newspaper articles, and scoured the Internet for information on the neuroscience of ADHD and how she could best treat it.
But from the moment she started her research, she said, she noticed something troubling: “I don’t often see people who look like me.”Janel, 36, is African American, and she grapples with an uncomfortable truth: The face of ADHD in the U.S.
is not black or brown, it is white — both in terms of the patients being diagnosed and the clinicians evaluating and treating them.Battling ADHD stigma in the BIPOC community is nothing new, but evidence shows that people of color — black and Latino in particular — are much less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, even though they show symptoms at the same rate as white people.