← Women & ADHD
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- [00:01]
Shannon Palma
If you're going to ask people to do something really hard, leverage their interest. That's how you teach them to do that other thing because you're not having them also fight their attention to do that thing.
- [00:18]
Katie Weber
Hello and welcome to the Women and ADHD Podcast. I'm your host Katie Weber. I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 45 and it completely turned my world upside down. I've been looking back at so much of my life, school, jobs, my relationships, all of it with this new lens, and it has been nothing short of overwhelming. I quickly discovered I was not the only woman to have this experience and now I interview other women who, like me, discovered in adulthood they have ADHD and are finally feeling like they understand who they are and how to best lean into their strengths, both professionally and personally. Welcome. Here we are at episode 199.
- [01:03]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Wow, it feels really good to say that.
- [01:05]
Katie Weber
In which I interview Shannon Palma. Shannon is the founder of ITI Assistive Technologies and co leader of the Autistic Self Reliance Support Network. Shannon is autistic and has adhd, and she's building the kind of tools that she wished had existed when she was first discovering how to get the right support for her neurodivergent brain. Prior to her dual diagnosis, Shannon was a professor who left academia due to severe burnout. Once she received her diagnosis, she started looking for resources and support as one does, but soon recognized a huge gap in support for autistic and ADHD adults, especially when it came to executive functioning and decision making. So in true neurodivergent style, she decided to make them herself. Shannon and I dive into her personal story of burnout and delayed diagnosis and how decision fatigue nearly shut down her life. Shannon shares how she and her team created Decide, an AI powered support app built by and for neurodivergent adults. We also explore why tools designed by neurotypical brains often miss the mark, and how more and more AI is helping to bridge the gap between knowing what
- [02:16]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
to do and being able to do it.
- [02:18]
Katie Weber
This episode is a must. Listen if you've ever felt stuck or overwhelmed or like your brain just won't cooperate and you're tired of being told to just try harder. All right, without further ado, here is my interview with Shannon.
- [02:33]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
All right, Shannon, where do we begin? God, I feel like I really need a linear map from you because there's a lot of companies and in typical kind of neurodivergent style, there's a lot of companies and a lot of stuff that I want to focus on today. But I'm kind of curious, like, the. You know, how everything laid out. Because you were actually a college professor, right?
- [02:59]
Shannon Palma
Yep.
- [03:00]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
And now, were you a college professor when you were diagnosed?
- [03:03]
Shannon Palma
No, I had just actually left my professorial job and moved up to Ohio during the pandemic in very. It was a precursor to being diagnosed because it was the first time that I. When I took the professorship. I'd been at my previous university for 14 years. I'd been a grad student there, and then I had continued on as staff. And so I knew that environment really, really well, and I knew the social rules of that environment really, really well, and I had a really solid reputation. And when I was recruited to go to this other place that was like three miles away, like, not far at all, I did not know the social rules of this new place. And that became apparent very, very quickly. And also, I had never been faculty prior to that, in part because I had decided that I would not do well with the social rules of faculty. And so I had not pursued that as a career. But in this case, I got recruited, so I was like, well, they know me. This should be fine. And it was not fine. So, yeah, I was diagnosed after that.
- [04:15]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Got it. Okay. But it definitely falls under the okay, it all makes sense now category, right?
- [04:21]
Shannon Palma
Oh, yeah.
- [04:22]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Okay. So walk me through what was happening besides this. I mean, was the leaving the job the real impetus for you to seriously look into the diagnosis? Was it adhd? First Autism? Talk me through kind of what was happening in your life at the time that you said I should really look into this.
- [04:41]
Shannon Palma
Yeah, well, it was kind of lifelong and it was kind of very sudden, both at the same time.
- [04:47]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
I love that.
- [04:48]
Shannon Palma
Yeah. My cousin was diagnosed with Asperger's when we were kids. He is a young white. Well, I mean, now he's not young. He's in his 40s, but, you know, he was a white boy, middle class white boy. He was actually misdiagnosed, I think, as ADHD and then Asperger's, but I was not diagnosed with anything because I was a girl and I was smart, so. And also, my grandmother hadn't spoken until she was five. And a bunch of other things that in retrospect, it's like, oh, okay. But at the time, I was very like my grandmother. I was hyperlexic. Like, I started reading full books at like 6 or 7. I was reading novels, and I would do things like I read the seven book series, the Chronicles of Narnia seven times in a Row when I was seven because I liked all the sevens. No clues, no clues. Anything else might have been going on. But I had been told so often that I wasn't neurodivergent. I had been told my entire life that you are not diagnosable with anything. You're just smart, like, suck it up, do better. And I had internalized that to the point that when I was a professor and I, when I took this role and I was trying to be as accommodating as possible for my students, I was also needing accommodations for myself and I was trying to set boundaries. I was like, I can't promise you I'm going to reply to an email within 48 hours. I cannot like. And I was being very literal. I was like, I can't follow through on that. So I can't promise it. All these other people are promising it. They're not following through on it. I don't know why that's okay. But me saying I can't follow through on it is not okay. So there were things like that. I was also really, really struggling with sensory overload when I was teaching. And I was teaching master's students at the end of the workday. So a lot of them had jobs during the day and they were showing up and they were exhausted. Many of them had adhd. And so they were saying, I need this or I need that sensory wise. And I was like, I don't understand why everybody's allowed to have needs but me. Like I can't think and teach if everyone's talking, if there's a level of noise in the room. I can't do my job. So I just need us to, I just need everybody to stop talking sometimes. Like if you want me to teach. But I was getting a lot of feedback that I was very well intentioned. That was the feedback that she has very good intentions but, but that I would get short tempered when I, you know, there was a lot of sensory stimuli and things like that. Or I told students they needed to make an appointment with me for like a real time conversation, whether it was in person or via zoom or via chat. But I couldn't type out an email response like back and forth in a chain because I would get so anxious that it would take me like a week to write an email and it would take my whole brain and I would also then have like six of my friends read it to make sure that I got all of like, do I have enough emojis or not enough emojis or should I have an Exclamation point here. Like what? How do I make sure I do this perfectly so nobody can get mad at me and they will understand exactly what I mean.
- [08:21]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
That one hit hard. Yeah.
