NonVerbal Learning Disorder and ADHD

[swmom]

Is anyone dealing with ADHD and a NVLD?

I think we might have that going on. We'll find out in a few weeks after some testing with a psychologist.

Has anyone found that any of the ADHD meds help with NVLD, too? For these kids, what have you found to be the most effective treatment in reducing their high level of anxiety? Meds? Any dietary changes? A certain kind of therapy? It's becoming harder and harder to put my daughter in any new situation. She is just so tense. I feel so sorry for her.

[dansmommy]

Have you read _Bridging the Gap_ by Rondalyn Varney Whitney? I found it most helpful. Also Tessier from www.schwablearning.org/ is very knowledgeable and nice. DS doesn't actually have this dx but has some of the features. I don't know that much about meds for it but I think meds can help them pay attention to the stuff that's more challenging for them and so do better academically (if they have ADHD as well). I think the biggest thing is using verbal stategies to teach them things -- like ds does better with his math if we talk about it and do it together in our heads. It's a learning disability as is dyslexia (I think of it as "the opposite of dyslexia" but maybe I'm wrong) that requires special strategies. I think a lot of kids with it have very high verbal IQs though so that gives them a definite strength, if they can get what they need. I'd proceed with caution with stimulants if she's having a lot of anxiety issues though. So that's probably all I know about NLD. Here's another website: www.nldontheweb.org/
Good luck. Christie

[savvymom1]

My 12 yr old dd has Asperger's syndrome which also falls under the autism spectrum. She can be anxious which causes lots of problems for her in school (hates change of routine, new teachers, new places, field trips, being told what to do if it's out of her comfort range, etc.).

The thing that has helped her the most was when a counselor suggested we put her on zoloft. Wow what a change for the better! I don't know if non verbal learning dsorder is helped by anti-depressant meds but you might want to discuss the possibility with your doctor. I can't say enough about how it has improved her life and our relationship as a family!

[AustinsMom]

You might check out Amen's website at www.brainplace.com. I think that the dyslexia and other language learning disabilities are from problems in the dominant temporal lobe; non-verbal from the non-dominant. He has a checklist on his site that helps you identify specific problems and it pinpoints what part of the brain the problem originates from. Then he lists possible treatment options. I didn't read this part, only other areas that pertained to my ds, but I know I found the ones I read helpful for my situation, so maybe you can gain some info there too. Good luck

[geewiznit]

Hi swmom! We may be paddling down the same crummy river. My daughter K, 12, has NVLD in addition to ADHD, mild OCD and anxiety. Paxil keeps the OCD under control and helps a little with anxiety, but not much. Ritalin LA during school hours is helping with impulsivity, the ADHD symptom that is the most troubling for her (without the med. she calls out in class all the time). I'm not sure if the stim increases her anxiety--I don't think so, though. As for the NVLD, it's worst impact is on the social side. She is dismal at reading nonverbal cues, and the impulsivity from the ADHD just adds to the social mess. End result: she speaks without thinking, and usually says the wrong thing! Very tough to be a social misfit at 12.

In any case, to answer your question, I don't think any meds affect NVLD. There are many learning strategies that can help, however. For example, K understands dense material much better if it is read out loud to her (also helps her focus), so I often find myself reading her history or biology texts to her. Note taking is very hard for her, so I buy extra copies of her books so she can highlight the text instead. My son, now a college freshman in Washington DC, also has NVLD and found that his hardest challenge in high school was dealing with maps. If he had to memorize, say, a map of Europe before World War I for History class, he would have to "verbalize" the map to learn it--"France is to the right and above Spain", etc. (I have no idea how he finds his way around the Washington DC subway system, but I just keep my fingers crossed!) Unfortunately, NVLD kids usually have more and more difficulty at school as time goes on--they do great in the lower grades, but have trouble with more sophisticated tasks, like synthesizing information from several sources for research projects. K was in gifted classes all through elementary school, but has hit many walls in middle school.

If you haven't discovered it yet, I highly recommend the website NLDontheweb.org. Truly everything you wanted to know about NVLD and more.

Many teachers are clueless about NVLD, so you may find that educating them is your biggest challenge.

Best of luck with your daughter. BTW, how old is she? I'm dying to find a girl K can commiserate with online. She is very extroverted, loves to IM and is very open about discussing her "issues".

