So good afternoon everybody. This session involves a program of research at Macquarie University into the lived experience of ADHD in school. The first two presenters will be discussing their research findings on studies whereby they have interviewed students with ADHD about their various school experiences. Our final speaker for this session will present on her personal experiences and perspectives as a female with ADHD. So I'd first like to introduce Ashley Behrens, who is one of my PhD students at Macquarie University. Her research aims to better understand the factors that contribute to social experiences of young people with ADHD, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Ashley is also a clinical neuropsychology registrar.

Or a registered psychologist at Macquarie Health Neuropsychology Clinic. So Ashley, welcome and we're looking forward to your presentation.

Hi. Thank you, Mel, and thank you, everyone. It's so great to be a part of this conference. It's been awesome to hear the different talks and the panel conversations as well. I will just share my screen. Here we go. Okay. So, as Mel mentioned, I'll be talking about the social experiences of children and adolescents with ADHD. The yeah. And I'm also currently completing my PhD through Macquarie. And, yeah, we'll be doing I'll be sharing some qualitative research. So I'd like to first start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which I'm presenting today, the Wango people of the Eora nation.

I'd like to pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and extend that respect to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people present today. As we're here to share ideas and, share research and our knowledge, I think it's also a nice opportunity to appreciate the thousands of years of knowledge sharing practices by First Nations people that has helped to sustain this amazing continent. So in terms of the background to the research, there are just three key things that I wanted to touch on. First is that research says that young people with ADHD commonly experience things like exclusion, rejection, and bullying. I see this clinically as well, but also not all young people with ADHD have problems with friendships and fitting in.

And the research doesn't tend to investigate positive experiences and strengths. Second, much of the research takes what we call a medical model approach where ADHD symptoms, are seen as the main causes of social difficulties. And while I don't wanna downplay the real impact of ADHD symptoms, we also know that for all children, social context is really important, and that has been a topic that has come up throughout the conference as well. And so I wanna also think about the social context and specifically the school context when thinking about the social experiences of the young people in the study. And the third thing to keep in mind is that current research is almost is mostly based on questionnaires completed by parents and teachers.

But that means that, we lose a little bit of the complexity in the social experiences, and also young people don't get as much of an opportunity to, to be a part of the research that really is about them. So that brings us to the study where we wanted to address some of these gaps, and the purpose was to interview young people with ADHD to better understand their social experiences from their perspectives. There were three key questions, but I'm really just focusing on the second one today. And that was what are the factors that contribute to the social experiences of those young people? So to answer these questions, I interviewed nine young people with ADHD. They were aged between seven to 18.

And they had all attended mainstream public or private schools across Australia. The questions were designed to understand their relationships with peers, teachers, and other adults at school, but also their experience of school generally and their sources of support. So we really wanted to understand how they talked about this school, like, the school context in relation to their social experiences. The interviews were analyzed by myself and another researcher, and we wanted to identify themes for each individual participant. And then we follow that with a cross case comparison where we look at these group level themes. But something to note is that this small sample size and the qualitative approach is more about getting to.

Understand, like, a more in-depth analysis of the person's lived experiences, and it's not really designed to generalize across all individuals with ADHD. So there were three main themes that emerged from the research, but I'm really only gonna be able to talk about the first one today, which showed that the school environment did play an essential role in shaping the social experiences of the young people in the study. Within this theme, we look at the overarching school culture and formal accommodations and learning adjustments. We also look at the experiences of relationships with individual teachers and that kind of individual teacher support.

And throughout this discussion, I'll touch a little bit on the emotional and psychological impacts of those experiences. So I'm gonna go into how this relates to those social experiences over the next few slides. So first, it's the access to nonstigmatizing individualized learning support and accommodations that was really important for people's academic engagement, but this then flows onto feelings of safety, in the school environment as well as confidence and a willingness to engage with peers. So those who struggled to access or who weren't offered nonstigmatizing and non and individualized support highlighted the negative social impact of that. So participant five, for example, reflected on her high school experiences.

