Encouraging Health

Learning disabilities come in all shapes, sizes and degrees. In fact the diagnosis ADHD, which we hear bandied about in teachers’ lounges and conference rooms in our public schools is a new term, only coined with the last forty years. Doctors had observed and recorded the symptoms as early as 1902, but drugs for treating it were not in widespread use until the 1960s.

We do not know why some childre have a much harder time in the classroom than others do, or why we should see so much of this syndrome at the beginning of the Twenty-first Century. Does it have anything to do with the mercury that is used as a preservative in the childhood inoculations? The best we can officially say at this time is that we do not know. However, we do know that mercury is a well documented poisonous substance.

i have jsut got off the phone with a young woman who was telling me of the problems she had going to school in the early 1960s. the rules and regulations in the first grade, which all the children have difficulty conforming to on one level or another, were for her sheer torture. She could not sit still. If she looked out the window, she would forget that she was in a classroom. Many of us had problems with day-dreaming when we were children, but most of us knew where we were at the time. This woman did not. She failed at learning the rudiments of reading that year. When I asked if her mother tried to teach her at home, she said that she does not remember, and that large portions of her memory from that time are blank, as her mind was not processing information to be able to remember it.

She did say that if she had permitted the doctors to medicate her to the extent they would have liked, she would be dead from the side-effects of the antidepressants that had been prescribed for her. She became severely allergic to antidepressants almost as soon as she first started to take them.

When this woman was in her twenties, she was prescribed amphetamines to help her stay awake to her surroundings. These same drugs are often used to help people lose weight. This woman discovered that for her they had exactly the opposite effect. They did not help her with her mental problems, and when she stopped taking them, she gained a tremendous amount of weight, which she has not been able to lose since.

She described to me how difficult it can be to maintain the concentration necessary to do what, for most of us, are simple tasks, such as preparing a meal or reading a book. There have been many times when she has had to put special concentration into putting one foot in front of the other in order to walk where she wanted to go. Crossing a busy street has often been a dangerous project. She described how, if you are mildly dizzy, you can walk and run, but you don[’t feel secure doing those things. She feels dizzy that way all the time.

In 1964, when this lady was a little girl, she was diagnosed as being mentally retarded. She most definitely is not, in the usual sense of that word, as she is able to express herself intellingently and well. Later she was diagnosed with what is known as a Central Auditory Procesing Disorder, as she did not understand voice tones and conversations were impossible to maintain, as she was so easily distracted. When I asked her how this affected her emotionally, she said that when something is with you all your life, you don’t realize that things could be different.

Music therapy helped increase her ability to concentrate. What chiropractors call their Neurological Organization Technique helped, but it is not available where she is living at this time. She would like to tgry a program known as Durr Achievement that started in England and has successfully helped many people with problems similar to hers, but is not certain whether she will be able to get the funding for it. She would like to try, because even though she is forty-four years old, and has two college degreees, she has not been able to hold a job. Her explanation is that getting started in the morning and going to sleep at night are too hard. If most of us said that, it would sound as though we were making fun of ourselves, but for this lady, and many others like her, these things are very difficult.

She has never been married, and she has no children of her own. However, she does have a niece and nephew who live a few hundred miles away, whom she loves dearly and she is hoping that the family will move closer so that she can be with those children more often.

In generations past, people like this woman may have been known as eccentrics, and left to potter through life as best they could. Now, research is being done, Ways and methods to teach people with such disabilities how to function in this increasingly complex society of ours are being worked out. We still have much to learn about what keeps our nervous systoms working optimally, but we are making progress.