How Learning Disability Affects a Person's Mental Health

[HereSince1628]

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/barbara-arrowsmithyoung/canadian-mental-health-week_b_3224386.html

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Imagine constantly straining to understand. Imagine missing important instructions, subtle comments, the tone of someone's voice or the logical consequence of an event. Imagine forgetting the main point of the conversation or task, the details provided, or the very look or place of objects. Imagine seeing everything through a fog, or as black or white. Imagine being only more aware that everyone else understood, while you were miles behind.

Now consider whether a secure self-concept could possibly grow from this experience. Indeed, those of us with learning disabilities will experience diminishing self-esteem from an early age. After years of frustration and frequent failure, any optimism towards ourselves or our future is out of the question. Instead, we just try to survive. Our mechanisms include fear, performance anxiety, obsessive tendencies, and avoidance strategies. For many, it can spiral to more chronic anxiety and depression. Addictions, self-injury, aggression, and other anti-social behaviours have been statistically linked to learning disabilities.

Various estimates put the percentage of the general population affected by learning disabilities around 10 per cent, give or take. I believe that these figures are under-reported, and that the true figure is somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent. Certainly the rates between learning disabilities and depression have been documented and are high. I also believe that many are suffering in silence.

As a society we must reconsider behaviours that are too often seen as lazy, unmotivated, defiant, or just not trying hard enough. One of my students shared that he had been told he was 'garbage' by a college professor. With these experiences repeated over time, other people's perceptions of a student often become internalized by that student. How could they not? This is one way that lack of understanding contributes to a climate of stigma and shame around learning disabilities. There is clearly a parallel between the discrimination felt by individuals with learning disabilities and those who endure the stigma of mental illness.

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[mopinko]

1. my second son

nobody could put a finger on what his problem was, but he thought differently. and then school taught him that he was always going to fail, but he was too bright to be learning disabled. now, at 22, he wont even try, because he is sure he is going to fail.
seems like so many kids these days come out of school beat up in this way, and need a couple years of doing nothing to find their way.

[hunter]

2. I have to concentrate and focus to understand people speaking.

I don't automatically hear words. If I'm not actively listening, languages I understand sound like languages I don't. I recognize the rhythms and cadences but not the words. In a noisy place like a restaurant I might as well be deaf. I can't separate a single voice from the crowd. I don't know the words of music unless I've seen them written down. I don't listen to vocal music for fun, or in the background, it's too much work. If I watch a movie on my own I turn the sound very low and rely on the subtitles.

My writing is a very tactile thing, patterns remembered by my fingers as much as words in my head.

I didn't realize until I was an adult that words were flowing through other people's heads even when they were alone and not talking or reading. If I'm not talking, writing, or reading the words simply go away. When I was single I used to throw a few gallon bottles of water in my car and drive out to the desert. I can go many days without any words in my head and I like it.

In school I always felt like an outsider and I'm sure that's one of the things bullies picked up on. I was weird.

I think humans develop a "secure self-concept" mostly in early childhood. For all the crazy in my extended family (and there is a lot of it) infants and small children are cherished. When we are older and getting smacked about by the world the firm foundation built in early childhood does not crumble.

This autistic-language-processing disorder seems to be a dominant gene in our family, a 50/50 chance of inheriting it. Sometimes the expression is very mild, sometimes disabling. Nobody mentioned this when I was a kid, but we had relatives who were entirely asocial hermits. Nobody talked about them, they were hidden away. I now know why one of grandfather's sisters kept such close watch over me. My grandfather had siblings who were essentially hermits. My grandfather was that sort too, but he was also an aerospace genius so he found his place in society during the Second World War, the Cold War, and the Space Race. His eccentricities were tolerated.

I started school able to read, so when the other kids were learning their ABCs I was spending time with the speech therapist and some kind of "posture" training. I don't know what they called that special education, but the teacher was always talking about "posture." I was a klutz on the playground and wasn't allowed on the monkey bars because I'd invariably injure myself or someone else. (Later on as a teen that's the same reason nobody wanted to see me on a surfboard.) I overcame the klutziness, but it took a lot of work as a young adult.

One of my kids carries the hypothesized gene, the mild version, and so do a few of my nephews and nieces. It usually shows up as something that catches the attention of kindergarten teachers, and then off to speech therapy the kid goes. It's a family tradition.

I'm not certain where the depression and OCD come from or how it's related to the autistic baggage. Anti-depressants are one of the meds that keep me functional. It makes me a little sad when I think about my older relatives who lived their lives in some state of dysfunction, hiding their illness from the world.