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A Light in the Tower: A New Reckoning with Mental Health in Higher Education
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- [00:01]
Dr. Pryle
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Dr. Christina Gessler
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Dr. Pryle
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Dr. Pryle
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- [01:32]
Dr. Christina Gessler
the New Books Network. Hello everyone and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the show's producer and host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I'm pleased to be joined by Dr. Pryle, the author of A Light in the A New Reckoning with Mental Health in Higher Education. Welcome to the show, Dr. Pryle.
- [01:58]
Dr. Pryle
Thank you for having me.
- [01:59]
Dr. Christina Gessler
I am so glad you're here and that we're going to dive into this important topic. But before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself?
- [02:07]
Dr. Pryle
Sure thing. I am a bipolar autistic author, speaker, law professor and expert in mental health and neurodiversity. And I'm also the author of Life of the Mind, Interrupted Essays on Mental Health and Disability and Higher Education, which came out a few years ago. And like you said, my latest book, A Light in The Tower, which was published by the University Press of Kansas, just came out in March of this year. And some good news is that it just won a national award and it literally just came out on audio this week. So if you prefer audiobooks, or if you need them for accessibility reasons, I'm so thrilled that it came out on audio so quickly.
- [03:01]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Your book is called A Light in the A New Reckoning with Mental Health in Higher Education. How would you describe this book?
- [03:09]
Dr. Pryle
Well, I decided to write, write this book because I've always been focused on mental health in higher ed. I've been a professor for gosh, oh no. I started teaching in higher ed in 2004. So where we at now? Almost 25 years, is that right? I don't teach math, so. And I have a PhD in rhetoric and a lot of law degree, so I've taught primarily in law schools. And the PhD in rhetoric combined with the law degree means that I research public discourse and how it influences law and policy. And so. And I've always been disability in disability studies and in particular mental health and neurodiversity. So that's been my area for a long, long time. And then when I stepped back from full time teaching, I'm an adjunct now, back in the mid-2000s, I started writing for public audiences about mental health and neurodiversity because it is my life's work and to make the world more inclusive for neurodivergent people and people struggling with their mental health. So when I wrote my first book, Life of the Mind Interrupted, my goal was to make people feel seen who are struggling with their mental health in higher ed. It's a much, much more, I guess, personal book than this one. A lot of personal, personal, deeply personal stories in that one. But, you know, five, six, seven years post pandemic later, I realized that although a lot had changed, not much had changed since that book came out. And I wanted to put out a book that showed that even though administrators were waving their hands about the higher ed crisis, the mental health crisis in higher education because of COVID was happening. And there is one it's true that the mental health crisis in higher education is not new. I'd been writing about it for, at that point, decades. And I really wanted to tie together the thread before the pandemic and after the pandemic and show that, yes, the pandemic squeezed higher ed, but that in squeezing higher ed, it just, all it did was reveal the weaknesses that academia had with regards to mental health and neurodiversity. So that the underlying problems had been there all along. The pandemic made these struggles even more stark and that faculty and students both struggle with mental health struggles and neurodivergent faculty and students struggle being neurodivergent in higher ed. So this book addresses both faculty and students, and it also provides support for the classroom. If you are a neurodivergent faculty member, if you are teaching neurodivergent students, then it provides a lot of support for that as well. So I didn't want the pandemic to be, quote, over and everybody to sweep it under the rug that these struggles that had, you know, come to light and to pretend that it was over, because it hasn't. It wasn't over before and it's not over now. It's something that's been there all along.
- [07:20]
Dr. Christina Gessler
On the COVID it says a reckoning with mental Health. Inside the book, you use the term mental disability. And the intro is called how to talk about Mental Disability. Do you want to talk about why? Maybe one is on the COVID and one is inside. You delve into that in the book, but for listeners, please.
