Diagnose a fictional kid :P

[domestic_engineer]

Yesterday, I was reading the excellent book Save Me A Seat by Sarah Weeks and Gita Varadarajan.

One of the main characters is explicitly said to have APD.  When he goes to the resource room, he's supposed to do the following exercise with noisy and visual distractors in sight:  1st, find a page with no pictures; 2nd, circle all the words that begin with the letter t; then copy the t words, and finally fold the paper in half and turn in.

But what happens is that the character gets through the first step then before remembering the second step his mind goes off on a series of connected tangents  as seen in this quote from the book... 

Quote

 ... The Santa in the snow globe [one of his distractors] is holding a sign that says, HOLLYWOOD, HERE I COME!  That gets me thinking about Evan and Etthan.  I wonder how they're doing in California.  That gets me thinking about the part in Bud, Not Buddy where Bud tries to sneak onto a train with his best friend, Bigs, only he ends up getting left behind with some girl named Deza who wants to kiss him.  I don't know what I'd do if some girl tried to kiss me.  Probably bite her.

Then the resource room teacher prompts him about the next step in his assignment, and the kid has totally lost his train of thought and forces himself to focus.

Sooooooo, my question is this ..... is this mental wondering a characteristic of APD?  or does this character also have ADD that isn't explicitly stated in the book ?

From reading the book, I didn't realize that people with APD struggle with sequencing so much.  is this a typical activity used to help people with APD?

The quoted section from the book is what I imagine is going on in the mind of my kiddo at times. sigh. 

[PeterPan]

The goal of the DSM is to divide up things into separate diagnoses. So no, we're not going to take the symptoms of ADHD and anxiety and call them APD. They'll be comorbid.

[domestic_engineer]

So is it fair to say that this mental narrative is typical of someone with APD?

[PeterPan]

59 minutes ago, domestic_engineer said:

So is it fair to say that this mental narrative is typical of someone with APD?

No, it's obvious ADHD, totally classic. I mean, have you never watched Psych? 

 

 

[domestic_engineer]

Haha. No, I’ve never seen Psych, but now it’s on my watchlist. 
 

Seriously, though - thanks for clearing it up for me. 

[kbutton]

23 hours ago, domestic_engineer said:

From reading the book, I didn't realize that people with APD struggle with sequencing so much.  is this a typical activity used to help people with APD?

Shorter answer--there is real therapy for APD, but yes, this is something people do to help with it. But really, they need to fix/improve the APD.

23 hours ago, domestic_engineer said:

Sooooooo, my question is this ..... is this mental wondering a characteristic of APD?  or does this character also have ADD that isn't explicitly stated in the book ?

More complicated/qualified answer.

So, any LD, developmental issue, problem that makes it a LOT harder to do what you should be able to do is legit distracting. Could that problem be a big enough problem that the child is unable to concentrate on what they are supposed to do? Theoretically, we can ask a child to do something so hard that they wander mentally. I believe this is possible, and I believe that if the child has been subjected to a ton of things that are too hard, we basically are asking them to be distracted and mentally wander. This would be stuff that is poorly scaffolded or outside their zone of proximal development.

You have the added problem that most people use auditory cues to gain attention, give directions, etc., and kids with APD get behaviorally used to being lost. It's just a fact. Suddenly doing something like handing them a list so that they can successfully DO what they are supposed to doesn't mean that they are used to being successful and not just trained to be out to lunch, especially if the task is essentially meaningless, like the one in the book.

Realistically, if you've got some kind of problem like APD or dyslexia or whatever, statistically, you are likely to have more than one (kind of like if you have one autoimmune disorder, you are at risk for others). So, it's likely ADHD, but it's probably NOT just ADHD alone on top of pure APD symptoms--it's the whole ball of wax overlapping and making it all worse (the behavior outworking is greater than the sum of the symptoms). 

I suppose there is a group of kids somewhere with LDs and such that have just one, but I bet that subset is quite small, lol!

If you need a place to start looking into APD remediation, I know an audiologist with the proper training in SW Ohio. If geography makes that absolutely out of the question, the place to start looking for one is on the IGAPS website. https://www.igaps.org/  The audiologist I know does have SOME ability to do SOME kinds of therapy and testing online, but it really depends on the profile of deficits. Some kinds of therapy, such as CAPDOTS, is administered by an audiologist and is adjusted for each client, but because it's a computerized program, it can be used remotely. 

Anyway, APD can often be improved or remediated.