Clinical Round Table 21 - Transforming ADHD Assessments: How to Provide Culturally Responsive and Trauma-informed Assessments for Youth with ADHD

This round table focuses on how a team of Black, Indigenous, and/or Latiné mental health clinicians developed and provided culturally responsive and trauma informed psychodiagnostic assessments for youth with suspected attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Currently, gold-standard ADHD assessments include parent and teacher report, while missing important information from self-report, particularly for Black and Latiné youth whose experiences are excluded from much of the research. In addition, the prevalence rate of trauma exposure is steadily increasing, with 100% of the adolescents with whom we serve reporting at least 1 trauma exposure. During this roundtable, clinicians, researchers, and educators who work with families from systemically oppressed backgrounds will benefit from understanding how to reflect on their own potential biases, how to perform a culturally responsive assessment, and what to include in this type of assessment. Culturally responsive assessments should include assessment of context (e.g., Chicagoland policies, neighborhood cohesiveness), strengths, and multiple forms of trauma. All ADHD assessments should include interviews or questionnaires related to oppression-based trauma, complex trauma, chronic trauma, and developmental trauma disorder. We will discuss 1) how to incorporate oppression-based trauma (e.g., racism, ageism, ableism) and developmental trauma into ADHD assessments, 2) how to value the lived experiences of adolescents with ADHD and their parents, and 3) how to incorporate discrimination and trauma information into an integrated report and treatment recommendations. Audience members will leave with concrete goals to use what they learned in their own research and practice.