- [07:41]
Dr. Pryle
Sure. So the introduction is called how to Talk about Mental Disability. And the entire section is, you could call it a thought provoking glossary. It's not meant to be something that you reference like a glossary, but it marches through the words that we use to talk about how to talk about neurodiversity, mental illness versus mental health. Everybody wants to talk about mental health, but that implies that there's some sort of mental wellness goal that we can and should reach for. And I'm referring to mental health struggles in part because it's a shorthand that people are familiar with. And then I move on to developmental disorders and disabilities. But these are words that are also complicated because people who are neurodivergent frequently do not like the word disorder at all. If you are autistic, if you are an autistic person, if autism is your thing, like it is for me, we don't say autism spectrum disorder, we just say autism. And this is complicated and it's complex, like I said. But this idea of disorder. But then there's the word disability, which invokes the disability rights movement, which is important and being a part of the neurodiversity movement, the disability rights movement, those are groups that are about solidarity and like I said, rights, you know, and they're about something social rather than something medical. Okay, so the word disability is not tied to necessarily to the medical. It is tied to the political. And it is definitely something that for, of course, for decades, has been about civil rights for disabled people. And extending, like, say, we'll say, membership to people who are neurodivergent into this idea of disabled has been an important part of. Of the neurodiversity movement, the disability rights movement. And so, okay, so then I get to neurodiversity in here and what that means. And neurodiversity was a word that was popularized in the late 90s, really only in the context of autism, but it's a generous word, and these days it encompasses. Well, I like to break it down into three things just because it's easier for people to understand, but it encompasses the developmental, like autism and adhd. It encompasses what we'd call mental illnesses. But I use the term psychiatric disability. And we're talking there about bipolar disorder. That's me, right? We're talking about anxiety. Maybe don't use the word disorder with anxiety. Right? And then, so anxiety, bipolar disorder, or depression. Okay? And then there's the third, which is acquired mental disabilities, like PTSD or brain fog, which became very, you know, a term that people started to talk about more during COVID even though it had been around a long time. If you know anyone who's had cancer, okay, Brain fog is nothing new. So that's. So neurodiversity is suddenly much more bigger, a much bigger set than to be neurodivergent is much bigger. Right? Except that people who have anxiety might not want to call themselves neurodivergent. They also might not want to call themselves disabled. We have a. You know, they. They have anxiety, and they. They want to get over it, and they want to move on with their lives because they're ashamed. They feel stigmatized. Okay? And. And so I talk through here that I settle on this term mental disability, because it encompasses all of these things that we have. We have the mental. And I don't use the word neurodivergent in this book to talk about everyone, okay? I use it. And honestly, I will be honest and say this, is that if I were to write this book again, I might have used the word neurodivergent instead of mentally disabled. But the thing is that one of the points I was trying to make is that because being neurodivergent is stigmatized, people don't want to throw themselves into that pot if they are depressed or have anxiety or struggling with anxiety. Students. Let's think about students or faculty on campus because they don't want to step into The Venn diagram circle of neurodivergent. Because that seems so permanent, then what we end up with is two groups, people struggling with their mental health and neurodivergent people like me, who. Who have permanent. We'll say bipolar disorder. You don't. It doesn't go away. And autism, which also doesn't go away. Right. So. So I am neurodivergent. I don't get to, like, step out of the circle again, let's say. And others who are struggling with their mental health who might not want to be referred to as neurodivergent. And so what do we do? How do we. What does that. And what does that mean on campus? And so one of the main arguments of this book is that because schools stigmatize neurodivergent students so much, and other or. And faculty, sorry, they're community members, because neurodivergent community members are stigmatized so badly by higher education institutions. And we can get into all the ways that happens then when community members begin to struggle with their mental health. Burnout, anxiety, depression, which follow burnout or anything. Right. Late diagnosis of adhd, these adult diagnoses that happen frequently with women, then they are afraid to come forward and ask for help because they see how neurodivergent people are treated. And so they hide and keep it secret. And then we have a crisis, this ongoing crisis. So if we can fix the stigma attached to this, these attached to people who do get accommodations, let's say, because they have. Who they are neurodivergent and they must get accommodations or all the other ways that neurodivergent students and faculty are stigmatized. Okay? Then those who find themselves in this new place of being mentally disabled, Right. Then they will be more apt to seek help. And so we have. So this, how we talk, a line of the book is how we talk about mental disability, how we talk about neurodiversity, how we speak about these things directly affects how we treat mentally disabled people, how we treat neurodivergent people. So how we speak about them materially affects how we treat them, how institutions treat them, things like that. So that's why I spend so much time on this lexicon. But the caveat is, of course, that this language is constantly changing. So I wrote this book in, you know, it takes a while for a book to come out. I wrote it in 2022. And in that time, you know, I've constantly thinking and writing and, you know, and like I said, if I wrote it today, maybe I would Lean into neurodiversity as a. As the word neurodivergent, as the word of the book, and not mentally disabled. Although as I've reread it prior to talking to you, I'm actually convinced I would keep that. And I owe the word, that phrase to my colleague Margaret Price, who wrote a book called Mad at School, which I highly recommend, and she uses it as well. And so I guess if you want to learn more, I recommend that you read this, if only anything, the introduction to this book.
- [16:43]
Dr. Christina Gessler
I wrote down that sentence. I flagged it. About how we talk about people, affects how we treat people. You gave a number of examples in the book about how casual language is used on campus to continue to other people. People using language where they're making jokes about someone's behavior or they seem to be trying to diagnose why someone behaved a certain way and how it perpetuates the stigma. And the people who are speaking this way seem to understand that when we're talking about mental disabilities, we're talking about invisible disabilities. And so you can't tell who within listening range or who within your immediate community you're actually making fun of at the same time that you're making a joke in the story that you're telling.
