:: Neurodivergent faculty play an important role in supporting neurodivergent students on campus. At a time when mental health has come to the forefront and is finally receiving the attention it deserves from institutions, supporting neurodivergent faculty is more important than ever.
If you work in higher education, you have neurodivergent colleagues in your department and across your institution—likely far more than you know. Most neurodivergent (ND) faculty keep their neurodivergence secret, or at least to share it with acquaintances, for fear of stigma, that is, the discrimination against ND people because of irrational fear of undesirable behavior such as irresponsibility, instability, or violence .
Before she was diagnosed with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at the age of 36, Geraldine Kalim, Reference and Instructional Services Librarian at University of Baltimore Law Library, thought she “just suffered from a random assortment of weaknesses, shortcomings, sensitivities, and idiosyncrasies.” She blamed herself for all of her mistakes and failings. But then, she told me, “One night, I randomly came across a Twitter thread in which adult women were detailing their experiences with ADHD (and, at the time, problems with medication shortages ).” Reading these stories had a powerful effect on Kalim: “I was sobbing, reading these accounts, realizing their experiences with ADHD and related diagnoses were telling me the story of my own life.”
After Kalim reached out to medical professionals and was diagnosed, and with the help she gained because of her diagnosis, she recognized her “mistakes” and “shortcomings” were not her fault at all. Her career thrived.
Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark, Director of Faculty Professional Development at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told me how she “struggled with generalized anxiety disorder” for her entire life. She said, “I wasn’t properly diagnosed until graduate school” when her panic attacks grew serious. And even now, “with proper medical support, the anxiety breaks through in times of stress.” Anxiety disorders can be debilitating and isolating, as Pope-Ruark recounts: “I can’t count how many times I’ve stood in empty stairwells, heart pounding, sweating, trying to breathe, just deciding where to eat lunch after a really hard class or if I had enough strength to go to a meeting.” But Pope-Ruark sought help: “Routines and a good therapist have saved me over and over.”
Do we want our neurodivergent colleagues hiding in stairwells, afraid to ask for help? The correct answer, by the way, is “No.”
Like others, I define neurodiversity broadly, as normal variations in human neurological function, emphasis on normal. If you are unfamiliar with this broad definition, you can think of neurodiversity as three categories: developmental neurodivergences like autism and ADHD, mental illnesses like anxiety disorders and depression, and acquired mental disabilities like PTSD and brain fog.
Other normal human variations include height and hair color. But unlike most other normal human variations, neurodivergence is penalized—that is, stigmatized. (There are other normal variations that are also penalized, which you can think of without much effort.)
The only real fix for the stigma faced by neurodivergent faculty is for institutions to embrace neurodiversity. Many institutions are taking positive steps in this direction—but most can use some guidance (or a kick in the pants). In the meantime, neurodivergent faculty can take steps to make careers in higher education more sustainable for us.
Here, I give advice for neurodivergent faculty and for the institutions who must do more to support them. This advice comes from personal experience (I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 21 and autism at age 43) and my professional work (I’ve been researching and writing about mental health, neurodiversity, and disability for more than fifteen years).
As ND faculty, do not feel pressure to disclose your neurodivergence. As institutions, do not pressure ND faculty to disclose. Because neurodivergence is stigmatized, neurodivergent faculty—that is, anyone who is responsible for the education of students—frequently keep their neurodivergence secret in order to protect ourselves against mistreatment. We do not have a duty to disclose our neurodivergences in order to help the community or be leaders for students. Being ND faculty can be hard enough.
Some of us do have the strength to disclose and serve as ND campus leaders. Institutions should support and protect those faculty because what they are doing is powerful community service.
For example, Kalim told me, “I am open with colleagues and with students and disclose if it makes sense in context.” She discloses to students because she wants to support her ND students as much as she can—because she did not have that support. She told me, “So much of my education was spent experiencing these challenges but not having a label for them, thus not knowing I could have been better supported. I want something better for today’s students.”
Institutions can support faculty who choose to disclose their neurodivergences and who in turn support neurodivergent students by, for example, paying them to be advisors to ND students, creating ND student support groups and paying ND faculty to supervise them, and giving ND faculty course releases to run ND student organizations.