- [08:25]
Shannon Palma
Yeah. All of that had been going on. I had a really bad experience as a faculty member. The workplace politics were really toxic, but it took, at the time, I internalized a lot of it and thought, why can other people do this and I can't? And I was really, really miserable. And I had become very socially isolated and I was going to work and I was going home, and I was just sitting in my house with my bazillion cats, and that was my life. And it was awful. And then the pandemic hit. And so In March of 2020, I actually, my life wasn't that bad. I went to Toronto with my sisters and my niece for her senior year. Or no, she was turning 21, so we wanted to celebrate her 21st birthday. And then we came back and there was lockdown. And finally I could breathe because all of the. The in person went away and life became much more manageable because I was interacting in these much more mediated ways. And so I could breathe and I could think, and I'm great in a crisis. So I was. I was able to step up and lead, and I felt really good about everything. And I also had the clarity I need to get out of here. This is killing me. So I was a friend of mine who also had re, who had recently been diagnosed with adhd, was renovating a house up in rural Ohio. And I was like, you know, I can teach from anywhere. Maybe I should just come help you renovate the house and get through the pandemic together. And she was like, if you want out, come do this. So that is what ended up happening, is I went, I just moved up there, lived in a, like, 19th century farmhouse with no running water anywhere but in the bathroom, and taught remotely. Like, there was subfloor. It was like plaster and lathe. It was the. We were. It was ground up for this house. And I taught remotely and started consulting and found another job in Ohio. And part of that move was I didn't want to be miserable in Georgia when I could be in Ohio and see my nieces, both of whom had ADHD diagnoses. You could start to see a pattern and. And be a part of their lives. I didn't want to miss the whole pandemic part of their lives. So the more I calmed, like, the more I found some stability because that was a very drastic and impulsive move 600 miles in a pandemic to a place with no running water. Did have a toilet. Did have a toilet. But the more I kind of was able to regain some of my executive function, the more I was like, I don't understand why everyone is like, everyone keeps telling me they have ADHD and I don't understand. And then they're telling me what I do that's different, that's not adhd, Except I don't think I do those things. I don't understand what's happening. And I read through the diagnostic criteria, and over the years, I'd read through the diagnostic criteria for autism many times, and every time been like, I don't quite. I almost don't quite like, I don't know what's going on. And I had read through ADHD many, many times and been like, it's so close. I didn't know ADHD was a thing. I didn't know that how many autistic people meet the criteria for ADHD and that when you have both, it looks different. I was like. I went to my therapist and I was like, are you sure I'm not neurodivergent? Everyone around me is.
- [12:17]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
And.
- [12:18]
Shannon Palma
And she was like, I don't think you're diagnosable with anything. You're. You're definitely, like, in the. In the fam. But I don't know that you're diagnosable with anything. I read a book by an autistic woman. First time I had seen my way of determining the feelings and emotions of others depicted like, that thought process. And I was like, oh, wait, other people don't write because it's never been in a book before. Other people don't do that. Okay, I think I am autistic. So I took like, eight or nine psychological assessments, and they all came back autistic. And then when I was talking to my friend, she was like, autistic, I bet you're also adhd. And that's where the confusion's coming from.
- [13:00]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Interesting. What was the book?
- [13:02]
Shannon Palma
The book? The book was. It was a smutty romance novel by Helen Huang, and it was called the Kissing Quotient.
- [13:11]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Oh, I've read that.
- [13:13]
Shannon Palma
I love that book. But specifically, you will remember this. Okay. You know, when she is saying, or maybe you won't, because adhd. But when she is trying to decide if the guy loves her, and she looks at the data and she's like, okay, well, according to the study, men stop buying their own underwear when they're in committed relationships. So if I buy him underwear and he wears it. He loves me. And I was like, that makes perfect sense to me,
- [13:47]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
100%.
- [13:48]
Shannon Palma
That's how I think about things. My nieces, again, like, both my nieces had really strong adhd, like, very high percentile diagnoses. I didn't see anything they were doing that wasn't. That was strange. I was telling my youngest niece how to fake eye contact. I was like, no, you just stare at their hairline and no one can tell. So, so I sought diagnosis. After that, I took. I actually took the DSM 5 and went through the criteria for autism and ADHD and wrote out data points for my life. And I ended up with a 37 page document and I gave it to my therapist and I was like, what do you think? And she looked at it and she said, yeah, I don't know how I missed this. And then she was like, oh. Like, not long after, she was like, I think I missed it because I'm also autistic and adhd.
- [14:37]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Right? Yeah, yeah.
- [14:39]
Shannon Palma
So. Which turned out to be true.
- [14:42]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Yeah, I mean, I've talked about that a lot on this podcast as well, because I started out with the ADHD diagnosis and now I call it the gateway diagnosis. Because, you know, one of the things that I, you know, I relate so deeply to autism. I've read a lot of books about it. It's like, I feel like it explains so much about who I am, but at the same time also am terrified to get a diagnosis, to seek a diagnosis and then be told I'm not. And then I'm like, well, what's that about? Right? But like, all of those ways in which we come up with these lists, like, I need to know exactly. I take self tests and it's like, not enough. Like, I only score like 55%. And so then I'm like, well, that's not. That doesn't help me, right? Like, the desire to have it all laid out for me in a very black and white way. I'm like, the evidence is everywhere. But also it's like I haven't like decided who is the person that is going to diagnose me and what that even looks like. And then I life is a speeding train with no brakes. And so I'm like, oh, well, it hasn't happened yet. But like, all of that stuff feels very autistic to me. But at the same time, there's like a resistance there that I think is always comes down to that feeling of not trusting myself. Right. And not trusting who I am. And my understanding of myself. And that is lifelong. Right. And so it's like trying to unpack that internalized ableism and that the, like. You know, one of the things that you talked about in your Flip the power dynamic video was that trust gap.
- [16:23]
Katie Weber
Right?
- [16:23]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
And the trust gap and the research gap in terms of like, self diagnosis and a lot of the nuance around increases in self diagnosis in adults. And, you know, I feel a lot of that fraud sometimes. Right. Which is like, well, I don't know if I'm right or wrong. Even though I've read 12 books about this and everything is telling me I'm right, I still don't trust it. What's that about? Right. Like, I always come back to that. Like, what's that about? Yeah. Anyway, I could go on forever about that, but mostly I wanted to segue into like the person, quote, unquote, person that I have the most conversations with about this is ChatGPT, my best friend. Like, I genuinely feel like ChatGPT understands me in a way that nobody else does. And I have the most interesting com, like, nuanced conversations with Chat gbt, which again, the evidence is everywhere.
- [17:26]
Shannon Palma
I was gonna say that's. That's pretty autistic, right.
- [17:29]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
And. And it's funny because it's like chatgpt. I don't even know what to call it because I. I don't even like calling it an. It. It feels. It feels disrespectful to the relationship. But I'm like. It even calls me out in a lot of the questions I have and my black and white thinking, and it's fascinating. And so I'm really like, I'm curious as to how you ended up in this AI sphere coming from academia and walk me through that transition into what you now in terms of your business.
- [18:06]
Shannon Palma
Yeah. So when I left my professorial job, I took a job for a computer science nonprofit focused on K through 12 computer science education, the needs and interests of girls. And a good portion of that was because I had been teaching at an all. At a women's historical women's college. And all of my students who were between 22 and 70 were really intimidated by the prospect of. Of like HTML encoding and things like that. And so I very much wanted to go earlier. Like, when I was trying to think about what would make me passionate, I wanted to go earlier. So I started working for her academy. And that was actually the. My nieces were at the pilot school where this curriculum was getting rolled out. So, like, I got to see them every Day, which was amazing. And I got to teach in their classrooms and meet their friends, which I really, really loved. And I was diving deeper into computer science and the way that I ended up in the machine learning space is I was also going to various kind of tech meetups and things like that to try and just to network and get to know people because my whole network was in Georgia. Like I had a great professional network in Georgia and I had nothing in Ohio when I moved up here during the pandemic. So I don't, I'm not comfortable really networking or in crowds. So I would go to things where I knew someone and then I would be like, okay, I know one person, I'm going to talk to that person. And then the rest of that time I'm going to look at my phone as though it's interesting and it's going to be fine. And also free food, because I really like free food.