- [17:41]
Dr. Pryle
The problem with that, you know, I don't know if you could take an example. I can think of many. Do you remember an example from the book? Fine, if you don't.
- [17:50]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You gave an example, I believe, of being in a. In a faculty lounge or a space and overhearing conversations and being aware that they weren't realizing that the stories they were telling were directly painful for you because the people they were speaking with thought it was funny.
- [18:08]
Dr. Pryle
Yeah. Like, the word bipolar, of course, is people use it all the time as a metaphor and. But they are intentionally referring to the mental disability of bipolar disorder. Perhaps somewhere in the field of science, there is a way to use the term bipolar to refer to a magnet or something. But this is not what people mean. What they're saying is, my professor is so bipolar, she never knows what. I never know what she's going to come up with next. Or the dean. I wish the dean would just make a decision. She's so bipolar, I can't take it anymore. And so the bipolar, I mean, it happens all the time. It's like, I feel like it's one of their favorites then. Or it's. Or like, I'm feeling so OCD today, I can't. Or, gosh, you know, like, you know, I'm having an ADHD day. I mean, these are real things that people deal with that makes that make their lives harder. It also can, you know, most. I won't say most, but my colleagues that I work with in this area who. Who are ADHDers, who do have anxiety, of which OCD has long been a subset. Although currently, the way, you know, things are being diagnosed, the medical world moves things around a lot, Right. You know, who have ocd. You know, there are struggles and strengths with every diagnosis. Right. And it's important to remember that these traits can be. That there are traits that are positive as well. A colleague of mine named Karen Ray Costa, you know, points this out a lot. You know, like, why when we diagnose medically, do we only look at the negative traits? Why don't we look at the positive traits as well? So this person, you know, hyper focuses and can therefore finish, you know, a project very quickly. That's like. We don't talk about. It's only the negative. Hyper focuses and loses track of time and is late. Okay, that's. Yeah, that stinks to be late. Sometimes that happens to me. But I also hyperfocus and can write a book in three weeks, so it's pretty great also, Right? So hyperfocus doesn't always have to be bad, but if you look at how the medical community diagnoses, they focus on the negative traits only. And so I feel like I've gotten off track here a little bit. Right. So. So when someone says, I'm so. I'm so ADHD today, they're never talking about the positive traits. They're only talking about the negative. So, you know, the dean's so bipolar. What they mean is that she's. Or he is being unpredictable to the point of aggravation. Right. The. The. You know, the. They're just using it as a metaphor instead of using more accurate adjectives. Okay, I'm so ocd. What do you mean by that? I'm feeling so ocd. You mean you want to clean your office. Okay, well, then say that my office is a really want to clean it, you know, and I'm really particular about how my pens are arranged. Then say that. Okay? Don't say, you know, that you have a particular type of anxiety that someone next to you might actually have. But here's the thing. Say no one in the room actually has any of these neurodivergences. Let's say zero people in the room have them. So that you're actually, with these words, harming directly. No one. The thing is, by talking this way, you are making it okay. You are making it. You are telling everybody who's listening to you that it is okay to use ableist language, okay? So everybody hears you talk like this and everybody thinks it's okay to talk like this. So even though everybody in the room might be neurotypical, no one is neurodivergent. You are reinforcing the ableism of this language. So it's never okay to talk like this no matter who's in the room. It's not okay because you are perpetuating discrimination against nerdy virgin people.
- [22:36]
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- [24:06]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You tell us in the book that there's a big gap between avoiding using a slur and speaking thoughtfully. And one of the things you hope that readers and listeners will take away is how they can Speak more thoughtfully how they can practice doing that, and you give them terms and vocabulary to do that, as well as providing examples of how it doesn't work. One of the things that you also tell us in the book is that in 2018, there was a study, this is pre pandemic, that found that 39% of faculty and staff and 42% of undergrads screened positive for anxiety. Creating a campus environment that is hospitable, is inclusive, is accessible, is essential if the very environment is a hotbed of anxiety.
