Ever thought about taking your child to a therapist? READ THIS.

[LizPLANit]

David Grove, Ph.D., diagnosed our oldest son with ADHD, OCD and dysgraphia in 2000, and has continued with his behavioral therapy ever since. Over the years, he has also helped my husband, our youngest son and me through the tough times and the times when we just needed to decompress. There are not words to express how my family feels about Dr. Grove. He took a family of quirky, obsessive, attention-lacking creative types and made us realize how normal we really are, or more accurately, how there is “no such thing as normal.” Our happiness, contentment and general healthy outlook can be attributed to his ongoing guidance and support.

Dr. Grove is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in private practice. He also teaches college courses, works with children at a residential treatment facility, leads outpatient chemical dependency groups, and is an area school psychologist, a Head Start consultant, director of a Community Mental Health Center, and a forensic psychologist. He was selected as a finalist for the Psychologist of the Year award, honored as a Diplomat by the American Board of Psychological Specialties, and identified as an expert in Forensic Psychology. Dr. Grove also received the Volunteer of the Year Award by the Heartland Area Education Agency for his efforts to educate professionals in the area of cross-cultural counseling. This, in my mind, puts him squarely in the category of ‘expert’.

In my ongoing quest to help my kids and others who have organizational problems through School PLANit, I convinced Dr. Grove to sit down with me to answer questions on organization, ADHD and other Learning Disabilities, and our public school system and teachers in general.

I'm sorry this is so long, but I just couldn't cut any of his answers, I thought it was all so useful, particularly if you're new to the ADHD thing.  This interview was copied with permission from www.SchoolPLANit.com

Q: ADD and ADHD seem so prevalent in our society. Do you think ADD/ADHD is more common now than it was 40 or 50 years ago? 
A: I think ADHD is just as prevalent now as it was then; it’s the requirements of society that have changed. I believe ADHD is more likely to show up when it’s counterproductive to today’s high-technology demands. Sitting in front of a computer and listening to someone talk for hours from grade school to high school is difficult if you have ADHD.

Forty years ago, from junior high on, you could choose more than half your day to work on topics that sparked your interest. But now those options aren’t available because everyone has to take the same number of classes and core classes. It brings out the problem a whole lot more.

Q: I’ve read a theory that ADHD may be a holdover from our hunter/gatherer past. What do you think about that?
A: I would tend to agree, because the skills that make someone successful in a hunter/gatherer society resemble the traits that characterize ADHD. Those skills don’t work well in a domesticated society. When we started growing crops and milking the cows every day, we began to repeat the same activities — and as people moved into cities, the daily repetition was amplified. People with ADHD aren’t going to excel in that environment. At one point in history, the person with the most ADHD tendencies was probably leader of the clan because they were hyper-vigilant, they had extra energy, and they were more likely to pursue higher-risk activities like exploring new areas to get food. If you were a low-risk person, you would have stayed in the cave and died of starvation.

Q: Are most learning and anxiety disorders inherited? 
A: First, I’d like to clarify that it’s only a learning disability if it inhibits learning. If you live in a society that doesn’t require a certain type of learning, it may not be a learning disability. For example, if you are in a society where there isn’t much reading going on, then you can’t have a reading disability because no one reads. It is completely relative to the culture you are in.

Second, a learning disability is not just determined by how you compare to the average person in a given area, but also by how far your performance in that area is below your intelligence. For instance, if you have average intelligence, then your reading ability would have to be significantly below average for it to be identified as a disability. A learning disability has to be compared to something, with your culture factored in.

But yes, there is a genetic predisposition for learning and anxiety disabilities. Panic attacks and things like that do tend to run in families. Can some of those behaviors be learned? I would say partially, yes. If your parent has a learning or anxiety disability, you observe how they handle certain situations and, in some aspects, learn their response. But I don’t think that’s the only answer. I know there are studies where twins are separated at birth and raised separately, and the concordance rate of anxiety disorders, learning disabilities and such things are pretty high — higher than you would expect. So there is a genetic predisposition.

Q: Do you have a list of red flags in a child’s behavior that may mean they should be tested? 
A: When children are unhappy, I look for a couple of things. One, is there something happening at home that needs to be altered? Two, is the learning environment relatively stimulating for the average person in the class? If the environmental situations seem acceptable, then I look at the variables within the child like memory and attention span. I think if family life is good and they are attending a decent school, but they have problems socially or developmentally in school — or they are just not happy — I would suggest seeking out professional advice. Particularly if a child’s unhappiness can’t be attached to specific events.

