I Got My ADHD Accommodations for Law School. Now I Want Everyone to Get Them.

Here’s the audio version of this that I recorded to make this post if you’re interested:

I just got diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. I’m 54 years old. I’m a first year law student. And every part of that is interesting to me. Like every part.

But the point of this isn’t to tell you my personal story. Everything I do in this space is advocacy work. And what I’ve found is that going to law school to help homeless people accidentally turned me into an advocate for something I didn’t see coming. Among other things, the fight for accommodations in higher education.

This is probably a message to younger people. But if you’re any age and you’re suffering in a high-pressure academic environment, keep reading.

I hang out on Reddit at the law school subreddits and man, there is suffering in there. A lot of suffering.

The research is clear. Lawyers have one of the highest rates of depression, suicide, and addiction of any professional specialty. I can’t speak to med school. But I can tell you honestly: I have never had more suicidal thoughts in my life than I’ve had since I started law school.

It’s not just the academics. It’s the fear-based system the whole thing lives inside.

The curve.

You don’t get an A by knowing the material well enough. You get an A by beating out your classmates. So it’s an automatic system of rivalry. You hoard information from office hours. You think twice before sharing. They post class rank publicly. And then the administration runs a constant stream of terror-induced conversations about academic integrity designed to make you feel like you’re one wrong move from getting kicked out.

It is outrageous. And it’s unnecessary.

You don’t need to terrify law students as a special little extra gift. The practice of law speaks for itself. It’s a challenging discipline. It requires deep study. You don’t have to filter people out by manufacturing artificial psychological warfare on top of already hard material.

ADHD

But what I really want to talk to you about is attention deficit. What it actually is, and how I’ve come to feel about the accommodations I now get because of it.

In adults, ADHD doesn’t look like a kid bouncing off the walls. It looks like difficulty sustaining attention on routine or boring tasks. Easily distracted by external stimuli or unrelated thoughts. Frequently losing things. Keys, phone, wallet. Trouble following through even when you start with good intentions. Hyperfocus on the things that DO engage you, which is the flip side of the inattention. Working memory problems. I can walk out of a law class and feel like I never even went. Nothing in my brain. I walk around in a haze of “oh look at the pretty flowers, there’s a picture of a dog.” To dig anything up I have to go back into my hard drive and pull it out. It’s in there. It’s just really hard to keep it in front of me.

Then there’s impulsivity. Quick to frustration, excitement, irritability. Mood swings that feel disproportionate. Racing thoughts especially at night. And rejection sensitive dysphoria, which is intense reaction to perceived criticism or failure.

Now, I can imagine someone without attention deficit reading this and going, “oh poor baby, you don’t like doing boring things.” Listen. I don’t just dislike boring things. I don’t DO boring things. Do you understand the difference? Or if I do, I have to exert so much discipline that it wrings me out into complete exhaustion. That’s how I have lived my entire life.

I always assumed that’s how everyone lives. I’m a middle-aged white Generation X guy. I know how to suck it up. I’m like, “Hey man, boring shit sucks. Welcome to the club.” But now that I have this thing, I’m like, “Oh. Is it possible that I actually find boring things harder than the average person does?” Apparently yes. The research backs it up.

Bright but scattered is genuinely common. Many people with ADHD have strong fluid intelligence, creative thinking, and rapid associative reasoning. The same brain wiring that makes sustained focus on low-interest tasks difficult also tends to produce divergent thinking, which is my specialty. The ability to make unexpected connections all day long. That’s my superpower. Hyperfocus is real. When something genuinely engages me, the intensity is remarkable.

The reason I almost wanted to quit, the reason I was having those suicidal thoughts, was an academic integrity situation in my first semester.

I was accused of plagiarism. I proved I didn’t plagiarize. I showed them the conversations I’d had with my assigned study group, the group I was instructed to share research with. I’d finished the memo ten days before it was due. Nobody else had even written theirs.

Then the conclusion wasn’t “you’re cleared.” The conclusion was, “well, you did overshare.”

The instructions said share your research. That was all we were given. I’m a 1L in my first semester. I’m supposed to magically figure out that “share your research” has invisible lines around it? In a system where we’re all already eating each other alive?