- [25:05]
Dr. Pryle
And also, what is it about higher ed that causes people to develop anxiety? So are they. Do they arrive like this or do they become like this? I can tell you that in law school that students come in, some come in with anxiety because they. They might. It might be genetic. It might be a part of another neurodivergence. So people who have, like, I'm bipolar, autistic, Right. I will tell you, I also have anxiety because you don't get bipolar, autism, autistic without anxiety. It's like, as we say in law, a lesser included offense. Right? It just is. It just comes with the territory. So, yes, I am a deeply anxious person, and I have been since probably the day I was born. But so some people are going to arrive on campus with anxiety, and that's. And those people might actually already know it. The problem is the way law school is structured. It is structured to make you freak out. Okay? It is designed poorly. Okay? I have been speaking about this for years. I am not the only one. And so by the end of the first year of law school, the rates of depression and anxiety in law students is sky high. It's like half. And it's like, why. Why do we do this to our students? Do you think they learn better like this? I mean, the answer is, of course, no. And then we have much higher rates. We have higher rates of addiction. We have all these problems. And I will. I'm happy to share this with our listeners, is that. I don't know if I can. I mean, I'm not trying to say I wasn't, but I don't want to claim something this painful, but I was approaching alcoholism by the end of my own first year of law school because I couldn't figure out a way to deal with the. Just like, I'm someone who knows that I have bipolar disorder, that I have, you know, a mental illness that is vulnerable, though, to alcohol, and yet I was drinking far too much, and so I'd help for it. Fortunately, you know, there's A. My. My doctor had me say, okay, go six weeks without drinking and see how it goes. And it. I could do it, no problem. But, like, I was afraid and for. And realized it that like, a lot of my classmates, I don't know if they were all right, and I know that a lot of them weren't. I had one student die of an overdose when I was a teacher, and that's just the one I knew about. And law student is. Like I said, law school is designed to. I mean, it literally is a feature, not a bug. And so. And you can wave your hand and say, oh, well, that's law school. But these numbers about anxiety among faculty and students in higher ed, I don't think. I think that's a feature, not a bug as well. I think that we design higher ed in a way. We think it's like, oh, yeah, it's college, it's fun. And being a professor is so great. We have summers off or something. We do not. And if you have 75% of your courses taught by contingent faculty, then actually you have a whole heck of a lot of people who are doing work under high levels of stress. And I cite a study in here about stress levels in contingent faculty. Someone actually did a study about a psychological study of contingent faculty in higher ed and stress and anxiety, and guess what? They're really stressed out and anxious. So none of this was very surprising to me, but I think other people were surprised. But I will say this is something that higher ed brings on and that we need to do better with. It's the nature of the beast. It's not, oh, gee, I don't know what happened. I'm like, okay. Really? Well, let me tell you. Let me tell you what happened.
- [29:25]
Dr. Christina Gessler
We spoke a moment ago, or I did, about invisible disabilities. You tell us in the book that often people who have invisible disabilities use a form of social camouflaging called masking, and that masking is exhausting. It takes a huge toll on the people who use that. You also talked about people who were quote, unquote, normal brain, which you tell us in the book is a social construct of its own, would describe you as quirky or awkward. Can you talk to us about this invisible disability and the stress of trying to mask to social camouflage and just get by?
- [30:13]
Dr. Pryle
Sure. I was diagnosed with autism in 2020. In my early 40s, I had bipolar disorder. I was diagnosed with that in my like as I was finishing college, which is when bipolar disorder manifests. And I'm lucky that it was diagnosed early. And that it's been. I have bipolar 1. People know the difference. And so I was lucky. It was caught early. I caught it, actually. I was like, something. I haven't slept in a month. And so I said, something's wrong. I was able to get my parents to help me find someone to do testing. And they're like, yeah, okay. So that was good. And it's been very, you know, mostly manageable with medication. I'm compliant. I have a great psychiatrist, so I'm really lucky. The thing is, though, is that I had undiagnosed autism also. So, like, it's. I think there's like a 10%. I was just doing research on this for my new book. 10% or so. The word in medicine is comorbidity, which is like, a really great word. And it's not. It's a terrible word, but a coincidence of bipolar disorder and autism. So this is not something that's highly unusual. So. So. But bipolar disorder, if you have it, you might experience the fact that you will talk too fast or, you know, because it's. Or talk too much. It's called pressured speech. And then if you have autism, you will also find yourself talking too much or too fast and, you know, about whatever and, like, you know sometimes about some. Something that the person you're talking to isn't interested in. And my teaching career when I was full time, I was terrified that someone would find out I had bipolar disorder because it's also one of the ones that's most highly stigmatized. People are afraid of people who have bipolar disorder. The one that's more. Only one that's more stigmatized is. Okay, that's not exactly true, but is schizophrenia, right? People are terrified of people with schizophrenia. They're going to be violent, they're