As ND faculty, pay attention to signs of burnout. According to Pope-Ruark, a well-known burnout expert and author of Unravelling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal, “occupational burnout is a stress-induced syndrome caused by chronic workplace stress.” As Pope-Ruark told me in an interview, “When you are constantly stressed about how to fit in and do your job as a neurodivergent person in a neurotypical world, it can be constant stress with serious consequences.” In other words, neurodivergent people are more prone to stress, anxiety, and burnout.
One reason neurodivergent people are more prone to burnout is because of the stress of masking. Masking, also known as social camouflaging, is when a neurodivergent person hides their neurodivergent traits to protect themselves and make neurotypical people feel more comfortable. Masking is frequently associated with autism because autistic people have led the way in teaching the world about masking; we now know that all neurodivergent people mask. The stress of masking can cause anxiety, depression, and suicide.
What can neurodivergent faculty do to help with burnout? Pope-Ruark has a four-part approach: “knowing and pursuing your purpose, acting with (self-)compassion, connecting with others and what you value, and finding a level of balance that works for you.” (You can learn more about this approach in her book.) But, she told me, “the conditions that cause burnout are not individual—they are social and cultural—so we need to be advocating for more humane working conditions.”
So what can institutions do to support neurodivergent faculty?
Institutions must embrace neurodiversity. Embracing neurodiversity means many things: acceptance of neurodivergence, which helps get rid of stigma; accessibility, which allows neurodivergent people to participate in our communities; and inclusion, which actively brings neurodivergent into our communities.
Institutions can do so by creating support programs, clubs and collectives, and educational programs not just for students (who also need these supports), but for faculty as well.
Institutional leadership for these intitiatives are needed because of the stigma that neurodivergent faculty face: creating a neurodivergent program to support themselves and others means that a faculty must publicly disclose their neurodivergence while asking for institutional support that might not be given. If the institution makes the overture, then faculty members know that the support is already there—as well as acceptance, hopefully.
One such support program is the THRIVE program at the Kansas City University College of Dental Medicine. THRIVE is a two-day immersion program focused on building wellness, resilience, and a connected community among students, faculty, and staff—with a focus on mental health. I spoke with Dr. Erinne Kennedy, the school’s Assistant Dean for Curriculum and Integrated Learning. She told me, “In designing this program, we learned that the program that was used to benefit our students ended up benefiting our neurodivergent faculty members as well.”
The program is personal to Kennedy because of her own experience with neurodiversity in higher education, as she shared with me: “As someone who has struggled with anxiety, I was connected to THRIVE because of my own journey being a student in higher education, becoming a clinician, and then joining higher education as an administrator.” She wanted to use her own experiences to improve the lives of her students and colleagues: “It was my use of organizational resources including therapy and other wellness benefits throughout my career, that stirred a passion for wanting to provide this foundation to all students.”
Kennedy emphasized that a broad definition of neurodiversity at the institutional level is needed to ensure that we can eradicate stigma for all of our community members. She said, “When a broad definition of neurodiversity, we create umbrella of an acceptance and a common language that allows us to communicate effectively and reduce the stigma that has been associated with neurodiversity for decades.”
Institutions must recognize that front-line faculty (FLF) who are neurodivergent are at an even greater risk of burnout. FLF are faculty who have close contact with students and are therefore in a position to notice—and do something about—students’ mental health struggles. Faculty frequently end up on the front lines because of institutional pressures related to race or other marginalized status, being female, and therefore seen as “nurturing,” and giving a teaching load of small, introductory courses like freshman composition where students are able to form closer bonds with them. Front-line faculty are the people that students turn to most, yet they are frequently the least supported faculty on campus. Front-line faculty who are neurodivergent must be extra careful of their own mental health.
Front-line faculty carry the immense burden of tending to students’ mental health. They are greater risk of burnout, depression, and anxiety. These faculty have expressed the need more institutional support , but institutions aren’t doing enough. For example, they could provide course releases for faculty who have extended office hours for student mental health. They could provide financial support, smaller class sizes, and relieved service duties.
My research has shown that neurodivergent faculty play an important role in supporting neurodivergent students on campus. At a time when mental health has come to the forefront and is finally receiving the attention it deserves from institutions, supporting neurodivergent faculty is more important than ever.
As Geraldine Kalim shared with me, when she first started sharing her neurodivergence with students, she was afraid it would undermine her credibility as a teacher. But the opposite was true. In fact, she said, doing so “actually presented opportunities to build trust with students, to find common ground, and even to chat about and brainstorm pedagogical techniques with each other. And to destigmatize, together.”
