Ken Huey 0:00

Welcome to The Voice of Hope, where bold leaders and healers share how they're building hope, not just talking about it. I'm Dr. Ken Huey. Let's meet the change makers transforming lives from the therapy room to the boardroom. Hello. Today's guest is Dr. Perry LaRock. He's the founder of Mansfield Hall and a leading advocate for neurodiverse learners. He's dedicated his career to making college more accessible, inclusive, and meaningful for students with disabilities. He's also the author of Taking Flight Guide to College for Diverse Learners. Perry, thanks very much for being with us. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me, Ken. I appreciate it. Yeah. So always find I'm fascinated to find out how people landed where they are. What's your why, if you will? Why do this?

Perry LaRoque 0:45

Yeah. Well, when you mentioned that this was going to be one of the questions, I thought to myself, it's always one of those things where there's supposed to be a short answer, but it's actually a long answer. So I'll give you the long answer, but I'll try to make it short. Uh I come from a long line of educators and was, I grew up at a summer camp, literally, and was around children and teachers and educators and counselors my whole life, and really was interested in going into the education field and just was not as motivated or interested in working with the students who didn't need the level of support that traditional schools could meet. And so I was just always much more interested in being challenged and working with those students that didn't fit the mold. And so my like probably my seminal experience was I was worked at a wonderful organization in Tucson, Arizona. I took some time off of college and spent a semester working with adults with developmental disabilities. And that was sort of my first foray into the field. And it just to me, being able to work with people who just saw the world from a different perspective to me was really just enthralling. So I did my actually my undergrad in special education, and I was a special education teacher, and it was in the public schools for a while. And then I served as a special education teacher at a residential psychiatric hospital, and then ended up becoming a professor after doing my doctorate at University of Wisconsin. And as a professor, I started seeing all of these kids falling through the cracks. I mean, just amazing, brilliant kids that just weren't meeting the demands of university. And it wasn't that they weren't bright enough or smart enough or didn't have enough ambition. It was just that the system wasn't built for them. And it just became passionate about that. And over my career, this concept of like social justice around people with disabilities really became something core to just sort of my being. And Mansfield Hall was one of the first adventures in this world of improving services for people with disabilities.

Ken Huey 2:52

Right. You've spent a lot of years then helping students who were often overlooked by traditional systems. How closely do those educational struggles correlate with mental health challenges?

Perry LaRoque 3:06

Yeah, you can't you really can't pull them apart. I mean, there's a lot in education and in behavioral sciences that you can't pull apart, right? And it's like the chicken or the egg questions. And I think that certainly when you have students who are struggling, it can create mental health challenges. And I think mental health challenges can create educational problems and they they work in tandem. And so oftentimes what we look at from all the programs that I work with is just like looking at the needs based and understanding what is it that the person needs. And sometimes they need more academic support in order to support their mental health challenges, but sometimes they need more mental health support to help their academic challenges.

Ken Huey 3:49

Okay. There's warning signs usually. Your type of a client, their parents are watching what's going on with them. What are the warning signs that they typically miss when there's a mental health concern with their kids at college?

Perry LaRoque 4:04

Yeah, college is tricky. I was actually just doing a presentation here recently where we were really talking with a lot of caregivers and stakeholders, therapists, and university professionals about what those warning signs looked at look like. And I try to emphasize to people is that when students are transitioning from high school or secondary to post-secondary, we go from a place where we wrap support around them and they're in our vicinity. Like we can reach out to them, we can grab them, we can tell that we can check on them, we can read their mood, we can get them the help that they need, we can bring them the help that they need. The problem when a student transitions to university is that we don't have that anymore. We don't have the team. And if we have a team, it's generally remote. Universities don't create a team for a student who might have mental health challenges or autism or learning diversities. And so either the student has to create that team around them or the parent has to create that team around them. But still we have a problem with tracking that student down, with meeting their needs. And so oftentimes identifying when a student is struggling has to come from them. Like they have to be self-aware enough that they are able to be able to speak out and say, hey, I'm struggling. Because what we find is a lot of students don't have that self-advocacy paired up with self-awareness to be able to go out and say, hey, I'm really struggling. And so we as caregivers then have to try to be the spies and the sluice the best we can to look for those warning signs. And they're different for everybody. I mean, isolation, I think, for a lot of students is one of those first signs where they start to isolate a lot more. But I'll tell you, a lot of students, when they're struggling, they put on their best face. I mean, that's that issue of masking. When things are going wrong, we start to see students, that's when it's hardest to tell almost because they're going to play it the best because they don't want people to know that they're struggling or they find shame in the struggle. And so, I mean, I think for parents, having that open line of communication and as many people around that individual as possible to be able to look for those warning signs, to be able to say, hey, they're not showing up to classes, they're not turning in their work, but they're really struggling, they're depressed, they're isolating without having that window into their world, it's a lot harder for us to know it. And so part of the work happens well before they get to university, teaching them to self-advocate, teaching them to ask for help when they need to, encouraging them to reach out to people when they can, so that when they're in university, they're not relying on us to help them figure that out.