going to hurt you, whatever. But bipolar disorder is up there. Um, and, you know, nobody wants to be around you if you have bipolar disorder. You are, you know, scary, unpredictable, irrational. All these things, you know, you know, you might be violent. So I definitely kept that under wraps. And. And I also did not know that it was. I was also keeping under wraps my autistic behaviors as well. And so for 20 years, I did what is called masking. And that is a word that also rose in the context of autism, but has been expanded and taken to be used by neurodivergent people with other. I'll say, diagnoses. So people with anxiety pretend so hard, you know, that they aren't. That they're calm and cool and everything's just fine, you know, People with depression, you know, gosh, I can't come on to the party on Friday. I have the flu. I mean, I've used that when I was in a depressive episode, I would just lie that I, that I was sick. Oh, I had this terrible, you know, influenza. You know, it's been this virus. It's gone on for two weeks and I'm, I am in bed. But it's not because of the flu. But. And no, I just, I can't have company right now. You don't want to catch it. Like it's contagious. And that's, you know, that's, that's. Those are lies that we tell. But when you're face to face with somebody. And by the way, social camouflaging is a word that psychologists use to refer directly to masking their synonyms. And so, and so basically. And the best book I can refer people to is by a psychologist, Dr. Devin Price, who wrote a book called Unmasking Autism. And although, like I said, it's about autism in particular, it's so, so good about learning about what masking is and how it works and how much harm it causes. So I'd be at work, teaching, interacting with colleagues, doing all these things and spending all this energy pretending to be normal. But like I say in the book, this socially constructed, neurotypical fake thing, which this is of course something I had to perceive myself. I had to like, what is normal. I'm looking around at other people and trying to piece together how I should act, which of course is itself exhausting. And then acting that way, standing a certain way, speaking at a certain pace, like trying to tell if I'm doing the right thing. And it is a. You never stop. You can never stop. And then I'd get home and just fall asleep because I'm so tired of pretending all day long. And the consequences of masking are really dire because if you don't have much of a support system, if you like, if I was a single parent, for example, and didn't have a spouse that could take care of the kids, or honestly, if I was, I don't know, I had two children, young children, and a spouse who worked a lot, like, away from home. So when he was traveling, I get home and open up a container of animal crackers, put them on the floor and say, go at it, guys. And I'd just pass out on the couch. There was nothing I could do. I'd just have to lay there and stare at the ceiling. But I put frozen on and just Regained this energy that I had spent the teaching wasn't hard for me. I've been teaching forever. I was a ski instructor in Colorado for two years before I ever taught anything. I was very natural teacher, actually, and enjoyed it, but it was everything else that was hard. And when I got my autism diagnosis, I was like, I can stop this now, but it's not that easy. You can't just stop all these habits that you've learned over decades. You have to unlearn them. And so I have spent the four years since my diagnosis unlearning and unlearning and unlearning all these things that I did to myself to harm myself. Um, but it's been a process, but it's getting better.
- [36:58]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You say in the book that women are far less likely to have their autism diagnosis and that the time period when people are in college and grad school is often when mental health struggles or something manifests and they realize they would, like, help you advocate for screening for students and you advocate particularly for screening for autism. Can you talk about that?
- [37:29]
Dr. Pryle
Well, this is. I love the pipe dreams, right? There was a research study, the only research study that I think, unless something's been published very recently, back in 2011, some researchers were wondering how many college kids were autistic. And so they set up a screening situation, got in a lot of students and screened them, and they didn't like, look at whether they had formal diagnoses or not. And what they found was that. They had to give this huge estimate, this wide estimate of what percentage of college students were autistic. Somewhere between this, whatever the low end was and 2%. It was 1.9%. Was, was the number because these students came through and they would screen them and like two would have actual diagnoses and then there'd be eight more that didn't. Okay. And they're like, oh my gosh, college students are wildly under diagnosed with autism. But. And so they didn't do like the full like 3 day battery of tests or whatever, which are in some ways, I think completely unnecessary. But they did the like, just the preliminary screenings and kept the. But kept it high enough to like, so that nobody would slip through anyway. It's not important. But the point is, is that they're like, based on these results, there's a much higher percentage of students on campus that are autistic than we have any. We have no idea how many there are, but nobody has redone the study. And the other thing about this is that it was back in 2011 when the screening tools were not as good as they are now. And one of the things when I say as good is that they kept women out more. They were still looking for what we might call boy autistic characteristics. That is gendered, like we'll say gender binary on purpose because I would have been like, have, I would have had more boy autistic traits when I was a kid. I just was never tested at all. Okay. But because I was a girl, if