It felt like one of those scenarios where they tell a woman that if she didn’t want to get raped maybe she shouldn’t have dressed that way. I thought we were talking about plagiarism. Well, we were. But then when you proved you didn’t plagiarize, NOW we see you overshared. I was told to share my research. I shared my research.

I cannot express to you how catastrophic the emotional response was for me.

What I’ve learned since the diagnosis is that rejection sensitive dysphoria, one of the signatures of ADHD, makes that kind of hit land at a completely different magnitude than it does for other people.

I’m a very passionate person. The emotional response wasn’t weakness. It was real.

My diagnosis report says, and I’ll just read it: “Sage was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The diagnosis was made using patient reports, diagnostic criteria, and standardized questions including the ASRS Adult Self-Report Scale. The evaluation also screened the patient for major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. The patient did meet the criteria for both.”

So I got the trio. ADHD, depression, anxiety. They travel together. Each one amplifies the others.

Through the STARS accommodations process at my school I now get 50% extended test time, testing in a distraction-reduced space, an audio recorder, technology-based note-taking, and copies of the instructor’s materials. I also get free access to a tool called Genio. It’s an AI-powered audio note-taking app that records the class, organizes my notes, and creates quizzes for me from the recording.

These are good tools. They are powerful tools.

So you take a person who is bright. You give them all this extra stuff. And then you put them in a situation where they’re competing directly with their peers in an artificially induced curve scenario where there are only three A’s, mostly B’s, and the rest are C’s, D’s, and F’s.

I don’t understand how this is fair. That’s what I’m getting at.

I just got my midterm grade back. I got 42 out of 50. The class average was 34. I’m pretty sure 42 was one of the highest scores in the class. And I also got 50% extra time.

Take a neurotypical student. Quiet. Steady. Working hard. Maybe not on fire with passion but doing everything right. And then put them in direct curve-based competition with someone who has 50 years of discipline, hyperfocus as a superpower, deep emotional drive, AND who now also gets extra time and AI-powered study tools.

Sage wrecking ball. Sage enters the room with his accommodations. I will out-study you because I’m obsessed to the point of madness. It’s not that I’m smarter than you. It’s just that I’m crazier than you. And now I get 50% extra time.

Something is wrong with that picture. Either me getting these accommodations is wrong, or other people not getting them is wrong.

I lean strongly toward the second one. I almost want to donate my stuff to those students. There are people in my part-time class who have an hour commute, work in a downtown office all day, every day, and have little three kids and a spouse. How the hell is that easier than what I have going on? I think everybody should get extended time. I think everybody should get access to tools like Genio. The curve already turns law school into a zero-sum competition. Layering accommodation disparities on top of that doesn’t fix inequality. It just redistributes it.

I’m not saying I don’t need the accommodations. I do. I’m not saying I don’t have a problem. I have a lot going on. I run a company called SageRock. I run a charity. I take a camper out to homeless people. I’ve built a dozen apps in the last few months because of AI. I’m in law school. And, and, and. This is how I have to live. Everything about me is go hard. Constantly. I’m on Citalopram just to calm it down a little.

But here’s what I want you to do. THIS IS MY MESSAGE TO YOU: If you’re in a high-pressure academic environment and you’re struggling, take a real inventory of what you have.

Things that commonly qualify for accommodations: ADHD. Dyslexia and dysgraphia. Dyscalculia (less common in law school). Anxiety and mood disorders, including depression. Autism spectrum. Trauma and PTSD. Hearing impairments. Chronic physical conditions like Lupus, MS, epilepsy, diabetes, migraines.

Find one of those, then go online and search for organizations that help create documentation for accommodations. There are sliding scale evaluations specifically for students. You may be surprised what you qualify for.

Do some inner soul searching. Do you have depression? Anxiety? PTSD or unprocessed trauma? You might.

We’re all screwed up. We’re all screwed up. That’s not weakness. That’s just being human.

This is absurd. The law school environment is absurd and cruel and inhumane and it just needs to end. There’s no point in the way they treat us. It’s abhorrent. Learning the law is enough. You don’t need all this trauma-induced bullshit. I believe it’s just one long hazing experiment.

I love learning the law. I love my teachers, I love all of that.

I can’t say enough how much I hate the environment of law school.

But until something changes: get accommodations, people. The system is rigged. It’s always been rigged. Play the game.

I love you.

Sage