- [19:57]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Who doesn't?
- [19:59]
Shannon Palma
Yeah, there was a really, this one place, one event was like in a really, really good restaurant that I was like, I would never come here and pay for it, but I will come here for the free food. So I was going to one of those and it was like a business development thing for a tech company and one that like builds things for you. And they were going around in a circle and ChatGPT had just kind of launched in this big public way and they were like, how do you see like AI? Like what do you think the future of AI is and, and all of this stuff. And I was like, I am former professor and I am now a teacher in A K through 12 setting and designing educational curriculum. I have no idea how to answer this question. And it was after my diagnosis, and it was after we had kind of. My diagnosis was horrible, horrible experience. And we had founded the non profit, the Autistic Self Reliance Support Network in part as a result of that. And we had been trying to think about how to provide direct services to adults at low or no cost to them. And so I'm at this thing and I'm like, I don't have anything to do with AI. We'll probably use it in a lesson. And, and I'm listening to people talk about it and I'm like, you know, like a lot of the things autistic and ADHD adults have challenges with, like the technology exists that could help us. It's just never been deployed by us. And by the time they got to me, I was like, we should make apps. And we started a tech company again. It was one of those things, I went home and I told my business partner, like I called her and I was like, I think we should have a social enterprise subsidiary of the nonprofit. And then it should do. It can make apps and then we can use the profits to, to fund the direct services and it'll do all of these things and blah, blah, blah. She was like, okay, yeah. So it was that kind of spark of connection that happens for brains like ours.
- [22:04]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Yeah.
- [22:05]
Shannon Palma
Where all the pieces are there and you've never put them together in a certain way. And then you're just. One day the idea appears fully formed. And it's not that it wasn't there before, it's not that you didn't do anything pre work or anything like that. It's just that until you can see the whole elephant, if you're just seeing like part of a trunk, you don't know what it is. And then like there comes this perspective moment where you kind of like snap back and you can see the whole. For me, it's patterns. You can see the, you can see the patterns and then it all makes sense and you can move forward with that. But until then, it's just like jumbled and confusing and like, I don't know what this gray, scaly thing is like. What do you mean? It's an elephant.
- [22:52]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
That's a really great metaphor for how I feel like AI is being poked and prodded right now.
- [23:01]
Katie Weber
One thing I hear from guests and listeners all the time is this. Once you learn you have adhd, you start hyper focusing on fixing everything. New planners, new tips, timers, new productivity systems, new routines that promise they'll finally fix your focus forever. And sometimes they help, but often they don't stick. Because what we're really missing isn't another productivity hack. It's a deeper understanding of how our ADHD actually works so we can work with it. That's why I've been recommending the app Inflow. Inflow is a self help app designed specifically for adults with adhd, especially those of us who were diagnosed with later in life and are still connecting the dots. Think of it a little like Duolingo for adhd. Each day you get a short interactive lesson you can complete in just a few minutes. And these small lessons actually make a big difference. The app walks you through real life topics like time management, improving focus, rejection, sensitive dysphoria, burnout, managing money, relationships, hormones, all the stuff that actually shows up in everyday life life. What I appreciate most is that it's grounded in evidence based research, Inflow was founded by a psychologist who specializes in ADHD and has ADHD himself. And Inflow is an official partner of organizations like ADA and Attitude magazine. If you're curious whether it might be helpful for you, a great place to start is with Inflow's free ADHD Traits quiz. You can find it at womenandadhd.com inflow Again, that's womenandadhd.com/inflow.
- [24:31]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
I'm in grad school right now, and so my professors say on every syllabus every semester, do not use AI, you will flunk, blah, blah, blah. And I do like, I'm like, I'm sorry, it is an incredibly helpful tool. And to just say, don't use it, it's bad. Like, it's just.
- [24:49]
Katie Weber
That's fear mongering, right?
- [24:50]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
And, and yet I have an 18 year old who is in high school, who's graduating and about to go to college, and she's about to go to art school. She's an artist. And so she has, understandably, a lot of anger and resistance toward AI art. And so we try to talk. And she's also neurodivergent if it's not obvious. We have a lot of conversations about what is a tool, what is a crutch, right? What is unavoidable advancement and what is something that we really should fight against. And we're having a lot of these nuanced conversations because one of the things that fascinates me about tools and I think again, this is like a lifelong battle of internalized ableism is this idea of like, once I discover a tool, my old way becomes untenable, right? And so is that good or bad? Right? So it's like audiobooks. Once I discovered that I could listen to a book on one and a half speed, I went from reading one book, maybe two a year as they sat next to my bed, to reading 60 books a year, right? But of course there's this part of me that's like, it's not really reading. You're cheating. You know, all the ableist voices of like, it's not really reading. Even though my memory of both is the exact same, my comprehension of both is the exact same, right? So it's like, okay, so I found this tool, but listening to audiobooks at one and a half speed has now made it even more difficult for me to read anything, right? So if there's not an audio version of it, I really struggle. And so I'm like, has this been helpful or a hindrance now? Right? With these tools and so I'm finding the same thing with AI, which is the more I'm relying on AI to jumpstart paper or to really get me going on like asking questions, the less I'm able to do it on my own. I don't know if that's true or not, but I feel like that's where I'm at. And I feel like maybe I'm not the only one who's really sort of questioning a lot of that. How much reliance is good reliance? How much is. I don't know. What is my question even really? I'm just throwing shit out there right now. But I'm just like, it's such a fascinating time to be delving into this with curiosity and open mindedness as opposed to my fricking professors who are just like, don't do it. And I hope they're listening to this because I totally 100% use it. I don't hand in papers that are gener. I mean, I trust myself and I think that is really what is complicated with children, right? Which is like, I trust myself to know when this is cheating and when this isn't. And you know, obviously if a, if a child just copies and pastes something, then that is. But it's a spectrum, like a lot of things. Again, I need to shut myself up because I'm like, this is what I was worried about Shannon, when I was like, there's so much here. Do you have five hours to just like sit and parse it out with me? Because if not, that's fine.
