One description that describes a lot of my childs problems it would be the great difficulty of maintaining passion or interest in anything with or without supervision. I don’t know to what it can be related but we are going into a learning disability evaluation this week and I cannot help but fear it’s either too late or is not really the direction we should be heading. My son is now a junior in high school and it is obvious he is not going to be able to function in college. He has a great intellect that he cannot harness and focus on his own. In addition to the learning disability evaluation we have after a year wait been set up for an Aspergers/Autism Spectrum evaluation. He has been treated for ADD from about third or fourth grade on.
My question: If he has some higher brain functioning disorder, will having a learning disability evaluation put us in the right direction of treating or dealing with it? Of course I could be all wrong and it not such a disorder even though I am pretty convinced it is. I am so afraid for my son and desparate.
[b]I know this is probably too much information to process but here is another post I made on another forum that is a little more concise about some things:[/b]
I am lost. I am deparate. I have a son who is 17 years old and has been treated for ADD all of his life. We have all failed: parents and teachers and doctors in getting him the help he needs. ADD has never been the answer but we kept insisting it was. I need answers and need them fast. He is slipping away from us. He is giving up on school because he is totally incompatible with traditional schooling. He can no longer socially navigate school on a day to day basis. People want to accomodate for him but we really don’t know for what? He doesn’t need remedial classes, he needs answers as to why such an intelligent kid cannot produce.
I need to know where a 17 year old can get a comprehensive learning disability diagnosis. It seems really easy to find resources for elementary school kids but not a junior in high school. Right now we suspect everything from ADD to Aspergers but we just don’t know. He has massive problems reading and writing. He is very gifted verbally and very intelligent. It has always been a big problem for him to physically produce something from what he has learned. I mean in the form of writing or some other task. I wish I had somewhere I could post some pretty long descriptions of his life and symptoms for someone to read. I am sure someone could point me in the right direction. I know I am rambling but I am truly desparate.
I talked to the school but it is a very long process to get approved for testing and then the result is not necessarily specific diagnosis. They just want to acommodate the student. Make things easier for them. That is only part of what I need. I am not even sure I am making myself clear. If any of you have any insight, I would appreciate some advice.
I read a sentence on another web site that fits my son son well: Severe discrepancy between expected and actual performance. It is sad to hear my son express complex thoughts and feelings verbally but not be able to advance something productive from his thoughts.
[Modified by: herb on November 08, 2010 12:56 PM]
Maintaining Passion and Interest
There are people with some LD known as an “out put problem.” Often it is because of some neurological condition. If you ask him a question and insist he write out his long winded answer he can’t do it as easily as he should be able to. If you verbally ask the question and will take a verbal answer he might dither on for hours about it answering the question in full and very adequately if necesary. Does that sound like your son?
Difficulty reading and writing could be dyslexia?
Desperate people do idiotic things. Don’t get desperate. Get cold and calculating. Turn off the desperation and turn on the common sense and reason. The more desperate you get the more out of synch your child is going to get just from the energy you are generating and spilling out in all directions. Do yourself a favor, go watch Cesar Milan. Seriously, so you can see how you need to deal with this. You need to be calm and assertive. And be a pack leader. Nervous pack leader creates more instability. Like dogs, humans are pack animals. So this holds true for human families as well.
How have you been treating his life time of ADD? I hate ADD diagnosis. Because, without any biological tests of any relevant kind a child is dismissed as a flawed member of society based on a total lack of physical evidence. I am an archaeologist. I study in part how the brain has evolved. There is nothing physically valid that in any way supports the diagnosis of ADD. That being said I have also not found anything physical that definitive proves it doesn’t exist, but, the suggestion is there that it doesn’t in the lack of difference in the brains and that is a cold hard scientific fact. Have you been medicating your child for a life time? If you have that could also be a source of your problems as these drugs were for large part not even designed to be used in children and they have long term side effects as well as short term ones. They don’t do a person any favors in the long run and according to NIMH studies, they are no longer even offering anything beneficial after a 3 year period of regular usage. So if you have been medicating it could be that you destroyed something in his brain that might have otherwise developed differently. It could also be that this was going to be a problem either way. No way to be sure.
