One of the most challenging questions for the mental health profession in recent decades has been the simplest: why are so many more children diagnosed with ‘special needs’ today than when we were children? There is no definitive “good” or “correct” answer to that question, but as many adults are discovering, many too late have suffered because they were misdiagnosed as children.
Adult ‘Special Needs’ Checklist
If you have 6 or more of the following symptoms, consider seriously talking to your doctor about the possibility that you have a disability, such as ADHD, that prevents you from taking full advantage of your own potential. You do:
• Do you misspell, even when given enough time to correct yourself?
• Does it take a long time to get to the point in a conversation or, in particular, in an argument?
• Are you often accused of speaking too loud or too low?
• Do people make fun of you for using too many ‘filler sounds’ (ie ‘uh’, ‘um’, ‘you know’)?
• Do you have messy writing with lots of crossouts and erasures?
• Find yourself reading the same sentence or paragraph over and over because it didn’t make sense the first time?
• Do you mispronounce words often even though you know the correct pronunciation?
• Do you often fail to complete all the tasks assigned to you at work, even if you have a checklist?
• Do you often have to ask for instructions to be repeated after the task is supposed to be well advanced?
• Do you make many careless mistakes, to the point where you are accused of not caring about it?
• Confuse letters and numbers with a similar appearance?
• Do you write letters, memos, or instructions in a disorganized and confusing way?
• Do you lose important things regularly, even after making an effort to control them?
• Don’t understand charts and graphs?
• Do you lose count, underestimate or overestimate how much time has passed or how long will / should a task take?
• Do you get lost often?
• Mix right and left regularly?
Why get a diagnosis now?
You may feel that it is too late for you: At 35 or older, it may seem like you are beyond the reach of most forms of intervention. But the truth is that many adults with minor to moderate disabilities only discover their condition because they recognize their own traits in the diagnostic tests used on their children. For adults in that situation, receiving a formal diagnosis can be a major psychological step forward in their lives: from seeing themselves as “unlucky” or “doomed” to seeing themselves as having a definite challenge that can be understood and surpassed.
The inherent power of having a name to give your problems – or, more fundamentally, recognizing that your problems have a definite source – is often incredibly liberating for an adult with a learning disability. There is a lot of knowledge about these disabilities; Once you understand that it applies to you, you can use it to great effect.