I am mentoring a student with ADHD and anxiety issues on a technical project.
Does anyone have any advice?
I have dramatically paired back the scope of the project because it seems like it was too daunting at first. But I don’t know if making is super simple (to not stress the student out) is the right step either.
The current pace of their work is very slow, and I’m not sure if trying to apply any pressure will help or hurt...
I have ADHD and I was also a very sensitive and delicate boy. This is completely based on my personal experiences, so I don't know how transferable it'll be. But if I had to give a single piece of advice:
Fast, immediate feedback loops. Remove all barriers between doing an action and understanding the consequences of that action. I grew up trying to program on the command line and thinking it wasn't for me. Then I tried Macromedia flash, which had a timeline and a preview window as part of the IDE. I could see the changes I made instantly, rather than waiting a few seconds for my code to compile. It sounds ridiculous, that saving a couple of seconds could be the difference between your student self starting and being bored.
I didn't have time to get bored. I'd make a change, and then my brain would see the change and think of where to go from there. Before I could process that, I was writing new code and reloading the page and seeing the changes. It was like hacking the ADHD part of my brain to get things done. If your student takes to this, don't let your engineering sensibilities get in the way of your student's manic desire to see things happen. The discipline of thinking out your change and then executing it comes in time and with experience. Just get them excited about being able to make changes.
Even now, at 36 having managed ADHD for a long time, I have an attention budget for about 2 and a half seconds between my mid abandons the task at hand. If I make a code change and go to reload a webpage and it takes longer than 2 seconds, I'm already on a different tab or application window and my focus is already lost.
Again, for clarity: find a way to get immediate (I say immediate because I mean immediate, not 'quick' or 'fast') feedback to your student.
> I could see the changes I made instantly, rather than waiting a few seconds for my code to compile. It sounds ridiculous, that saving a couple of seconds could be the difference between your student self starting and being bored.
I would posit this is true for lots of people—children and adults, with and without ADHD. The more you can decrease that try → result feedback loop, the more fun it is to experiment.
It passes if allowed to, but having someone complain about overreaction or try to push through it does not help. Sometimes an ADHD brain, especially an anxious one, can seem to react in an irrational way.
And it's true! But there's nothing they can do about it at that moment. They can learn how to smooth the curve or avoid getting into it in the first place, but not mid-panic.
Just to add a quick bit of advice. If you feel that rejection-sensitivity seems like you, along with depression, anxiety, etc. and no meds like SSRIs or anything else they've thrown at you have worked well, one of the most effective meds are MAOIs. Nobody knows why (like all psych meds), they aren't prescribed much - most younger psychiatrists know nothing about them nor do GPs, and there are some risks, but when all else fails...
At one point in my life, I was frequently the other party in similar scenarios; it's been a while, but some things I recall as helping me:
- Quick feedback loops
- Low formality experiments
These re-enforced the feeling of play, which felt much less high-stakes than 'work'. In a state of play, unexpected results aren't failures and interesting intermediate results provide a jumping-off point for informal social interaction, especially a shared anticipation of the achievement of the desired end product.
- High-touch guidance
- Pairing where I was driving
These significantly reduce the emotional energy barrier to asking questions and help teach norms about which aspects of product engineering require discipline vs which aspects that can be held loosely. Discipline and formality are expensive [at least for me] so saving the bulk of it for situations where it's essential allows much higher rates of progress in those directions where it isn't.
- Displays of vulnerability of my senior peers
- Stories of failure and its cost by the same
- Personal interest in me and my values
This helped me build trust in my team, which gave me additional space to feel safe playing around in. It also helped me start building a set of people for whom I no longer worried about wasting their time, allowing a bi-directional flow of value and a reinforcing of my motivation and sense of belonging.
All that being said, I have no context for your case beyond the above, so it's quite possible none of this is relevant, but hopefully it at least some useful fodder for your situation.
Do you mean very slow by your general, working-world standards, or the standards you would expect from them given other signals (verbal fluency/evidence of understanding, education level)?
If the latter, it could well be perfectionism getting in the way (shoddy existing work doesn't discount this possibility). Encourage 'iterated failures at any old sub-problem' perhaps? It's the only way I know how to deal with all three of those problems myself.
When I was starting out with small-ish programs, IDEs gave me performance anxiety. So I'd write in bits and pieces in Evernote or notepad, converting plain descriptions into code, and only merge it all into a single file ready for execution right at the end.
I would say slow based on the past students I have mentored of the same age.
It's interesting that this individual wants to struggle through a certain mode of problem solving (which I allowed for some time just for learning experience) even after I eventually showed them the more efficient strategy.
What I'll add is: focus on being crystal clear above making the challenge less challenging.
I subscribe to the idea that anxiety (and ADHD) is not 'disorder', but rather 'hyper-order'. it's characterized by an intense need, whether necessary or not, to bring order to things, and one of the ways to minimize the problem is to make the challenge 'orderly' before you make it less challenging.
The approach might be different for ADHD compared to anxiety, but I think the root desire of being provided with order is similar. I can't speak for the former (at least not with a diagnosis), but I can for the latter: I'd be happy to be faced with a difficult challenge, as long as it's clear what the stakes are. what the pay-off is, as well as the consequence on failure. I'd probably want regular feedback, and a reminder that nothing I do is the end of the world. In the case of ADHD in particular, I suppose I might want regular feedback specifically to find out if I'm going down a path that isn't worth it in the grand scheme of things.
[not a doctor] ADHD is frequently comorbid with other issues such as generalized anxiety disorder and bipolar disorder. Some ADHD medications can make these other issues worse, especially GAD. A doctor might need the full picture of behavioral patterns to make sure they’re on the right medication.
Does anyone have any advice?
I have dramatically paired back the scope of the project because it seems like it was too daunting at first. But I don’t know if making is super simple (to not stress the student out) is the right step either.
The current pace of their work is very slow, and I’m not sure if trying to apply any pressure will help or hurt...