I love board games and role-playing games, and use them as an illustration when it’s remotely relevant. In this case it is, because although it’s not the only autism and NLD-friendly game, it certainly is high on the list.
This blog has hibernated for a while, five months to be precise, but a mail from the NVLD Project woke me up. Something is finally happening in the field of NVLD, or can we call it development?
The NVLD Project had what they called a submision update about a week ago. It just said that Prudence Fisher, Amy Margolis, Amie Wolf from Columbia Universal Irving Medical Center, together with Mark Riddle from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine had sumbitted a proposal to the DSM Steering committee to include Developmental Visual-Spatial Disorder in future versions of DSM. That’s the name they want for NVLD.
Did you find that clarifying?
NVLD has symptoms that could also look like ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and Bipolar Disorder. The conclusion upon further testing could be NVLD, but NVLD can also coexist with the other diagnosis I mentioned. So, where does it leave you if you received a half-assed examination, which in many cases has led to a rather hesitant diagnosis? Are ASD, ADHD, and Bipolar seen as visuo-spatial deficits? If they’re not, and NVLD doesn’t give the complete picture, where does that leave the individual?
I’ve heard about several cases where testing showed that an adolescent had many of the autism criteria, but the psychologist decided to look for other explanation. After that no one is looking, even when it’s obvious that there’s a good reason to do so. I’ve never heard such crap, because if the testing matches the autism symptoms, or NVLD, it doesn’t make sense to ignore the result.
Visual Spatial Processing Disorder refers to the brain having problems interpreting what the eyes see. This isn’t new at all. It’s always been a key indicator in NVLD, but is it the only one? I’m not dead set against the choices the researchers behind this submission made, or the language they used, but I want more clarification. It seems to me that they see NVLD as solely a scholastic difficulty.
The accepted hypothesis is that NVLD is caused by damage or disorder of white matter in the brain’s right hemisphere. This could be why the brain has problems processing the information coming through the eyes . Does that mean that it could be more than we can handle sometimes, that we experience sensory overload? That’d make sense to me, and it’s one more major overlap between ASD and NVLD.
Personally, I’d like to see more focus on the consequences or the outcome, and whether the different conditions are close enough that it’d make more sense to treat them as subgroups within the same spectrum. It’s been said that autism isn’t a learning disability. It’s just that so many autistic have this disability in adition to ASD, but isn’t that an indication that the condition affects learning? I suppose the idea is that NVLD is all about scholastic skills, and that all other symptoms can be explained with visuospatial issues. I can see that as a logical explanation for many of the symptoms, but I’m not convinced that all consequences are a result of learning disabilities.
We have been waiting for an official diagnosis for a long time (research has been going on since late 1960’s), longer than some of the subgroups within the Autism Specrum Disorder, so there shouldn’t be any problems with documentation. Regarding this first attempt to get NVLD into DSM, I’m not sure it’ll succeed. It’d help, but I believe they’re missing the distance across the spectrum.