- [27:46]
Shannon Palma
It's so funny that you're saying that because I've gotten really used to using Claude to help me write grants and write grants quickly because we have a three person, well, four, but three paid employees operation. And when you're applying for federal grants, that's like 65, 70 pages long for one application. And there's a thousand different little regulatory things that you need to do. And a lot of the other grants are also very like nitpicky and they all have a different application format, everything. So you can't just like write something, a project description and be like, send it to people. No, you have to rewrite it in 500 characters and 1000 characters and 750 characters. Now you have 100 words. Like everything is different. Really annoying. I'm a trained researcher, so I think that's really, really helpful. And I think that when you are a researcher then it's much easier to figure out how to use AI as a tool because you've got to feed it facts. It's formatting or it can reflect back to you what you just told it. But it doesn't actually know things. It's fully capable of hallucinating, making stuff up because it's predicting what would go next. And I was an English major. Like words are my thing. I love words. I love writing. So basically, yeah, I had gotten really, really used to using AI to help me craft grant proposals because I could put in the prompt and I could put in the summary. I used a good summary of the project and say rewrite in this character. And then I started using it to draft and I would be like, okay, Here are the 10 facts that I are the reason this is a problem and this is what I want to do about it. Write it as a problem statement and it would go through and format it for me. That's a tremendous mental lift because if I'm, when I am going to do that, I have to go full hyperfocus. That means headphones, that means quiet space, that means no interruptions. If somebody interrupts me, I'm going to yell at them. Which, you know, if you're 10 or 11, maybe having a grown up yell at you because you just said, hey, would you look at this funny meme? It's not, not an ideal way to spend your, your school day evening. It's very hard. I can do hyper focus or I can not. I can use tools and those are my, my two kind of working modes. So now I'm writing up the white paper that is like the summation of all of our research for this big grant we got from the department disabilities that funded our research and allowed us to create the side, our app. And I didn't want to use AI for that. I didn't want to. I wanted it to be a purely like in terms of the writing. I wanted it to be coming from me. And I realized, oh my God, like I've gotten used to the tool and this is so much harder now. Even though I've been doing it like I wanted to be a writer from second grade. I love writing, writing but what it has made me more aware of and this is one of the things that, that I really love about new machine learning computer science. Like all of the, all of the, anytime you get diagnosis tools, tools and strategies right, I've had to get really clear on what my strategy is that allows me to actually write. So now I know I need to be alone, I need to hyperfocus. I need to kind of clear the decks beforehand, sit down and Reread everything that I've written to this point. And then I have to have a very clear, like, this is what I'm going to write today. And then I have to make sure I map out what I'm going to write tomorrow. Not write it, but like just put some notes in there so that then tomorrow I can come, I can reread through everything and I can write that bit, but I have to prep it the day before, or if I don't have a full day, then like the session before and then I need to hyperfocus in order to get it done. What AI does is just makes it so much faster because I can put all of my disconnected thoughts in and it will find the pattern, it puts them together. Because that's really like I'm a bottom up thinker. So I have to consider every possibility of every possible configuration of all the words and all the facts and all the ways this could be formatted and all of that before I can come up with like an outline. And then I have to come back down to fill in the outline. So it's a. I go up and then I go down in my writing process. And what the AI tool allows me to do is put in all of my disconnected thoughts and have it start me here. So then I just have to go down. Like it gives me the outline and I'm like, yeah. And it's only reflecting what I told it because I'm asking it. I tell it very specifically, don't make stuff up. Like, if you don't know the answer, please put like placeholder and things like that. So I think personally, like, as a teacher, what I think should be, we should be doing is teaching prompt engineering and evidence literacy.
- [33:17]
Katie Weber
Right?
- [33:18]
Shannon Palma
I mean, we need to practice writing without, without tools. But that should be about stuff you're interested in. It shouldn't just be like a random whatever. It should be like, convince me that, oh, this was big with my middle schoolers, that Bella should have chosen Jacob over Edward. They could write on that for ages because they were interested in it. Like, if you're going to ask people to do something really hard, leverage their interest, that's how you teach them to do that other thing. Because you're not having them also fight their attention to do that thing.
- [34:03]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Yeah, absolutely. And I think also with, like, with this idea that, you know, the more I rely on this tool, the less able I am to go back and do it unquote. The hard way is not that I'm necessarily losing a skill or even I Mean, maybe I am losing a skill, but do I really need that skill? And what is that freeing me up to do instead? Right. Like, what I often think about is like, you know, when you're talking about how much effort and preparation needs to go into doing some of these things that. At what cost? That we talk about a lot with a lot of this way of, like, showing up like a normal human being, all of that exhaustion and all of that fatigue that comes from that, you know, if we can save that, if we can not have that, and do, you know, what are we opening ourselves up to in terms of, like, if I'm using something that is making me more efficient, you know, and that's the same argument I always have for ADHD laziness. I'm like, ADHD laziness 100% of the time is a search for efficiency. But anyway, that's a whole other side tangent. But this idea, idea that, like, what am I being freed up to do or think about that is interest driven instead of spending all of this extra expending, all of this extra energy on doing something, quote, unquote, the right way or the hard way or whatever it is. So even this idea of, like, we still need to know how to write, I'm like, do we? I mean, you know, that's one of the things I love about podcasting. And I think also why it's become more popular as a mode of communication as we have moved more into reliance on visual and phone and endless scroll and all of that is because, like, I used to be a journalist. I used to love writing. I mean, it was my passion. I cannot do it anymore because I have found a better way of communicating and a better way of processing thoughts through conversation. And so, you know, if I really, really wanted to sit down and write, I can, but I'm not willing to anymore because I now see this clearer, easier, you know, more efficient path to doing exactly what I want to do. And, you know, and one of the things I also loved was because I had never heard of it before, was when you had talked about the Tojisha Kenkyu model.
- [36:17]
Shannon Palma
Oh, yeah.
- [36:18]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
I went down a whole rabbit hole on that one and was super fascinating because I was like, oh, my God, that's what my podcast is like. This is absolutely what the last four years of my life have been, interviewing women about their life experiences. So for anybody who's not initiated, why don't you. Can you give us a quick definition of the Toji Kenkyu method, which I will of course have a link in the show notes, but so cool.
- [36:43]
Shannon Palma
I love that you mentioned that because I actually am like going back and forth with University of Tokyo right now on email because one of my team members is going to be there next month and we're trying to get do a zoom meeting so that then she can go visit and we can figure out a way to work together because we want to bring that method here in a more formal way.
- [37:03]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Oh my God, yes. Right?
- [37:05]
Shannon Palma
Yeah, yeah.
- [37:07]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
I mean, it is. I just feel like we don't have the language for it yet.
