“Can you look at that clock and tell me what time it is?” the neurologist asked.
Aisha Adkins sat beside her mother as she peered at the clock hanging above the sink of the doctor’s office. As her mother stared, unable to determine the time, Adkins’s stomach tightened.
Her mother looked shaken as she realized that she couldn’t complete this task she’d done all her life, Adkins said. The neurologist, a White man, continued to administer a brief series of tests known as a “mini-cog,” according to Adkins. Fifteen minutes later, he diagnosed Adkins’s mother — a Black woman who was 56 — with menopause-related stress and prescribed antidepressants. He did not order further testing.