they had tested me though, they might have found me to be autistic because the traits I had were more what we call classically autistic, which is what boys look like when they're autistic. So I did the thing where you line up all the pencils in a row and I was, I was, you know, I would throw these sort of tantrums and do all the things I was, I did not do. I did not present the way a lot of girls present when they're autistic, you know, and so you can, and this is, like I said, is a, it's a gender binary, but in, in, in how the scientists look at it. But what's interesting about autistic people is that we are hugely gender fluid and have high rates of trans people and non binary people among us, which is hilarious considering how, how much difficulty that, that doctors have diagnosing people who are what, you know, what they would consider female. Okay. It, I don't, it's, it's so, and this has to do with how girls who appear cisgender female when they're small are socialized to be quiet and keep, you know, and, and to be polite and all these things, this social pressure to just press on them so hard on us. Right. And so unless your autistic characteristics are like, so just impossible to suppress, let's say then like, like me, I was like almost. I was kicked out of everything. I was nearly kicked out of kindergarten and then again first grade. I mean, I was, I was, I was like the sort of classic autistic thing, but nobody would have tested me because I was a girl. Getting tested for autism as a girl in the 80s was like flying to Mars. There was no getting tested as a girl, even if you were so autistic. I was so autistic anyway. I think my first grade teacher said I was a psychopath. Okay. So that was easier to be labeled a psychopath than autistic in 1980, if you are a girl. And so I was interviewing my mother recently about this. So fortunately she retired. So I Got to stay in kindergarten or first grade. But the point is that, um, so a lot of girls, like, who are, you know, and I'm saying this, whose scientists label as girls, okay, slip through the testing cracks. And even today, a, you know, like I said, I'm being very specific with the girl and boy language on purpose because I'm saying it the way doctors say it, okay? Recognizing the high percentage, and this is so wonderful to me of gender fluidity and, and, and, and non binary and, you know, trans folks in our community. But this is, you know, the. That if you are, if you, if you were a CIS girl from the eyes of scientists and doctors and psychologists when you were young, then you are you. There's an 80% likelihood that you would not have been diagnosed as a child, okay, past the age of 18. If you got a diagnosis, it was after you were an adult like me. So even though I am autistic as fuck, okay, and have always been, and I look back, like just five years ago, I'm like, oh, my God, I can't believe it yet. I didn't have a diagnosis until I was 43, 42, right? It doesn't matter. That's just how the testing, how the. All the prejudices against girls having autism, okay? That's how it has always worked. But the screening in college, if we have these sort of like this blind screening in college, remember 2011, that's a long time ago. Those prejudices were still strong. They're getting less and less strong as time goes on. If there were screening for autism and adhd, oh, it'd be so wonderful. They did a similar thing recently for ADHD in college where they just picked a group of kids, didn't have anything to do with whether they had a diagnosis or not. And this has been replicated multiple times. They just did this. And they replicated it in Australia. And here, 29% of students screened positive for ADHD in higher education. 29%. Okay? They did not have formal diagnoses. They did not have, like, not like some of them did. But, you know, 20, 30% of our students have ADHD according to this study, and it's been replicated. ADHD is not a false or fake diagnosis. It's real. And it's extraordinarily difficult to deal with without support or we'll say, while people don't believe you, that it's real or while you are stigmatized or afraid to ask for accommodations. So, yeah, we should screen everybody. We should provide it as a free service and then support them and not stigmatize them, but pipe dreams.
- [45:08]
Dr. Christina Gessler
The book is divided into two parts. Part one is a lot of what we've been talking about here, which is diving into the mental health crisis in higher education. And it goes through eight chapters delving into different aspects of this, from anxiety to burnout, to toxic overwork to depression. It covers so many of the things that we've touched on here in more detail. Part two is called Teaching with Mental Health in Mind. And this is the section of the book that outlines ways people can start to see how ableism has impacted and what you can do instead. One of the things that you explain in the book is that accommodations and accessibility are not the same thing. In fact, they are sort of the opposite. To get accommodations you have to jump through hoops, you have to give away part of your privacy. You may have to go through expensive paperwork. We've talked about a few moments ago about the kind of three day testing someone might go through. If we design, however, the way we handle the campus, the way we deal with our students, the way we write a syllabus, the way we handle a classroom with accessibility in mind, we're really doing the opposite of accommodations. Accommodations are person by person and they require the student to not only self advocate, but to know how to self, advocate, to feel well enough to self advocate and to hopefully be self advocating to someone who will receive it and believe it. Whereas accessibility is a very inclusive design. In the time we have left, can we talk about Chapter 15, teaching accessibly and inclusively? Because this is where we start to move from the pipe dream to the implementation of different things that really will work.