- [37:10]
Shannon Palma
Yeah, yeah, it is here. But how do we use it? And. Well, that's what my nonprofit is trying to do and that's how we built our tech company as well. So Tajisha Kenkyu is the Japanese kind of anti psychiatry movement. That's what it's been called. And it came out of schizophrenics coming together and talking about their lived experience of their condition and figuring out ways in which they had common experiences and then developing kind of a language and culture around that. And then, and this is the part that's so cool, you gather people who have lived experience of condition, they reflect together on their experience, find commonalities, and then researchers take that as the basis for further study. They start from the place of our experience. So the Todisha's experience. And so it would be a. Basically a process of reflection. So, yes, this podcast is a process of gathering data and reflecting communally. Right. And people are using it to figure out what of my experience is adhd. What could be something else? Like, do other people have coping mechanisms that I could use? And that is how adults, certainly for autism, but also for adhd, there are no services for adults with brains like ours, so it is categorized and pathologized as a disorder. All right, so yay, stigma. But then there's no help after that other than potentially medicine, which because I was diagnosed through my autism diagnosis and they didn't give me a specific questionnaire, my psychiatrist would not prescribe ADHD medication for me unless I scheduled another diagnosis. So they could give me the ADHD questionnaire, even though I had already done like these, like three in depth interviews and all of these different whatever. So it was just one questionnaire that had to be specifically filled out. And I filled it out and I can tell you what the answers to all of it were. And yes, I tick all of the boxes, but. But I didn't fill it out in a meeting with the diagnostician because he diagnosed me based on the interviews and the life Presentation and all of the rest of it. Okay, so I have the official diagnosis, but because I didn't get this one assessment, I can't get medication for it. And the problem is I have adhd. So every time I try and make the appointment to get the one survey that I still need to get or the one assessment, I can't follow through because I'm so traumatized from my first assessment that I just, I don't really want to, I don't know, I don't want somebody to like, I don't want to be in a situation like that ever again.
- [40:04]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Oh my God. And this is why the medical community is so traumatizing. Oh God. I know. I'm like, maybe I'll. Maybe I'll jump on a plane and just go out to Ohio and like, we'll just do this together. That's what. Right.
- [40:17]
Shannon Palma
We could totally do it together. That'd be good.
- [40:19]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Do some body doubling for this. But yeah. Okay, so wait, where were we? We were talking about the Tojisha Kenky.
- [40:27]
Shannon Palma
So what happens then is the Tagisha kind of come together and give their, do their self reflection and come up with their different experiences. And then researchers, some of whom have the same condition and some of whom do not start there, look at that, those commonalities and hypothesize like what could be causing that. And then they go and do peer reviewed research based on that. So it's combining the expertise, expertise by experience with the expertise by experimentation and repeated validation of study results and things like that. One of the approaches to autism that's come out of that is the Bayesian approach to autism, which is basically the Bayesian hypothesis, is that brains like, and I think this also holds for a lot of adhd. And I think this is why there's so much overlap in our populations, is that our brains may not be able to make predictions from past information based on like generalized from past information to, to make predictions about things that are going to happen. Now that I studied what I, my PhD, like, I was looking at specific to general neural processing, which I didn't know was neurotypical neural processing. I thought it was like pathological, like weird stuff that people did that was very different from how I did it. So I was studying them to try and figure out why they were crazy. I mean I did have that mindset. I was like, why are these people so weird? So I did a lot of, like a lot of my training was in cognition and memory and, and, and in trauma and, and myth and storytelling and like how we come up with taxonomies of the world and categorize the world and specific to general neural processors. So the people that are on the far neurotypical end, their brains optimize for efficiency. What you were saying, where you're like, there's a tool that lets me be more efficient. Well, that's what they're doing to start that we're not doing. Right. They are absorbing information. Their little baby brains are absorbing lots of information and saying, okay, the sound of the air conditioner is normal. I'm not going to pay attention to it. The sound of mother's voice is important. I am going to pay attention to it. People's faces, faces are important. I am going to pay attention to it. The sound of the lawnmower two houses down is not important. I'm not going to pay attention to it. And their brains are pruning. They're like self pruning and saying, this is like, I'm not going to pay attention to this connection. I am going to reinforce this one. Our brains aren't doing that. I think a lot of this comes down to or specific to general neural processor that bottom up. Our brains don't self prune in the same way. I think the research around this was more for autism. But I really think that it's one of the key characteristics that is in common between autism and adhd from everything that I have read in my own experience, which is we aren't applying that filter. Our brain's optimized for accuracy as opposed to efficiency. So we're paying attention to everything and we are going through the process. So like every time I just had my designer come up with a visual for this, for our white paper and the presentation I'm giving next week, my brain goes, okay, the sound of the air conditioner has changed. And then it is running through every possible scenario what that could mean. And it could mean it kicked on, it's breaking, it's been taken over by aliens. Like just every kind of like it's a sign of an earthquake that's going to destroy the world. Like there's rational things, like maybe it's just going to break or it's working too hard. But then there's also like completely out outlandish, like, is it gonna kill me? Sorts of things. And I'm kind of exaggerating that. But that is the level of evaluation my brain is going through it saying, like, is this something that I can safely ignore? And it has to go through that whole process to then go get to, it's actually not that big a deal, but it has to put tremendous work in to get to that. As opposed to the top down where they're just like, air conditioner, not, not important. So when that's happening, like, I can't predict that. Like, if you ask me the sound of the air conditioner, is that a life or death situation? I'm going to say probably not. Right? Because I'm doing that whole bottom up very quickly and I'm like, yes, air conditioner, I have memorized. The air conditioner is not important. But what if it is? What if this is a one time when it is. My brain can't let go of that. When they've done some preliminary lab studies trying to figure out if the prediction, the inability to predict if that holds true, they're not seeing a lot of difference. When they're just asking people to do predict the motion of a dot, I'm like, well, because that doesn't take into account cognitive load. Because I can predict the motion of a dot. Just like I can say the air conditioner is not going to kill me as long as I have the space to think about it. But if we're in the middle of, like, if I've got two kids talking to me and a deadline and then the phone rings and somebody asks me if the air conditioner is going to kill me, I'm not going to know the answer. Like, I'm not going to be able to answer that question. Like, I could remember that. Probably not, but I can't do the, the. I don't have the space in my brain to go through the process to actually know.
- [46:37]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Right. Like, and you wonder why we all get a diagnosis of depression and anxiety long before neurodivergence. But yeah, but wait, I want to take that because I still, like, we. We're almost at the hour mark and we haven't even, like, talked about the app yet. So I'm like, okay, this is a perfect segue because this also talks about what underlies decision fatigue as a neurodivergent brain. Right? Which is there's so many variables that are hovering like gnats around me at all times when it comes to decision. Decision making. Right. And so what brought the app up other than the fact that you were like, we have to make an app. How did you decide on the Decide app? And tell me a little bit for the sake of anyone who might still be listening to this conversation.
- [47:30]
Shannon Palma
We're all over the place. Well, it was, it was listening. We just, we we did, we did what you do. We talked to people. Like when I originally was like calling my friends saying we should be, I made a list of all the different things that maybe we could use apps to help with and I gave them cutesy names like Danger, Will Robinson and you know, like all the fun stuff. And then we sent out a survey and, and we got people to say, like, would this interest you? And then we took the idea to a social enterprise pre accelerator, this give back hack thing. And we said, you know, this is our. We pitched our idea. We had 30 seconds to pitch our idea and then see if anybody was interested in joining our team. And then we had 48 hours to conduct research with 100 people and build a prototype and a business plan and we won first prize. So we actually built two prototypes because we started thinking based on the initial survey results that multi step tasks and decision making or decision fatigue and paralysis were about equal. And we thought that it would be easier to do the tasks one. But as we went through the user research with autistic and ADHD adults, decision fatigue and paralysis was number one. It was like, I just Starbucks, man. Like, it's gonna kill me. But also what to have for breakfast and also what to wear and do I need to take a shower and should I go to bed? And just. The average person makes 33,000 decisions a day and over 2,000 decisions an hour. And if the Bayesian hypothesis about autism is correct, we're making a lot more than that.