And her experiences her experience showed that without learning adjustments, she felt dumb and less than other students. So she describes the impact of this, on how she saw herself, but also how she felt her peers perceived her. Similarly, without supports, participant three described attempts to implement her own self regulation strategies like drawing while working, but these were punished in the classroom. And then when adjustments were available, she explained that they were sometimes isolating, and should get removed. So they were stigmatizing. So if you kind of try and self regulate by yourself, you'd kind of get punished. But then if you use the formal supports, you'd get separated and isolated.

So on the other hand, those who had ease of access to learning support and an overall positive view of the school environment also tended to have positive social connections and greater self confidence. So, participant nine, he accesses discrete support in the classroom and exam settings, and and he also noted that his friendships were all positive. And he had lots of friends, and he didn't feel like he was disliked by his peers. And, an excited, participant six expressed that he felt supported by his teachers. And both of these participants expressed having a strong sense of self confidence and belonging in their peer groups. So participant.

Six and nine were the only two participants in the sample who reported exclusively positive social experiences. And while we can't really draw causative conclusions about this, it seemed like the school environment corresponded with a stronger sense of social confidence. So through all of these experiences, we can see how support in the school environment could be associated with fears or judgment and self doubt or, alternatively, social confidence and higher self esteem. Continuing with this theme, negative impacts of the school environment appear to be compounded to individuals who face discrimination in other forms such as racism. So for example, participant a.

Described regular experiences of racism during high school, as well as bullying and victimization. As a result, she attempted to blend in and to fit in, but this involved the suppression of her cultural and religious identity, as well as a desire to mask her ADHD. So, for example, by suppressing her talkativeness. And this compounding suppression of her culture plus masking her ADHD resulted in what she described as an identity crisis where she lost her true self. And so fitting in as a coping mechanism served the purpose of self protection from bullying, but came at the cost of a lost sense of self and a lack of true belonging and and true social connection.

So this highlights a potential vulnerability in individuals who face overlapping forms of marginalization based on different aspects of their identity. But you'll be pleased to know that in the longer run, participant eight reflected on a shift towards becoming more free to be her true self. And this kind of experience was described by other older adolescents in the sample who reflected on shifts in their identity development, improvements in self confidence, and a growing understanding of themselves over time. So it suggests that there are some developmental changes in how young people thought about their identities and their social experiences as they progress through school.

Now in addition to the school culture and accommodations and adjustments, relationships with teachers were also really important and influential in terms of social outcomes. So most students describe tension between themselves and a teacher, including feeling misunderstood, punished, targeted, and these things contributed to feelings of embarrassment, stigmatization, or feeling really othered in the classroom. But on the other hand, these same participants also described really positive experiences with teachers that they felt were flexible, empathetic, and understanding. So participants seem to have these really opposing experiences with different teachers.

And positive teacher relationships fostered confidence and social connection between peers, which was nicely illustrated by participant three. So she moved to a new school, and she described the school as safe and sociable. And she felt that this contributed to her confidence to communicate and to collaborate with others in the class. So an an important aside is that participant three at this point had moved to a school where classes were much smaller and they were able to receive one on one support. So these vastly different experiences indicate that there are disparities in teacher levels of training and understanding with respect to ADHD, and we can see that this is really felt by the students.

It also suggests that the positive teacher relationships may be more accessible for the students who can attend more well resourced schools. So that is a very, very brief, summary of just one of the key findings from the study. At present, in the literature, there's very little support for, you know, interventions that are targeted at specific social skills or specific individuals. And medication isn't consistently found to be associated with improvements in how the peer group accepts young people with ADHD. So the suggestions I provide here are not really focused on the social skills specifically or the individual specifically, but rather on how modifications at the broader school level could facilitate improved social outcomes.