- [47:11]
Dr. Pryle
Yeah. So chapter 15 is for those who don't know, is the last chapter of the book. So I've been building up to this through the entire part two. One of the most important things in order to implement this with the suggestions I make in this chapter is you have to trust your students. So I'm going to preface with this. And you're like, oh yeah, I trust my students. And I'm like, okay, I thought that too. And then a colleague of mine, Catherine Denial. Kate, a professor who works. Oh gosh, Kate, I'm so sorry. Knox College. She's at Knox College and she wrote this world changing essay that is now a book called A Pedagogy of Kindness. And it, I swear, like, I don't know who could read that and not walk away, just completely changed. And if you're that person, we would not get along. So don't tell me. But the point is that a pedagogy of kindness is about letting go of control. So a lot of things that we presume we need to control in the classroom and trusting our students. And it just blew my mind. And the book just takes these ideas that are in this essay and just blows them up. And it's like, yes, please, more, please. Why aren't there 10 books? Okay? And when I read it, I was like, I was reminded of a saying by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. And it goes like this. It is better to let 10 guilty people walk free than to send one innocent person to prison. So what he's saying is that, you know, what are the stakes here? So how many mistakes are we willing to make? How much harm are we willing to cause to innocent people so that we can be sure to catch all the bad guys? And the answer is, we should be willing to cause no harm to innocent people in order to catch all the bad guys. So Holmes phrase stuck with me after I read Kate's piece, because what she's saying is, is that we spend so much time policing our students, we don't even realize it. It's become so natural. And we might even think that we're one of those professors who don't do that. I actually thought I was one of those. I'm like, oh, I. I don't even. I don't even, like, take off for attendance until they've skipped three classes. And Kate's like, you shouldn't take off for attendance at all. And I'm like, what? And then I was like, oh, she's right. She's right. Because what is attendance about, you know, and. And. And everybody. And then, like, anybody listening right now is going to go, what if I don't take attendance? If I don't require attendance, then my students won't come, and I'm going, well, then you have a different problem if your students aren't coming. Either your teaching is poor or your students aren't coming because there's a problem on your campus that needs fixing. That is something else. Your students are sick. They're tired. There's a bigger problem at hand. And so I stopped taking attendance. I just know it's not right. I take attendance, but I stopped penalizing my students for attendance. And the most amazing thing happened. My students came to class way more than they did before, and I'm like, what is happening? This is the reverse, because I took attendance, and I said, who's missing? Anybody? Anybody know who's missing? And they would look around the class and Say, oh, Alex isn't here. And I'm like, oh, gosh, has anybody seen Alex today? And then somebody would say, oh, yeah, I saw her in the dining hall at noon. Let me text her. And I said, can someone, like, see if she's okay? It's okay if she can't come today, but just make sure she's all right. Okay? And so someone would text Alex, and Alex would either write back and say, I can't come today because she knows it's okay to say that, or she'd say, I'll be there in two seconds. I'm just running late. And then Alex bursts through the door. And we all see Alex. We're like, yay, Alex is here. You know, absolutely no shame in arriving late. No shame in having to meet class, miss class. If you're hearing me say no shame, then that's the thing. No shame. It also takes a burden off of you as the teacher because you don't have to keep track of all those absences. Who cares? Okay? And the really amazing thing is this. In law schools, we have to have 80% attendance, or according to the ABA. So if you're like, well, I'm in a program where we have to take attendance. This is required. And absences are. I'm like, nobody is more rigid about attendance than the American Bar association, okay? Or they might be as rigorous, but the aba. But here's the thing. What counts as an excused absence is actually up to us. We have that kind of freedom. Not everybody does. But listen, I was the contingent faculty. I was never tenured, ever. And if you're listening to me, my former colleagues, this is important to learn. Okay? So Alex misses class, let's say. But the thing is, is what counts as an excused absence. That's my call. And she can, you know, and so students would miss class. No shame, right? And I would say, okay, you know, Alex, you know, you weren't in class. You know, do you feel like you are okay with your work? Have you caught up enough? Are you behind? And because there's no shame. She'll be honest with me. She's like, to be honest, you know, I feel like I'm slipping behind. Is there anything I can. Can you help me out? And I would say, yes, I can. And we can have these honest conversations frequently. What I would do is not do that work myself, because, honestly, I'm also worn out. And. And this is the important thing to remember is that teaching this way is not about putting a bigger load on us as faculty. We are also Burned out and tired and exhausted and depressed and anxious too. Okay, so if you're like that sounds like a lot more work. Doesn't have to be. You can just say, hey, is someone here able to help Alex, you know, or Alex can say. I can say to Alex quietly, you know, instead of calling her out, is there someone in this class you feel close enough with that? You guys can study together what you missed last week, and she can say yes or she can say no, and then we can work on that together. But it doesn't have to be a lot of work. Usually they just solve these problems on their own. It's amazing. And then I like, good. Then you send me an email confirming that you've done that, and then it's handled. Okay. It's like letting go of attendance was huge. I was like, oh, my gosh. But I do take attendance. Penalizing attendance, by the way. I do take attendance because taking attendance lets them know I give a crap whether they are there. And so Alex knows that I care that she arrived. And then, of course, everybody turns and looks at her and says, hey, Alex, we're so glad you're here. And then I also notice whether a student has slipped off the. The radar, right? So if a student misses two or three classes in a row, I'll call the student up to me and say, hey, you've missed a