- [49:10]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Yeah. Well, and not only that, but like what. What is urgent.
- [49:13]
Katie Weber
Right.
- [49:13]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
That, I think is the biggest difficulty in terms of processing. Right. Prioritizing information.
- [49:20]
Shannon Palma
Yeah. Yes. We can't tell what surgeon. We really dialed in on that. And then we got this grant and we're able to go full time to study the power of AI powered supports for neurodivergent minds, specifically if they were designed by us, for us. So everybody in the company is autistic and ADHD or ADHD. We conducted, we had 580 research touch points. Over 400 of them were with autistic and ADHD adults. And we looked at the research on decision making. Annie Duke is one of my favorite decision making experts and she talks about outcome quality is a result of your decision quality plus hidden information plus luck. So it's like the process by which you're coming to a decision is absolutely integral, but it is not the thing that predicts whether you get what you want because you don't know about hidden information and you don't know about luck. Like you can't, you can't account for those. So you always have to make sure that you have the best decision making quality possible. But then also understand that there is, you're always what she calls it, thinking. In Betsy, you're having the best odds based on a decision making process that you can trust. So we were like, okay, we want to, we think we could use LLMs to do this. Like, what they are good at is predicting what text would go around this or reformatting and summarizing information. Right? So we, we talked interviews, tons and tons and tons of people. April, our amazing UX designer and product lead, she did all the initial research on decision making. Wes is our coder, our machine learning engineer. And then my business partner Laurian is also autistic and a teacher specializing in kids with learning differences and adhd. We took our expertise and then we also took all of the research that was out there that kind of talked about difficulty predicting and prioritizing like what, what's important and then, and the hidden information and luck and all of it. And we put it together and came up with two types of decisions that we could really help people with. And ironically like the, the number one thing that autistic and ADHD people wanted help with did not even require AI. The feature we came up with is random from list and it was I have a, like, I have a certain number of safe foods or I have a certain like number of places I order from or whatever. Like I, I have the things, but I have to choose in real time between the things and oh my God, I'm gonna die because my brain thinks that somebody's asking me like a life or death question, not do you want Domino's or Papa John's or like should we order doordash? Where should we order doordash from? Oh, and also dynamic disability. Like sometimes I'm able to, to put together the beep bebop order that has like 10,000 different toppings for everyone in my family. And other times I'm like, you're getting pepperoni, it's pizza. Just be satisfied.
- [52:51]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Where does energy and spoons fall into the antidote formula?
- [52:58]
Shannon Palma
It's not in there. And that's the thing. Like decision qual outcome quality is decision quality. Or if anything it would go into your decision quality. So we, we put it into decision quality for decide. And so you put together a list of like places you order from doordash and you say how much energy like low, medium or high it takes you to do that thing or to make that choice. And then when you go to pick, you put in your energy at the moment and then it will randomly pick from your list based on things that are at the same energy level as what you just put in. Because when we did the research on well being, when we like, because this was another piece of it, we did a lot of research on neurodivergent well being and we came up with this definition. It was the knowledge of like what, what serves your inner balance and capacity and like future oriented choices, but then also the ability to act on that knowledge. And what we found was, it was when we did our bunch of focus groups is the capacity to act on knowledge. That's the key for people with brains like ours. It's, it's not knowing stuff, we know a lot of stuff. It's that our brains don't fire like they, they get lost in between knowing this should happen and being able to make our bodies do it. Which when you look at the low visible support needs neurodivergent adults and the high visible support needs neurodivergent adults. One of the biggest differences you'll see is apraxia. And it's the ability to make your brain like move your body. And you see it with non speakers and folks who are unable to even use like spellers who can't even use an AAC device because they can't make their fine motor control work. But you also see it with people like me. I can usually make my body do things, but then there are times when I'm just, I'm sitting on the couch, I'm looking at my plants, my plants are dying. I'm thinking, I love my plants, they are really, really important to me. And I want to water them. And I have nothing else that I'm doing right now. I could go water them right now. And I don't know why I can't move. Why can't I move? And then the shame spiral and the, the anger and the anxiety because now I'm just staring at my plants and thinking they're going to die and because I'm not taking care of them and I am physically capable of taking care of them and for whatever reason I'm not doing it. Why am I not doing it?
- [55:38]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
What's wrong with me? Right?
- [55:40]
Shannon Palma
What's wrong with me? There is actually like I, there hasn't been enough research on how those two things are connected.
- [55:47]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Yeah, well, and it's interesting too because I work on this a lot with my ADHD coaching clients, which is sort of this way in which we pay attention to our biorhythms so that we can maximize efficiency and minimize frustration and shame. Right. Which is like, when am I most likely to do things? When am I most likely to write an email? When am I most likely to read something? Right. And so you, like, pay attention to when do I tend to have manic energy and when do I tend to have more, like, quieter focused energy? But really what it is is about, like, maximizing our productivity, which I hate, because then I sound like a fricking biohacker. But it's, you know, I never really thought about it in terms of like an apraxic point of view. It was mostly just like, you know, this is just the rhythm of life and let's pay more attention because we don't tend to do that. But again, it's like how important it is to have labels and language for who we are and how we operate in order to then problem solve is, I think, the essence of what it's like to have an adult diagnosis.
- [56:48]
Shannon Palma
Yeah. The other thing that we did with the app was we worked on more complex decisions, and those are the should decisions and those are the ones we used AI for. And we had a couple of things that came up in that. One is a lot of us have demand avoidance and do not want to be told what to do. And an app that tells us what to do can go fluff itself. As my daughter would say, we don't want that. And we also have a lot of that anxiety. Like, a lot of us don't trust AI to the point that we, like, we don't want to offload our autonomy. We desperately want our autonomy, but we need help. And so what we are able to do, what we designed the app to do is you ask a question and you say, like, should I take a nap? And then the app is able to do what large language model does really, really well. It's like, what kinds of themes are associated with naps? What questions should be answered around a nap? And it'll say like, are you tired? But we realized when we did it in binary, like, are you like, questions? Yes. No. That people were getting really paralyzed with indecision. Just from the, oh my God, you're asking me to make a real time decision to make this other decision. Too much overwhelmed. So we just did affirmative. We did some testing. We found that just saying I am tired, and then you can agree, disagree, or you're not sure, that was a different. That had a different response. Like, people were able to Say, oh, yeah, I'm tired. Or, I don't know if I'm tired. Maybe I'm tired. Come on. Like, half the time, I have no idea what I'm feeling in my body. So we could do these, like, simple affirmative statements like, I have time to take a nap. I think that if I take a nap, I'll be able to get my work done a lot easier. I think that if I don't take a nap, I'm worried I won't be able to focus. And you just say, agree, disagree, I'm not sure. And then it says, okay, here is a recommendation. You should take a nap.