So first, you know, we know that not all individuals experience social difficulties and disconnection. But those who did, there were some changes in how this was experienced over time. So it's worth monitoring and keeping an eye out for, you know, transitions and risks at different stages of development and schooling. But I think a really important point to make make is that the school environment plays a really important role here. And so we should seek to ensure that learning adjustments are accessible and nonstigmatizing. We should provide teachers with psychoeducation and also empower students and parents to self advocate.

We should also work towards developing an ethos of accepting and valuing neurodiversity and other forms of diversity in schools. And we also found that positive connections and bonds with teachers contributed to greater social confidence. So staff and teacher training is really recommended as well as resources and support for for teachers and staff to develop those stronger bonds with their students. But we know that much of this comes down to resources and funding as well as collaboration between clinicians, families, and schools. So that was super brief. Thank you so much, everybody, for your time. And I think we'll take questions at the end, if I'm not mistaken.

Terrific. Thank you so much, Ashley. That was a terrific presentation. I think we will have questions at the end. So we've got three presenters as mentioned. So we'll move forward to our second presenter, which is Lucas Sack. Lucas is a psychology honours student at Macquarie University. His research aims to utilise qualitative research methods in order to better understand the school experiences of women and girls who have been diagnosed with ADHD. Lucas' research aims to identify contributing factors with ADHD under detection as well as key areas of support. So welcome, Lucas, and we're looking forward to Thank you.

Cool. Thank you. Okay. So, yeah, as Mel mentioned, I'm Lucas, student at Macquarie University. And so I'll be presenting my thesis research study, which was a qualitative research study that I'm aimed to investigate and communicate the experiences of female students diagnosed with ADHD. So I'll briefly talk through some of the background of why we chose this research area as well as some of the key issues that kind of led to our research question. And then following this, I'll talk through some of our participant demographics as well as our methodology and then discussion of some of our key research findings and some of the implications of these findings as well.

Just before I continue, I'd also like to briefly clarify our use of gendered language. So much of research previously done on ADHD treats sex and gender as interchangeable terms. However, sex refers to a binary categorization of biological male or female status assigned at birth, whilst gender refers to sociocultural roles and expectations attributed to biological sex. This reflects an individual's identification with these constructs of either masculine or feminine. Our research acknowledges this distinction. I will use gender, female, male, boy, and girl to refer to the self reported gender identity of the participants.

So the aims of our research, was largely informed by the growing understanding of the barriers in place to the identification and diagnosis of ADHD in women and girls, especially in the school context, which forms a key area of impairment as well as an area lacking sufficient support without proper identification of ADHD. So existing research identifies that males are two to two point five times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD compared to females. Whilst this was previously seen as a diagnostic feature of ADHD, growing research, and growing awareness of late diagnosis in females suggest that underdetection is likely taking place. Additionally, there's a significant gap in existing research investigating women and girls with ADHD.

With only nine percent of qualitative studies investigating the experiences of ADHD and ASD in schools, including female early samples. And with mixed gender studies, seventy four percent had majority male samples. So qualitative research is also important in this area because it gives a voice to underrepresented groups to describe what is important to them as well as demonstrates respect for their knowledge of their own challenges rather than conforming to the researchers' understanding through, say, survey studies. So under detection of ADHD in females is largely attributed to factors such as differential symptom presentation in females with ADHD compared to males.

As well as greater rates of internalizing symptoms and inattentive symptoms that may go under the radar for teachers in the classroom. Additionally, comorbidities and gender bias and symptom appraisal also might obscure detection in the classroom. Some previous research has identified the way in which teacher ratings of symptom severity are significantly lower than parent ratings for female students, but there's no significant difference for male students suggesting that gender might play a role in symptom appraisal. Additionally, previous research has identified that lower teacher ratings were associated with greater levels of self reported stress for students.

Indicating that there's greater amounts of stress occurring for these students who are undetect undetected with ADHD related challenges. Also, it might be the case that DSM five criteria may not be reflecting the work different ways in which female experiences with ADHD might present as well as the diagnostic manual lacking guidance on how gender may influence symptom presentation due to its focus on symptomatic descriptions based on male samples. So this led us to our research question asking what is the school experience of female students with ADHD?