few classes in a row. Are you okay? And it's an are you okay? Check. It's a metric for that. It's not about shame or punishment. And I've had students, you would be shocked. The things students have told me because I kept track about of whether they were there. Like, how many people keep track of that with you. You just start punishing. We just start punishing. We think this, now it's time to start docking their grades instead of asking them if they're okay. And it's not like counting and keeping a spreadsheet of absences. That's way more work than just asking, are you okay? And that doesn't mean that I have to do. I'm not their therapist. All I have to do is give them a number to campus. Campus health or. Or, you know, if you have something in your. If you're like in the law school, for example, we have a person in our, in our division for undergrads. You know, you might have somebody, you know, the student. I don't. I don't know. Every campus is different, you know, so. And then what I usually say is, I'd like you to email me once You've made contact with this person. And so, but like I don't have to walk them over there. I don't have to do it, you know, But I do keep track so they know I care. But that requires relinquishing control over my students attendance in class. And here's the thing. Sometimes they miss class because they're hungover. Sometimes they miss class because they sleep in. Sometimes they miss class because they went to the basketball game and they are just too exhausted to make it to class the next day. And that is okay, because my class is not the most important thing in their life. They have a lot of things in their lives that are way more important than me. And this is part of it too, is getting your ego out of the way so that you can teach your students and build trust with them because they're never going to come to you for help if they think that you're going to get all puffed up and ego stricken if they tell you. Yeah, I went to the final four to watch our team play, which is actually a thing at UNC Chapel Hill where I teach, so trust. So the guiding principles I talk about here, our agency, okay, which means that students have the power of self determination and it's diametrically opposed to this freaky control thing that we have been trained to believe. This, this authoritarian, it's mistrust, it's adversarial since we were in kindergarten ourselves, that the teacher is the bottom boss. And we were. Unless, honestly, unless she went to like, I don't know, I went to Quaker school for four years, boarding school. And like there was a lot less of this. But so giving students more agency over, over themselves is a big deal. And then empathy. And here I'm going to quote Dr. Denial. She says, you know, it's, it's this two simple things, but believing people and believing in people. So when our students tell us something, we have to believe them. Okay? It's, you know, we can't presume they're lying. We have to presume they're telling the truth. If we constantly presume they're telling the truth, what's amazing is they will tell us the truth. If we presume that they're lying, they're going to lie to us because they can feel that we're going to, that we don't trust them. And so they're like, I better make up a good lie because otherwise I'm going to get in trouble. But if we're like, yeah, you know, I wish I could have gotten the Final Four, then they know. They know that you don't have to lie to us. And isn't it better if they tell us the truth? Especially when we had 14 students die by suicide here at NC State last year. Two years ago. I mean, that was horrible. So, yeah, empathy, it's about trust. And then the last one was accessibility. And like you said, accessibility, you know, people, you can think about it as universal design for learning, but that's not quite the same thing. But if you're more familiar with that term, that's like a lot bigger in scope. But the idea is, what can you do to make this class easier on everybody? Okay, you can set deadlines, sure. But don't penalize people for turning stuff in late. Set the deadline. Grant extensions. Just grant the extensions. Don't penalize them for turning in late work. Why not? I mean, when was the last time you turn in something late? I turn in late stuff all the time. It just happens. Part of life. Well, the real world, I'm like, dude, the real world, you turn in late stuff all the time. Teach them how to ask for extensions. That's helping them prepare for the real world. And there's a whole. A whole lot of things in here like that. But the main thing is believing in our students and believing our students. When a student needs an absence, we give them the absence. When a student needs an extension, we give them the extension. And when we stop policing our students, our own lives get easier. It's not about creating more work for us as professors, teachers. It's about creating less. Everything gets easier.
- [59:57]
Dr. Christina Gessler
We're starting to run out of time. So I'd like to ask you, what do you hope this episode sparks?
- [60:03]
Dr. Pryle
Well, my pipe dream self hopes that I don't. I certainly don't expect people to run out and buy my book. I just hope that they start thinking about ways that they can support their colleagues who are neurodivergent and support their students who are. And if listeners are neurodivergent, that they know that they aren't alone, that they're surrounded by others who are. And maybe they can find kinship among other people in their institutions so they don't feel alone. Because feeling alone when you are struggling with your mental health or struggling in any way is the worst thing. So whether it's in the classroom or the faculty lounge or in your dorm room and you are struggling with your mental health, you aren't alone. The numbers don't lie. You are very much not alone. And even though it might feel that way, I can guarantee that people up and down your hall are feeling a lot like you are. So I'm not sure what it will take to help students and faculty find that kinship with one another. But building these communities on campus are very important. And what institutions can do is help build those communities, create the space in which those communities can be built. Of course, the best way to do that is with money. Just throw money at the problem, you know, get input from neurodivergent people themselves and then hand them a blank check and let them do the work. Not a pipe dream. Just do it. So that's what I hope. Thank you.
- [62:01]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Pryle, and taking us into your book, A Light in the A New Reckoning with Mental Health in Higher Education. You've been listening to the academic life. I'm Dr. Christina Gessler inviting you to please join us again.
- [62:16]
Dr. Pryle
Sam.