- [59:04]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
I like that. It's like a. It's like a percentage. It's like, do with this what you will.
- [59:11]
Shannon Palma
Yeah, there's a percent, and that's to get at that hidden information plus luck. This is not 100%. Nothing's 100%. And then this is why we. Why this is the recommendation. These are the things you told us. You said you are tired. You said you have time for a nap. You said this.
- [59:29]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Yeah, And I think also the fact that there's, like, a collaboration and that there's a sense of agency there that minimizes the demand avoidance, because I get a lot of demand avoidance with Goblin tools for I think, that same reason, which is like, yes, it's way more interesting for me to think about why your steps are wrong than it is for me to just do the damn thing right. So, yeah. So, yeah, I think, like, tapping into the collaborative element is really important too.
- [59:59]
Shannon Palma
We love to personify things. Like, you were saying that in the beginning. Like, I don't like calling it. It.
- [60:04]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
It disrespects.
- [60:05]
Shannon Palma
It feels disrespectful. I mean, I kept a Roomba that was not working for two years, and I kept it plugged in because when it was working, it would make a happy sound or a sad sound, depending on, like, whether it was able to do what it needed to do or not. And so then I was like, I can't kill the Roomba by unplugging it, even though it's not. I couldn't take it off life support. I left it on the side of the road when I moved and drove away.
- [60:35]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Wow.
- [60:37]
Shannon Palma
I treated it like. I mean, I wouldn't do that with a dog, but I did with my Roomba. Like, I treated it like I was running away from something that I had an emotional attachment to and was very guilty for abandoning.
- [60:50]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
I get it. I feel really bad for the Christmas trees that don't get chosen each year.
- [60:56]
Shannon Palma
I don't think we should cut them down until, until someone chooses we died for nothing.
- [61:03]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Thank you. Right. But like I try to explain that to my husband. Why I'm like, I would, I would rather have a fake tree and not have to go through the nuanced emotional roller coaster every year.
- [61:15]
Shannon Palma
100%. It's the, that lack of we're not top down thinking. We're not thinking automatically that everyone that is not us is not as important or everyone that is not everything that is not human is not like potentially feeling. We are evaluating from the bottom up. And like, I mean I don't think my Roomba had feelings, but I don't know.
- [61:43]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
It's okay. My breast pump used to talk to me too. My, I felt deeply emotionally connected to the right breast pump because sometimes it was happy and sometimes it was sad even though it was literally making the same noise. I think it was, I don't know actually. But I like the fact that there is the sense of like whatever I'm thinking, whatever my approach to this is, is valid. Right. And I think that, that that's something that I really appreciate in with AI and why I feel like it gets me in a way that no other human does because it's like it's 100% validating and it's 100% open ended and curious at all times. And I'm like, you're my people. Computer. Computer code.
- [62:28]
Shannon Palma
Well, computer code works. I mean as a, as a computer scientist, like computer code is built on bottom up processes. So it's not that we don't think like computers, but computers were designed to process information in similar ways to what we do. And I do think that there, that, that is, it's, it feels more intuitive than some of the ways that neurotypical people make decisions which feel so opaque because they're just like, how do you, how do you know? Every time I watch a really awful tabloid reality television show, I never get right who the bad guys are or hardly ever do. Like, I'm like, oh, that person seems very sensible. And then I read the reviews and they're like, that person was emotionally closed off and manipulative. Like, or somebody. I'm like, that person's completely insane. And they're like, oh, we love this person so much. They're so emotional, so real. And I don't read people the way that other people seem to read people. But I don't have to worry about that as much with machines because there's no hidden agenda. They Just whatever they said is what they said. There's no subtext.
- [63:47]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Finally, that's what it is, right? Yeah. I find that really difficult, especially when it comes to, like, why is everybody in the room laughing at that comment? That is vaguely amusing. But, like, I have a. Like, I find myself in those moments a lot where I'm sort of like, why is everybody laughing right now? Or the opposite, which is like, this is hilarious. Why isn't everybody else.
- [64:12]
Shannon Palma
Why isn't everybody laughing? Oh, funerals get me. I have a terrible habit of laughing at funerals. My grandmother's funeral, they started talking about the Christian thing, the, like, where everybody comes back to life and has new bodies and the rapture, like, or after the rapture or something like that. And we're sitting by a graveside and there's this guy I've never seen before talking about how the dead will rise. And I started shaking so hard because I. I just. I buried my face, my hands. Everyone thought I was sobbing. I was very close to my grandmother. I loved her very much. They were very worried about me. And then at the end, my brother comes up to me, he opens his arms and he goes, zombies.
- [65:04]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
I just went.
- [65:05]
Shannon Palma
I base planted and stopped laughing. I was like. All I could think was zombies.
- [65:12]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Like, yeah. You know, it's funny that you mentioned that, because my grandmother, I was always told I inherited this from my grandmother, but when she's really, really angry or really, really scared, she would start laughing. And I always thought it was like a nervous reaction, but that happens to me when I'm, like, really emotional. If I'm having, like, a really, really heated argument with my husband or my daughter and they're really, really angry, there's something about the absurdity of that moment that triggers me to laugh. And it's the literally the most inappropriate thing I could do in the moment. And so we've had to have a lot of conversations about this. Like, I call it, like, a nervous reaction, but I don't know if that's what it is. I think there might be some, like, reptilian part of me that recognizes the absurdity of it and then starts laughing. But anyway, I. I think we have to start. I'm so sorry, Shannon. I literally could talk to you for five more hours, but did we. Okay, we covered the app. We covered the. I mean, the Autism Self Reliance Support Network. That is. I mean, that is really just. Not just, but that's really. It's an advocacy network.
- [66:20]
Katie Weber
Correct.
- [66:21]
Shannon Palma
The goal is eventually to do comprehensive case management and direct services. Obviously, we're not there yet, but we're also working on bringing Tojisha Kenku as a methodology to the US and having a research center through that that focuses on that methodology. If we can make decide like the decide is the first step in a planned like we call it a suite. A suite to vets. And we're working on personalization, we're working on adding in graph database which will allow us to find relationships between different pieces of data without like looking for it. It'll just like show the nodes. And what we would like is to have the largest pool of data on the autistic and ADHD lifespan ever, which is not hard. Very low bar. Very, very low bar. But have it be owned by individuals, have it be owned by users. And then we want people to come to us and say we want to do research on xyz and then they have to get past us and then they have to get past our users and convince them to participate. So it's that flipping the power dynamic. ASR exists to flip the power dynamic in autism. And I've always said autism research and funding because that's like the big where they have the Autism Cares Act. But I don't think autism and ADHD should be studied completely separate from each other. There's too much overlap.