Ken Huey 6:36

Okay. So they start doing a little bit better. Mansfield Hall supports education, independent living, mental health, all of this. When confidence and mental health start to improve, what do you see happening relative to where they've been?

Perry LaRoque 6:52

Yeah. Well, we have the joy at Mansfield Hall. I mean, and it really is the joy of my career because we knew this was the right thing to do. I knew it was the right model. We knew it was going to work. We knew it was right. I'll just say we knew it was right to give these students this opportunity. And we're working with a group of students who are on the autism spectrum or have something that's similar to the autism, social communication challenges. The students are college capable at the community college level, up to the university level. We have a range. But what's wonderful is that these students are generally marginalized. Many are bullied. Many of them don't really find their tribe. So we have this joy of when they walk into Mansfield Hall for the first time to see this group of people around them that's supportive and accepting and open, that you really see them having this ability to be able to thrive in a place where they feel safe and accepted. And so we have that joy of being able to give them that piece of feeling accepted and being around people that can commiserate with them and can empathize with them. But when we start to see students, Wayne will also work with students who have failed out or have taken some time off of college because it wasn't working and come back to us. And generally, what we see students, they have this shame spiral, this failure spiral that they're in, where they see that their efforts haven't paid off, that they are frustrated with their life, that they doubt that they're going to have that self-determination that they were looking with. And when we start just to give them that hope back, when we start to help build them up in a sequential way of giving them a little bit at a time, they're able to engage in the world and give back to the world in ways that they didn't imagine before. And we see that every year. And we require all of our students to volunteer for this reason alone, is because we want them to be in a place of not only being able to be happy and comfortable with themselves, but to be able to share their unique challenges and their unique perspectives and their unique strengths with the people around them.

Ken Huey 8:57

Yeah. Anxiety and depression are really common among young adults today. What's going on? Why do you think this stage of life has become so mentally challenging for so many of our youngsters?

Perry LaRoque 9:10

Yeah. I mean, that that is the million-dollar question, right? I mean, I love Jonathan Hayes' stuff around how social media is impacting us. But I think it's bigger than that. I have kids myself, social media and computer technology, addiction, all that stuff. That's been something that we've dealt with with Mansfield Hall from the beginning. But as a parent, seeing my kids start to enter into that world, I feel like it's come a long way over the past decade, but we're still seeing this huge amount of anxiety. And so I have guesses. I mean, one is that I feel like we're encouraging people to talk about their feelings more. And I do think that's a wonderful thing. And so I think whereas people might not have identified with anxiety or with neurodiversity in the past, they're much more likely to identify with it. And I think identifying it is great. I think it's the first step. I think the second step is where how do we support a person who's more anxious? And so, and certainly I think COVID didn't help because I think that created a big generation of people who were in a really anxious situation for many years. But overall, I feel like it is a way that people have started to understand their emotions more than they have in the past. I'm not sure they have more anxiety, and that's my personal opinion. I'm not sure people have more pressure on them than they have in the past. I think they're able to talk about it more than they have in the past. We do know that universities have seen a huge increase in anxiety and depression. We know that a lot of the college counseling offices that we work with or disability services work with, they've their applications have gone through the roof. But again, I think that's because people are seeking the support that they need that they hadn't before. And so I'm not sure the problem is that people are more anxious. I think the problem is that we might not have the number of supports and services in place to handle a much larger group of people.

Ken Huey 10:59

The populations that we work with, these young adults, really carry some damaging labels.

Perry LaRoque 11:06

Yeah.

Ken Huey 11:07

And I'm wondering how can someone begin healing that mindset, rebuilding confidence in the face of labels that pull them down?