[lisle]

Hi,
My 12 yo is very much like K, outgoing and nld and adhd (very impulsive and verbal). I have found that he is very good at visual discrimination tasks but not at visualizing things so multiple choice tests are much better for him than fill in the blank. Spelling is a nightmare. which is unusual for this kind of kid, unless he memorizes the spelling orally, and then sometimes the sequence gets messed up or he says c instead of s.
Maps are something he just shouldn't have to do, if you ask me, but we do have to be careful not to overaccommodate and make him helpless later. So one teacher started to teach him by having him learn the outer boundaries of the map. I thought that was helpful.
We are pretty in the dark on this and the combination of not gettting it when the teacher gives sour nonverbal signals and the adhd makes him the one of all the kids who is constantly in trouble. Everybody else was doing the same thing, but they picked up the signal when the teacher walked in sternly. But try to explain this to a teacher who thinks she has told him a million times not to do whatever. Sorry for babbling. I have no idea what to do about the anxiety either. If you try to rehearse things, it may help. Can you drive somewhere as "practice"? We did this with parties, but it honestly didn't help him (it helped me!). Did you ever read the explosive child book? It applies.
lisle
lisle

[swmom]

Thanks for all your replies. There must varying degrees of nvld because I look at the symptoms and some do apply - especially the fear of new situations and social difficulties - but some clearly do not. I guess I'll let the psychologist tell us what he thinks after meeting her in person and doing some testing. I thought it was especially interesting that Zoloft was helpful with at least one case of nvld. With all the stuff that's being discovered about anti-depressants though, I don't know about adding Zoloft to the Strattera we're already giving her. That really scares me.

[dansmommy]

I know, there must be a million symptoms and I don't see how anyone could have them all! Has she had an IQ test? My understanding is that younger kids usually have a substantial gap between their verbal (high) and performance (low) IQ. I guess this can change as they get older and I don't really understand why. Good luck understanding it all. Hope the psychologist has insight about this -- no one has ever suggested to me that ds has it and I wonder if this is lack of training on the part of the Ph.D psychologist who assessed him. Christie

[swmom]

dansmommy -

She had a verbal IQ of 115, performance IA of 90. 25-pt. difference That does indicate a nonverbal learning disability. HOWEVER, at the time of that testing, she was not on meds, was farsighted and needed reading glasses, had visual processing issues that hadn't been remediated, auditory processing issues that hadn't been remediated and had sleep apnea, which we didn't know about yet. We're testing again next week. It'll be very interesting to see if that 25-pt. discrepancy is still there. Right now, we're trying to decide whether to have her on meds for the testing.

[lisle]

Hi,
My son has a 40 point difference between verbal and performance. He is so gifted verbally but also has processing prob. (speed)that seem to impair him with writing, which you would think would be a strength. That along with the adhd is really defeating sometimes.
He has very little sense of time and space. Have you noticed this in your kids? I have had his tests repeated by a different dr. and only 3 points better. I wonder if attention had a lot to do with it, but then again the second dr. was careful and gave him little breaks, spreading out the testing over three days. I think he has more trouble with tone than with facial expressions.
He notices it but may miscontrue its intention. He for instance thinks I am insulting him if I point out a weakness I want to help him with. This, of course, gets us nowhere; he just gets angry. I just try to explain that I love him at these times. lisle

[swmom]

lisle -

Thanks for your post. Deep down inside, I have this sick feeling. My dd has been diagnosed with ADHD and on Strattera, she's doing really well. So, I think of the
ADHD as being pretty well under control for the time being. The tics(licking her hands, and sucking on her hair)are a concern. Perhaps we have OCD. Before she was on Strattera, when she felt really excited, she'd also flap her hands. I think that's a symptom of autism, isn't it? She's also very anxious, especially in social situations. So, I believe we have anxiety on our hands.
Then, there are the social struggles, just doesn't connect terribly well with other kids, pretty immature and not quite with it. So, this is either nvld or asberger's, right? Then, she's got some processing issues, primarily auditory. This is why I have this sick feeling. We've got ADHD and perhaps ALL THIS OTHER STUFF. Where the he.. did all this come from? It'll be interesting to see what the psychologist tell us. How could one beautiful little girl have so many issues?
Sometimes I just feel really overwhelmed and so sad.
This is our only child.

[geewiznit]

I know just how you feel. My DH and I look at ourselves and other family members and try see if we can tell where all of K's problems came from, but while we see some anxiety in this person and some hyperactivity in that one and maybe some OCD in another, and the NLD in her brother, we just can't see how it all came together in one child and at such magnitude. So we do what we can. The Paxil is excellent for the OCD, nothing much helps the anxiety, we jump from one med to another for the ADHD, but they all lose effectiveness before long. We tried social skills classes for that aspect of the NLD, but she never sees her own shortcomings, couldn't understand why she had to go and wouldn't put in any effort.