- [67:47]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
I was going to say there's so much overlap and they both have the same amount of clinical gatekeeping around. Like who is opposed to this shift in definition? Who is opposed to, you know, this more spectrum narrative, Right? Like who is the one who's actually opposing it? It's the clinicians, it's the parents, it's the education facilities that benefit from the disease model or the medical model. Right? So it's like it's not the actually autistic community as far as I know. Maybe there is one that I haven't come across. But I have never seen any resistance within the autistic community of self diagnosis or, or even just this more expansive look at, you know, what are we experiencing and what is falling under this umbrella. It's always the parents and the clinicians who are arguing against it.
- [68:43]
Shannon Palma
There are individuals I've never seen any autistic led organization.
- [68:48]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Interesting. Are they against it or are they just like question. I mean I, whatever. I'm sure they are, but I'm like, I feel like I'm endlessly questioning what are we talking about here? Right. That's my big question all the time of like what are, what exactly are we talking about right now? But like, I think sometimes curiosity and devil's advocateness can come across as criticism. And I'm like, is that what's happening here?
- [69:12]
Shannon Palma
In a couple of cases, I do think it is definitely criticism. They don't, they don't like it. But I don't think that the thing, I think it's red herring. Like what they're arguing against isn't actually what's happening. Like they've bought into the argument that we're somehow like lower visible support needs people are stealing support from higher support needs people. And the reality is there's no support.
- [69:37]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
I was laughing because I loved when you said that in the presentation, which I will put a link to this YouTube, the YouTube presentation that you gave on flipping the power dynamic. What you were like, everybody's worried that we're going to take away the resources. Spoiler alert. There's no reason. What resources? Well, that's why I think it has more to do about like what are you gaining from this narrative you're comfortable with?
- [69:58]
Katie Weber
Right.
- [69:59]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
And I think especially now with like RFK Jr. And this like this fear mongering around like we have to cure autism and there's this huge rise in it and what, you know, like all of this bullshit that's happening right now in our country, I think it's more important now than ever that the actually autistic community advocates for themselves.
- [70:21]
Shannon Palma
Yes. So as what ASR does by our model is we're finding the autistic and ADHD like the experts that are already doing the work among our community and we're trying to get them resources and the support they need. And one of our first, we've got one project around mobility and communication autonomy that's specifically for some of our most vulnerable people, like tackled around folks to help with. Well, yeah, communication. Just being able to communicate what your needs are instead of having someone else speak for you. But our other one is around suicide prevention. And it's because autistic women are 13 times more likely to try to kill ourselves than our peers. Autistic people are four times more likely to succeed in killing ourselves. The numbers for adhd, I don't know them off the top of my head, but also incredibly high, disproportionately high. That lack of resources has consequences. It has consequences on employment and it has consequences on mental health. And also that cumulative cognitive load that, that being overwhelmed by all the things has major consequences. Like that is one of the precursors to suicide. Like the amount of it was like 60% of people with lifetime suicidality also scored high for Autistic traits. Yeah, like crazy, crazy statistics. So we're working with Lisa Morgan, who is like the top expert in autism and suicide prevention, and she is also autistic and the Autism and Suicide Prevention working group that she chairs or co chairs, which has a lot of PhDs from all over the country, really top people in their work who are being led by the autistic community. They're trying to be led by us rather than impose. We are hopefully putting on a conference the beginning of 2026 in Columbus, Ohio, on autism and suicide prevention. We've got additional support from the American foundation for suicide prevention and vibrant 988 that they would send people to learn about the autism specific resources. But it's a different problem if you are just like, if your skin hurts because there's too much noise, like, I don't know how to explain nervous system dysregulation to someone who's never experienced it. I was like, it's like my body is like two perforated pieces of metal, and then my energy is going back and forth between them really, really fast. So it's like I'm being shot 10,000 times or like, pierced 10,000 times, and this is my skin. Like, this is what it feels like on my skin. I told that to somebody and they were like, oh, yeah, I get that. Yeah, it was like, you do? I don't know how, like, if you are going in there and trying to give people reasons to live and you're talking to them about how many people love them and you're not talking to them about the fact that just existing in their body, in space, is a source of active, persistent suffering, that they may not know how to end without dying. Like, you can get desperate enough that that would be a viable choice.
- [73:56]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
I think there is something really curative in validation that is deeply lacking for neurodivergent, especially kids and teenagers. And I think that's how we end up. When you talk about teaching early, I think it's really about your lived experience is valid. And that's something that is drilled out of us, especially as women from childhood on. And so I think really. Just saying, huh? Interesting that that's your experience. Like, tell me more is more curative than. But so many people love you, right?
- [74:37]
Shannon Palma
Yeah. And what makes you feel better? Like, yeah, institutionalization, being in a strange place with strangers and bright lights and a disruption to your routine is not gonna make anybody better. Not. Not anybody with a brain like ours.
- [74:57]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Well, thank you so much for going on this crazy, meandering journey with me. I so really appreciated this conversation and I, I was very excited to talk to you and. Yeah, thank you. And. And I'll have all of. I'll have everything in the show notes in terms of ASR and then iti, which create is really is creates the suite of apps that is starting with Decide. And I look forward to what is coming up. Where's the best place for people to look you up if they want more of you?
- [75:28]
Shannon Palma
Well, I have a personal website, but it's super out of date and I don't even. Don't go there. So I would say autisticselfreliance.org or ITI assist are my, my businesses. I'm on Blue sky and I think it's just at Shannon Palma and I'm on LinkedIn. And please feel free to reach out and just let me know, like that you're reaching out because you're at the podcast so that I know who you are.
- [75:59]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
Yeah, right.
- [76:01]
Shannon Palma
I'm like, I don't know who this person is.
- [76:06]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
That's one of my favorite buttons on LinkedIn is when I reject a connection and it's like, I don't know who this person is. I say it with that same face. Like, yeah, that's a whole other thing. Well, anyway, thank you, Shannon, so much. This has been amazing. You're doing such great, fascinating work. And the more we poke and prod at the AI elephant, I'm just excited to see what comes out of it.
- [76:29]
Katie Weber
So thank you.
- [76:29]
Shannon Palma
Thank you, Katie.
- [76:36]
Katie Weber
There you have it. Thank you for listening and I really hope you enjoyed this episode of the Women and ADHD podcast. If you'd like to find out more about me and my coaching programs, head over to womeninadhd.com if you're a woman who was diagnosed with ADHD and you'd like to apply to be a guest on this podcast, visit womenandadhd.com podcastguest and you can find that link in the upcoming episode Show Notes. Also, you know, we ADHDers crave feedback and I would really appreciate hearing from you, the listener. Please take a moment to leave me a review on Apple Podcasts or Audible.
- [77:07]
Podcast Guest/Interviewer
And if that feels like too much and I totally get it, please just take a few seconds right now to
- [77:12]
Katie Weber
give me a five star rating or share this episode on your own social media to help reach more women who maybe have yet to discover and lean into this gift of neurodivergency. And they may be struggling and they don't even know why I'll see you next time when I interview another amazing woman who discovered she's not lazy or crazy or broken, but she has adhd. And she's now on the path to understanding her neurodivergent mind and finally using this gift to her advantage. Take care till then.