And with this, we sought to use a qualitative framework to avoid prescriptive hypotheses that might influence the interpretation of the data as well as allow our approach to be completely guided by the participants' experiences rather than our prior expectations. So our inclusion criteria required that participants identified as female were between the ages of 10 to 20, were currently or previously enrolled in Australian mainstream education and had a primary diagnosis of ADHD. So we recruited seven participants in total, ranging from 10 to 19 years old with a mean age of 13.7. A majority of the participants represented with the combined subtype with only three out of seven of the participants having the inattentive subtype.

In addition to this, all students were taking medication for their ADHD and have received some form of individualized educational accommodation support. So to conduct this investigation, we used interpretive phenomenological analysis or IPA. We chose IPA as it maintains high contextual sensitivity and ensures greater depth that and detail that can't be captured in a quantitative framework. Additionally, IPA, is chosen in place of other qualitative methods due to its exploratory nature and its participant driven approach, which is well suited to communicating the experiences of an under researched group. IPA also integrates participants' experiences in a cross case conceptualization.

To develop group experiential themes by identifying the convergent and divergent experiences of participants. This methodology uses phenomenology to focus on participants' lived experiences as well as describing a theoretical framework of interpretation to account for the influences of the researcher. It's also a highly ideographic method, so it emphasizes an in-depth exploration of the individual in their own context rather than attempting to generalize across context. So these are our overall findings. The yellow boxes are the group experiential themes that we developed across the seven participants. So these were being understood and self understanding, navigating autonomy and support, and neurodiversity and social experiences.

Today, I'll just be focusing on being understood and self understanding, which encompassed the participants' expressed desire to be understood by their teachers beyond stereotypes, bias, and preconceptions that surround ADHD, as well as the necessity of self understanding as a precondition for self advocacy behaviors. So this was constituted of three key subthemes. So that was teacher understanding of ADHD, ADHD stereotypes and gender biases, and self understanding and self advocacy. So the first subtheme, teacher understanding of ADHD, reflects the experiences of participants who desired for their teachers to have greater understanding of ADHD, that reflected their experiences in the classroom. So participants often describe this.

In their teachers having, like, a poor understanding of ADHD in the classroom, and the limitations in teaching knowledge and self advocacy, surrounding ADHD have been demonstrated in previous literature. So participants often describe the way their experience of learning and ability to engage improved when teachers tried to understand them, how they learn better, as well as trying to understand what ADHD was like for them in the classroom. So participants reported that teachers had varying levels of understanding about ADHD, and these misconceptions or lack of knowledge, of how ADHD manifests in girls led to inconsistent, or inappropriate accommodations for their challenges in class.

So greater teacher knowledge has been demonstrated to facilitate better understanding for the reasons of student students' classroom behavior as well as informing greater empathy and more appropriate responses to behavior in the classroom, which also improves how students feel in the classroom, and improves their ability to engage. So because of this, we saw that participants' experiences reflected that greater punitive and sanction based responses to ADHD related behaviors present in teachers who had poor understanding of ADHD and also relates to increased stigmatized beliefs surrounding ADHD with the lower knowledge or understanding of ADHD. So a second sub theme reflected participants'

Experiences of stereotyped beliefs and biases surrounding ADHD. Participants described having to navigate the dominant popular understanding of ADHD as the naughty hyperactive boy. Participants felt that their experiences were often misunderstood or diminished due to their lack of alignment with the stereotyped idea. The stereotype beliefs surrounding ADHD and gender shaped the way in which teachers perceived the behaviors of some participants as well as the provision of effective classroom support. Our findings suggest that, teachers adherence to stereotype views of ADHD restricted to hyperactivity or commonly male externalizing behaviors, resulting inattentive or internalizing challenges of girls being often overlooked or not noticed.