Perry LaRoque 11:14

No, I think that's actually a really great question. And for me, this concept of labeling students has been at the forefront of education coming from a progressive education institution, University of Wisconsin, we've really looked at like how labels impact people. And there was a New York Times article just recently that I thought was fascinating. Cause basically what it said was when we label students, we tend to hurt their self-concept, we tend to lower their expectations, we tend to give them a crutch to make excuses around. And we've seen that. But when we give adults labels when they hadn't been labeled before, like autism, they tend to understand their challenges and feel more empowered by it. And so it gives us this catch 22 like adults get the label and they're more empowered by it. Kids are given a label and they're disenfranchised about it. So what's the problem? And I really do think the solution is that we need to move in this country to a perspective of just understanding characteristics, understanding strengths, that like pigeonholing people under a certain label isn't what we want to be doing. We don't want to continue to separate out. We do things differently for people with disabilities. We do things differently for everybody and we should embrace that and we should honor that. And so, because someone has a label, it doesn't mean they need or don't need more support than somebody else. I mean, I use this example a lot. We have students who, under an older model, might receive a dyslexia label because they were at the 20th percentile in reading. And then there's someone who just missed the cutoff at a 25%. But why does that mean the person at 20% needs more help than the person with 25%? And so I think that what we need to start thinking about is just what does the learner need and how do we support that learner? And I'm not necessarily sure that we have to give someone a label in order to in order to do that. I'm not sure, as we say, coming to Mansfield Hall and telling us that someone has autism, it's not helpful. That we don't, that doesn't mean anything to us. We we saw Temple Grant and said if you've met with someone with autism, you met once someone with autism, understanding who they are as a person, strengths, weaknesses, all of those different pieces is what can help us get to know someone in order to support them.

Ken Huey 13:24

You've worked with a lot of students facing various adversity. What have they taught you about resilience, emotional strength?

Perry LaRoque 13:32

Oh, yes. I'll tell you the one thing that I've learned that I truly have taken to heart, and it was a realization that I had, God, it had to have been Mansfield Halls, we're on our 14th year, so it had to have happened about 10 years ago. I was sitting in a community meeting with all of 30 of our students. It was this at our program in Burlington, Vermont, and and a student shared some really personal news. And I looked around the room and I just looked at all of the people who were there. And it's interesting because there's they're all lovely, wonderful individual people, but you know, all very unique and different, and they all have different characteristics, and people might classify that as weird or quirky or unusual. And they were all in this room. And when this person shared the news, the community was so open and accepting to that person that I've just realized that, like, these people are not finding a community of other autistic individuals, they're finding a really accepting community, and the level of acceptance amongst these folks is just something that I wish the world could take with them. You can come into Mansfield Hall with purple hair and weird music, and you can like the strangest thing like My Little Pony or whatever it is, right? And everyone just says, Hey, you be you. And I feel like if everybody could just have the mantra of like you be you, like the world would be such a better place. And so, really, the students they truly have inspired me in that way. And it is the most accepting group of people I've ever met in my entire life. And I feel lucky for them that they have it. I feel lucky for our staff members to be also benefit from it. But it's really the acceptance that's at the core of these students, they're willing to just love and be with anybody.

Ken Huey 15:28

If you can find one message from this episode that people who are struggling today, some young adult could hear, what would you want them to hear most?

Perry LaRoque 15:36

It's not you, it's the world. It's not you. I promise it's not you. It is you and your unique characteristic. The what makes you you special. It is the most unique characteristics that you have that make you important for the world, and it's the world that's not ready for it, but you shouldn't change for the world. Like, you can't change for the world. Like, what you have to do is you have to find your people, you have to surround yourself with those people, you have to find your passion, you have to pursue your passion. There's nothing wrong with you, there's no label that can define you. It is you are an imperfect, wonderful human being like the rest of us, and you have so much opportunities to give back this unique perspective of the world that none of us have the ability to give that unless we have the same type of neurodiversity. And so for me, it's be yourself, be proud of being yourself. There is nothing wrong with you if you are around people who think there's something wrong with you, find people who don't, because there are people out there that will love you for who you are, and find those people and prove everybody in this world that you have something to give. And I promise that you'll make that contribution.

Ken Huey 16:51

Super fun. Okay, Perry LaRocque. Really fun stuff. Seriously, your passion for what you do and the service that you're giving in this world is just fantastic. Thank you for spending a few minutes with us to talk.

Perry LaRoque 17:04

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Ken. It's been really great.

Ken Huey 17:08

Thanks for joining us on The Voice of Hope. If you were inspired, share the light. And remember, hope's not just a feeling, it's a force. We'll see you next time.