Typical Emotional Development in Students with NLD: A Typical Developmental History Students with NLD also usually begin to display anxiety in the early elementary grades. As students enter middle school, these problems intensify and generalize to multiple areas of their life. Many students begin to withdraw from both school and family, choosing to spend as much time as possible in their bedrooms because they find comfort in that environment. If they have a telephone, television, a computer, and internet connection available, many students isolate themselves in a self-preservation type of behavior. Whenever they are forced to emerge, their anxiety rises and they report feeling overwhelmed and out of control. These feelings of hopelessness and helplessness often develop into depression and a greater potential for suicide. As one parent put it, “I am the chief interpreter of the world for my child.” Parents need to recognize that they will often be told that they are overprotective; however, school personnel need to recognize that the parents have been witness to an extended history of subtle and not so subtle abuse of their child by others, especially in the school setting. As a result of this close relationship, children with NLD will have a very difficult time separating from their parents as is expected in adolescence. One of two things typically happens, either the emergence of the adolescent occurs with great trepidation on the part of both the parent and child (often accompanied by much anger and derision), or separation does not happen at all, leaving the child tied to the parents often until their mid twenties to early thirties. A study (Rourke, 1988) was conducted over several years investigating the relationship between neurotypical individuals, individuals with a language-based learning disability (e.g., dyslexia), and individuals with NLD. What Rourke found was that NLD exhibits more clinical and more internalized forms of psychopathology than individuals with language-based learning disabilities and neurotypical individuals. They also found that, while individuals with a language-based learning disability may have emotional problems during school, they tend to resolve them after leaving school. They find school or employment where they can excel and not be reminded that they have a disability. Unfortunately, individuals with NLD continue to struggle throughout their lifetime with emotional issues including low self-esteem, anxiety, and depression. In fact, approximately 41% of students diagnosed with NLD are mislabeled by schools as having a severe emotional disability and placed in a classroom for students who do have a severe emotional disability. When this sort of placement happens, one of two things typically happens to students with NLD. They either begin to identify with the aggressive acting out students in an attempt to align themselves with the aggressor, or they become the target of bullying by the emotionally disturbed student. If the former happens, students with NLD will awkwardly attempt to emulate the aggressor in their classroom, often becoming mascot, henchmen, or yes- man for the bully, or is taken advantage of to perform the illegal acts that the bully would normally perform themselves. If the latter happens (bullying), the student with NLD will again be the target of peers that will further reinforce their perception of the world as unsafe and drive them back to their bedroom where it will be even more difficult in the future to convince them to put themselves out in public and try again. Individuals with NLD “misperceive, mis-emit, or fail to emit subtle nonverbal information in exchanges with others” (Rourke, 1989). Translated, this means that students who have NLD not only don’t understand or pick up on social cues (subtle and not so subtle) that are in their environment, but also do not emit appropriate social cues to others. This is probably one of the most powerful arguments for the need for social skills development throughout the student’s school career, not just in elementary school. Social skill development is not intrusive, and no one has ever died from or suffered from social skills that are too well developed. School systems will typically give lip service to their desire to raise good citizens. Being a good citizen demands good socials skills. While most people do not use advanced calculus or trigonometry on a daily basis, all people must use social skills on a continuous basis just to survive in society. While a school can provide a reasonable level of social skills development, those skills must be practiced in a variety of settings to attempt to address the problem of generalization of learned skills. Individuals with NLD can learn most skills or tools to get along in society; however, which tool and when to use it is the greatest struggle that they encounter. As a result of their need/reliance on auditory input, students with NLD do not need to make eye contact or appear to pay attention. As one student with NLD stated, “Why do I need to look at you when I am getting all the information I need through my ears. I don’t need to look at you to hear you.” However, in many school settings, by fourth through sixth grades, this type of behavior is often misinterpreted, mislabeled, and test results are misinterpreted as Attention- Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder – Inattentive Type (ADHD-IT). Following this diagnosis, students with NLD are typically placed on a trial of medication to help them pay attention. This tends to be ineffective at the very least and, at the most, dangerous as a good portion of students have violent aversive reactions to the medications. By the time these students enter middle school, they have the diagnosis of Anxiety and/or Depression. While behaviorally, these diagnoses correctly describe the student’s experience, the emotions remain primarily exogenous to the student. Throughout life, if the environment is recognized as the genesis of the anxiety and altered to be less anxiety producing, a goodly portion of the anxiety and depression dissipates. However, if the student is exposed to an anxiety-producing environment for an extended period of time (different for every individual), a base level of anxiety will become endogenous. (Dr. Dean Mooney, Maple Leaf Clinic, Wallingford, VT)
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 17:11:25 +0000
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