These findings also corroborate evidence that teacher teachers underrate severity of ADHD related challenges in female students compared to male students even when displaying the same behaviors. So some participants also described the way gender biases changed the way that, teachers responded to the ADHD related behaviors in the classroom. And our findings suggest that participants whose ADHD related behavior violated gender based expectations or teachers' beliefs surrounding typical female student, potentially aligning more so with the stereotype male presentation of ADHD, are often more likely to face a more punitive or disciplinary response from teachers.

And finally, for our subtheme three, which was self advocacy I'm sorry, self understanding and self advocacy. This encompassed the role of self understanding in promoting self advocacy behaviors as well as the role of self understanding and reducing feelings of guilt and self blame towards school related challenges. This conveyed the importance of, understanding and psychoeducation in promoting access to support as well as reducing negative self stigmatization towards an ADHD diagnosis. So participants described, the way diagnosis and psychoeducation reduced their negative feelings towards themselves and their challenges they're experiencing at school. And self advocacy was really relevant in this.

As something that, allowed students to speak out towards what they wanted in class and what kind of support and accommodation they needed. And knowledge of ADHD and psychoeducation was a really strong promoter of this. So students with a greater understanding of ADHD and less negative self stigma were better able to advocate for their needs in the classroom and also better able to communicate their needs. So for older participants, social media played a role in this in reducing taboo and negative stigmas around ADHD as well as increasing their understanding towards the challenges that they were facing in school and seeing that seeing other people's challenges with ADHD online.

However, they did also acknowledge the prominence of a lot of misinformation and stigmatizing content that they're exposed to on social media. So our research identifies the need for improved teacher education programs surrounding ADHD and neurodiversity more broadly, as well as the need for schools to provide comprehensive professional development focused on ADHD. And this is particularly present in the need for a greater understanding of how females present with ADHD, and this should be implemented into teacher education programs. Regular workshops and collaboration between special education and general education teachers might also help to bridge this knowledge gap.

Schools should also implement implicit bias training for staff and to and initiate awareness campaigns that promote a better understanding of ADHD. Additionally, encouraging open discussions about neurodiversity in classrooms will help to reduce stigma for students and staff alike. And schools should offer targeted programs to self advocacy, teaching students, the skills necessary to be able to communicate their needs, and teacher training programs should, promote their ability to help students develop these skills and recognize when support is needed. Additionally, more research is needed to develop more effective teacher education programs.

As well as increase our understanding of differential symptom visitation in females to help bridge this gap of underdetection that's taking place. So in conclusion, we sought to use qualitative methods to better understand the school experiences of females with ADHD, and our findings indicate the role of teacher knowledge, bias in stereotyping, and the importance of self knowledge and psychoeducation in shaping the school experience. And there's a prominent need to increase our amount of research into how females present with ADHD, as well as what we can do to better, support these students in the classroom that might be going undetected. Thank you.

Amazing. Thank you very much, Lucas. So we will swiftly move on to our third presenter, and, both Ashley and Lucas will stick around for questions after we've heard from Steph. Steph is our third and final presenter for this session, and Steph is a second year scholarship student at the University of Technology in Sydney. She's currently studying a bachelor of information technology and has the lived experience of ADHD. Steph hopes to provide insights into social experiences and ADHD in females from her firsthand perspective. So thank you very much, Steph.

Hi, everyone. My name's Steph. So like Mel said, I'm currently in my second year of uni studying Bachelor of information technology at University of Technology Sydney. Also, as Mel mentioned, I'm here to speak about my own personal experience as someone with ADHD, specifically in relation to some of the topics that have been researched by Ashley and Lucas. Before I get started, I'd just like to mention that I'm super grateful to have the opportunity to share my experience. It's an absolute privilege to be part of such an impactful event. So as someone with ADHD myself, I know how important it is to have access to support systems that empower you to reach your full potential.