The other reason i hate ADD diagnosis, is because there is no comprehensive physical work up done on the body. There are over 400 physically valid conditions that can present as ADD that the shrinks never even look for before they slap a lable on a child and shove drugs that effect the brain in the same way as cocaine does on the poor kid. It is horrible and it has been an industry for the last 30 years. Which is why i hate ADD diagnosis. They offer no physical proof and destroy brains by terrifying parents into accepting faith based treatment. let me make it simple, medicating a child for ADD is in essence, no different than accepting creationism over the theory of evolution. Accepting ADD on solely opinion alone of someone who studies a glorified humanity and then allowing them to fill your kids with drugs, there is no science. I am married to a PHD in theoretical physics i am an archaeologist. I know the difference between what constitutes scientific fact verses pseudo science. ADD diagnosis is pseudo science. Out put problems are not dyslexia is not.The 400 things that can present with the same symptoms as ADD that the shrinks do not even look for, those are also not pseudo science.
I realize you have been doing all this time what you believe is in your child’s best interests and that you do what the experts tell you. I understand that. You have done nothing wrong besides putting your faith blindly in the hands of others because you didn’t know what else to do, and accepting whatever they came up with because you didn’t have any answer at all. Sometimes “i don’t know” is fine. That is what scientists say when they don’t understand something. Those with faith slap a lable (usually the GOD lable) on whatever they don’t know about and call it a day and with no evidence within the context of physical reality declare the problem solved because it is so obvious if you just have faith or if you just know how to read other people’s behavior. The problem with that aproach is that i once knew a cat that would purr rub against your ankle and then throw herself at your face clawing for your eyes still purring. You would never know it was coming from her behavior, only if you could read her mind. The point is, psychology is a glorified humanity (archaeology is also. The difference though is i rely on science and interpret science, they interpret behavior with no science to back up their interpretations, much like creationists interpret the creations of God and then declare some smart thing must have created us all… It couldn’t just all be the result of abiogenesis. Except that it is.) If you accept evolution, because there is evidence in physical reality and you do not accept creationism you should by that same rational not accept ADD as a valid problem until they supply physical evidence proving it. Not just that it exists but physical evidence from your own son showing he has it. If they can not do that and instead hand you a crazy meaningless subjective check list of loose symptoms this does not qualify as legitimate science. Please, apply actual science to your son and see what the result is.
Because i once had a friend with ADD. She was 26 when they discovered she had had a life long sever and serious iron defiency and a vitamin B defiency for just as long. If they had just given her a blood test when she was 4 and being diagnosed with ADD, they could have fixed her mind and body at once. But that is the thing about psychology, they only deal in spectral evidence rather than in scientifically credible evidence. My husband who works as a post doc at vienna tech, researching theoretical physics has read indepth on ADD diagnosis and i quote, ” The methodology employed in the diagnosis of ADD lacks in all scientific credibility.” So says a real scientist. And someone who has done some study of brain development throughout human evolution. But you make up your own mind. I am only trying to help by making you aware of the pieces no one ever tells you you are missing while they are busy terrifying you into submission for the good of their bank accounts (courtesy of big pharm) oops I mean the good of your child…. Well for them there is no difference. No one pays me anything to put out information. I do it because i have seen these drugs kill children and i do it because i care. And for too long parents have been terrorized into complying and trusting with no evidence. It’s time for that to end because not only does it often ruin lives and brains, it can kill. Some of those over 400 things that present as ADD that are very physically real, some of them are lethal if they are not caught early enough yet psychologists never look for them or insist they are looked for prior to diagnosis with ADD. Others are more minor and just annoying and can be treated to actually get the effect you try to get with the psych drugs that just mask the symptoms for upto 3 years.
Please, before you see another psych person, please please please take your son to a real doctor. Have them do the entire thing get some answers about his body and if they do some major full complete work up even looking for the unusual and come up blank, then go back to psych. But please look at what is physically real first.
Hi Herb and welcome here,
It’s never too late to get an evaluation, many people don’t get one until they are adults.
The crucial thing that an evaluation can provide your son with, is an understanding of his own way of learning. So that he can look for ways that work the best for him.
Where he is probably having difficulty with maintaining passion and interest, because he is trying to do things in ways that don’t work for him?
The problem is that the brain is an invisible tool-kit, where we all have a different set of tools?
So an evaluation will let him know what tools he has and hasn’t got?
Where an evaluation will also help to understand his particular strengths.
To get a diagnosis, if you’re in the US, here’s a link to the Learning Disabilities Association of America, which has chapters in each state. Who can help you with getting a diagnosis and other things.
[url]http://www.ldanatl.org/state_chapters/index.asp[/url]