Time does bring about changes, though. K was also a "hand flapper", but completely grew out of it, we still don't know why. Her organizational skills just seem to have improved on their own. We've figured out lots of strategies for helping her over academic rough spots, mostly by trial and error. And even though we have the NLD diagnosis, it really has been less of an issue than we anticipated--compared to the effects of K's ADHD, the NLD just seems like a minor glitch.

I truly believe that once we get past puberty, things will straighten out even more. Don't be overwhelmed by the alphabet soup. If you just think of her as a child with a complex personality and some learning issues, instead of a pile of diagnoses, it will be a bit easier to cope.

In a way, it may be easier that this is your only child. I know that whenever my son has a problem, I tend to go to pieces because now even my "easy" kid is giving me heartache! He had some rough years in high school and at times I felt that there wasn't a single aspect of parenting that I was doing right. You have the luxury of concentrating your efforts on one child.

[swmom]

geewiznit -

Thanks for cheering me up. I needed it. Will probably need cheering up again after her psychologist's appt., so don't go too far!

You mentioned that you're struggling with the ADHD meds. Have you tried the Strattera? That's the one that's working for us and has been for about 6 months now. Lots of positive changes, no real side effects. We had some moodiness but I think we nipped that in the bud when upped the med by 5 mgs to 45/daily.

[lisle]

Gee and SWMom
I agree with both of you. My son resists anyone who tries to help him--a lot of his issues remain because he won't make the effort to change them, which may be from the adhd. A part of nld is also agnosanosia (sp)which is a low ability to understand their weaknesses. Isn't that enough to make you crazy? Or is it a good thing: protection so that they don't collapse emotionally. Nature built that into the disorder--interesting. Nevertheless, everything seems too overwhelming to him.

When I think about it, however, nobody ever talked to me about my problems with my brain when I was young. I can see now that I have an ld. I never had to deal with the feeling something was wrong, though I knew I couldn't do my social studies. I guess I felt dumb, to an extent. Maybe this is too frightening for them to handle--all this talk about disability. We move in our family from saying it's a "difference" to it's something he needs meds for, if we can find the right one ever, and that too must be such a mixed message! Yet we were told by many dr. not to hide the adhd from him. He's 12 now and there hasn't been much progress over the years in the add or behavior, just a lot of angst.

About hand flapping. Don't jump to conclusions about it being PDD. My psychiatrist said it was. It turns out that I read a lot about mercury poisoning and when we got the mercury out of his system (possibly from too much tuna but probably from flu shots which just had the mercury removed this year), it stopped completely. Some of the other symptoms of adhd also can come from mercury, lead, and aluminum--as aluminum is stored in the frontal lobes. I go back and forth about believing all this, but I do believe the mercury was the culprit in the hand flapping. Some kids do not get rid of the metals in the environment (fish, food packaging, pots and pans, flaking or scratched old paint or certain vinyl miniblinds a few years back, or how about soda cans) as well as others; it's just a "difference." So life is very complicated, and it's not always heredity. lisle

[geewiznit]

We've debated trying Straterra, but are holding off on it until it's our last resort, because her being on Paxil makes the dosage issues particularly difficult. Plus, our doc is not hearing great things about Strat so is not pushing it (but will go for it if I ask). Also, the ramping up process seems so fraught with difficulty--the stomachaches, the mood swings--I wonder when would be the "right" time to embark on it. She goes to a private school with lots of homework and long-term assignments, plus is now in rehearsals almost every day after school for an upcoming play. I'd hate to throw her for a loop right in the middle of everything, and the school vacation periods are too short to get the Straterra fully rolling. Then in the summer, she's away at camp for 7 weeks! So, once (okay, if) the Ritalin LA she is now taking follows the usual path (increasing strengths until it doesn't work at all), and going back to Aderrall XR again doesn't work, we'll suck it up and go for the Straterra .

K went to the movies with a classmate last night, and they ran into a couple of other 12 year old girls from her school. I was struck by how much younger she seems than her peers--not just the immature behavior, but in the way she looks and carries herself. They all, K included, are developing breasts, but K still has that little girl belly (Paxil packs on some pounds), and a round face, plus she's short for her age (no doubt the stims are hurting in that department). She looked and acted 9 or 10 compared to the others. One more dopey thing to make her out of synch, darn it. This was the first time she socialized with this girl outside of school. I so hope it continues. We've had so many one-timers who get a full dose of K one to one and definitely don't want to come back for more.

K is starting to recognize her social shortcomings a bit, but still doesn't seem to think she can do anything about them--she accepts herself the way she is, which is nice, I guess, but not much of a motivator for change. I think she just expects the rest of the world to adjust to her and is surprised over and over when it doesn't. That being said, she's still quite different from the girl she was at age 8--better in many ways, so don't assume that the problems you deal with now will remain the same forever (tho you may just exchange some of them for new ones!)