However, I know that it's a common experience for students to make a choice between accessing support and maintaining social involvement or acceptance. This is quite concerning because as obvious as it sounds, the choice to accept support should never impede on any other aspect of anyone's life. On top of this, it's really important for students to feel as though support is normalized and integrated into their day to day lives as this is a major contributor to not only assisting students in reaching their goals, but allowing them to feel comfortable in themselves.

If you're constantly being singled out for the purpose of providing so called support, then you're much likely to feel detached from your peers, and you may begin to question whether this supposed support is worth the social exclusion that comes with it. School is also a period of life where social inclusion and acceptance are really important factors in themselves even without considering the isolation experienced by students seeking support. As Ashley mentioned before, there is currently a direct perceived connection between individualized support and feeling sense of isolation.

And the fact that this is a common experience demonstrates the importance of making changes to the support strategies being carried out in educational environments. Although this might seem a bit negative, I personally think it's exciting because it gives us all the opportunity to think about possible ways that this can be changed and what we can all do as individuals to help. This also leads into my next point, which is that ADHD is not a lack of potential despite some common misconceptions that are held today. Although ADHD presents a number of difficulties to those who experience it, there is absolutely no reason why ADHDers can't reach the same goals or achieve the same level of success as neurotypicals.

Does this mean that situations will need to be approached from different perspectives? Yes. Does it also mean that different strategies might have to be implemented in specific areas? Yes. But none of that means that ADHD is a less capable than their neurotypical peers. In fact, it shows that we possess a level of perseverance and dedication that is often on thought of by most most people. It also brings to question whether the teaching methods used and study methods taught in schools today are actually effective or whether they only cater to the needs of a specific group of people.

Obviously, there's never going to be a universally effective approach to learning, so maybe we need to consider strategies to make learning a more individualized process so that all students are given the best chance possible at achieving their potential. Even if you take ADHD out of the equation, I still think this is a topic that needs to be addressed for a number of reasons. The main one being that everyone learns differently. So if there's only one teaching method being used to convey information to students, then the chances of your whole class understanding that topic to the same extent are extremely slim. Everyone has different areas strengths and weaknesses.

So to expect all students to engage and learn from the exact same approach is an unrealistic expectation and one that needs to be changed. So having just spoken about the importance of incorporating more diverse approaches to learning in schools, it's also important to think about the role that teachers play in all of this, particularly when it comes to ADHD. With ADHDers, extrinsic motivators are the key to providing comprehensive support, so it's vital that teachers are aware of the impact they have upon students. This applies both positively and negatively.

Teachers who actively approach learning with a positive attitude and are willing to accommodate to individual needs are the types of teachers that are likely to make a long lasting positive impact on their students. On the other hand, teachers who actively shame and discipline kids for needing something to be explained in a different way are teachers who push students away from persisting in challenging situations, unknowingly building a negative association with students' classroom experiences. Considering that positive reinforcement has been shown to be one of the best ways to encourage learning in students with ADHD, when this is paired with the fact that emotions play a major role in both decision making and actions taken by ADHDers.

It becomes apparent that a lot of this directly relates back to students' overall classroom experiences. I still remember all the teachers that I've ever had, and I know for a fact that the attitude they had towards my learning directly impacted both my interest and involvement in the subjects that they were teaching. Teaching. It also links to self esteem and belief in your ability to succeed in school. I remember I always thought that I was terrible at maths because throughout primary school, would often be ridiculed for asking questions in class, and it wasn't until my year seven maths teacher encouraged me to start asking questions again that I realized I did actually have the skill, but it just wasn't being supported until that point.

If teachers can commit to implementing strategies that improve classroom experiences, students with ADHD will be significantly more likely to invest their time into succeeding at school, thus providing us with more opportunities to achieve our potential. My final point was inspired by part of Lucas' research and his participants' responses surrounding their interactions with social media. Linking back to what Lucas mentioned earlier, social media can definitely be a useful asset for ADHDers. It can be a place to connect, share, and relate to the experience of others, and sometimes may even be a push for people to investigate the possibility that they have ADHD.

As I know it was for me. Despite its usefulness, however, it can also pose significant threats to the ADHD community as a whole. Social media content is generated with the intention of catering to the masses in the form of relatable posts that resonate with as many people as possible. This can be particularly damaging to the general perception of ADHD as a concept as it gives social media figures the opportunity to generalise, minimise, and misinform about ADHD related topics.

As ADHD is often already misunderstood in terms of symptoms and support strategies, it's really harmful to portray those factors as a relatable experience that everyone faces. I know I've had my fair share of conversations where people expose the general lack of understanding surrounding ADHD. People often think they're being empathetic by saying, oh, I find it hard to focus sometimes too, or everyone gets distracted sometimes. But really, this just demonstrates the surface level understanding that most people have. As we all know, ADHD is so much more than just a list of symptoms. So to have this minimized view perpetuated through social media is only gonna cause more obstacles for us to face. This being said, nothing is all bad.

And I think that there is so much potential for social media to be used in a positive way as it already has been in a lot of cases. But it's definitely important to recognize both sides of that considering that it's something that will always be relevant. So if you ask me what I'd like you all to take away from what I've spoken about today, I would say the most important things are the ones you can see on this slide right now. Firstly, developing integrated support for students in a way that doesn't come attached with social isolation. Secondly, acknowledging that ADHD never has to limit anyone's potential. It just means that things need to be approached differently sometimes.

Thirdly, understanding the significance of the learning environments that teachers create within their classrooms. And finally, thinking about how we can transform social media into the supportive and useful platform that it has the potential to be while also recognizing the harm that it often causes today. That's all for me today. Thanks so much for listening everyone.

Thank you so much, Steph, and thank you to our other two presenters as well, Ashley and Lucas. So I believe we're going to move now to question time. I'm not sure if others from ADHD Australia will be joining, for those questions. Steph, while we're waiting to see if there are any questions, I had one for you. So having listened to Mel. Thank you. Hi, Mel. Having listened to Ashley and Lucas' presentations and their research findings, are there some things that you maybe saw a similar experiences to what you had or potentially different experiences?

Yeah. Definitely. I think especially what Lucas was talking about earlier about the difference between ADHD being recognised in girls versus boys is definitely a major factor. Even after I'd been diagnosed with ADHD, I definitely noticed the difference in treatment in just like a normal classroom environment. You know? It's a lot more normalized for boys to be sort of hyperactive and disengaged with what's being taught in a classroom.

And so as a female, it's sort of like it it feels like you're doing worse than your peers even if you're actually just having the exact same response as them just because of, you know, general understanding of it as a whole. So, yeah, it's really good to see that. It's something that's being looked into. And I think Lucas explained it in a really good way because it's definitely something that needs to be changed.

Terrific. Thanks, Steph. And sorry, Mel Webster. Thanks for joining us.

No. Thank you very much. And apologies just so I had, a few technical difficulties. So I do apologize. So look, we've had, a a huge amount of, specific questions that have come through for, you individuals from the audience. But I'm really conscious of time, and we've got a number of people waiting, for us to be able to to respond. So can I make a suggestion that what we do is ask for yourself, Mel, some of those questions and then we can post them on the ADHD website if that's okay? Some responses to some of those questions once they've come through with obviously the, recording if that's okay.

No problem at all. So, yes, please send questions through and, Steph, Ashley, and Lucas, and myself will respond to those.

Beautiful. And look, thank you so much. It's obviously always difficult when we've got a conference with lot lots of people keen to ask lots of questions and different things. You've obviously sparked a lot of interest, and, I really appreciate you here today and giving your time and sharing your experiences. And like I say, we will, put some feedback to the team and obviously have that on our website as well so people can ask questions, to you and we'll make sure that we post them afterwards. So thank you. Fantastic session. Thank you so much.

Thank you.