Q: What exactly do the tests you give show? 
A: The first test I give is called a G-factor, a general intelligence level test. In order to identify a problem, let’s say a learning disability, there has to be a significant deviation of one particular skill set from your overall intellectual ability. Once I get a G-factor, that can be further analyzed for other subsets of ability and intelligence that are significantly below average. For example, if you have an IQ of 100 and all the other subsets are clustered plus or minus 5 points of 100, like 95 to 105, that is good. But if one of those subsets are an 80, you’ve got a problem.

Let’s say short-term memory comes back at 80, but your general level is 100. That is a significant difference and so it tells me that memory is going to cause you problems because you are not able to use your overall intelligence effectively, particularly for things that require short-term memory. The results are compared to an overall average, but mostly to your own intelligence factor.

Q: Do you have to be a psychologist to give these tests?
A: Yes. Only psychologists are qualified to give these tests. One thing that separates psychologists from other mental health professionals is that psychologists are trained to give standardized tests. None of the other professionals are licensed to do that.

Q: What type of therapy do you use? 
A: I use a mix of existential and cognitive behavior therapy. The existential part is to help each person develop the healthiest interpretation of what is happening to them and who they are. For example, when someone gets ready to give a speech and starts to feel anxiety, one person may interpret that as, “Oh my gosh, I’m lousy at this,” while another person may interpret it as, “I’m anxious, this must be really important; I hope I can stay focused.” So how you interpret how you feel determines how you react to it. The existential part is asking, “What does how you feel mean to you?” It’s how you choose to interpret a situation. You are responsible for who you are and how you react, even though you don’t have control over what happens to you.

The nuts-and-bolts part is cognitive behavioral therapy. How do you change the meaning you’ve attached to things? What is a better way to interpret a situation, and how are we going to change it? It is essentially your temperament. Some people are born with a real vigilance and notice lots of things. That can make you a nervous wreck or it can make you a very detailed person; it’s just how you manifest it.

Q: I hear so many parents say that giving children drugs for anxiety, ADHD, OCD, and other disorders “alters the child’s true self,” or “takes away from what makes a child special or unique.” Other parents point to the idea that Einstein had OCD or ADHD, and if he had been medicated we would have missed out on all that profound knowledge. Do ADD or anti-anxiety meds really change the personality or intelligence of a person? Are we taking geniuses away from society by medicating people with these disorders? 
A: I would have to say no. I believe the medications we use enhance an individual’s ability to use his or her intelligence in ways that are productive. Just think what Einstein could have done if he had been medicated. It wouldn’t have changed his thinking, it just would have clarified it for him.

Through clinical studies, we know there is clearly an improvement in a patient’s ability to use his or her intelligence with medication. And if using your intelligence — your cognitive ability — is important in the culture you live in, then it probably makes sense to enable people to do that. As long as the side effects of the medication don’t preclude that.

Most people can tolerate medication for anxiety, ADHD, and other learning disabilities quite well. I would say that the medications we are using enhance a person’s ability to utilize what they already have. It doesn’t make you any more of a different person — no more than if you drink a cup of coffee or if you work out to help you stay focused or calm. Unfortunately, the normal ways we use to change body chemistry, like working out and diet, don’t work for some people. So we add medication to help. It’s really no different than the changes some people get from exercise or diet changes. Every time you eat anything, you’re changing your body chemistry. Medication is essentially eating a combination of molecules that will enhance your ability to do certain things without hurting you in other areas.

Part of the problem is the massive drug scare with our culture — the notion that if you take drugs, it somehow makes you a bad or weak person. Which is not true, because you are perfectly fine except that you could contribute more to the welfare of others and live out your values better with medication.

I can use myself as an example. One of my deep values is to help people, listen to people, and work with people. So when I take medication, it allows me to do that more effectively without hurting other parts of my personality and intelligence. Back when I was digging ditches right out of high school, before I went to college — which is one of the experiences that made me want to go to college — I didn’t need ADD medication. I just needed to know how far to dig and how deep. But once I set foot in college, it became clear that I needed the medication in order to use my intelligence.

Q: Why is it so hard for some children and adults to be organized?
A: There is a part of the brain called the reticular activating system, and that part of the brain scans the environment and tries to decide what it should pay attention to. Some people very quickly pick out what they are supposed to be paying attention to. For example, some kids know that if the teacher is talking, THAT is what they should be paying attention to. For other people, the reticular activating system is still scanning ... so yes, the teacher is talking, but have you ever seen a bird that red? That person’s reticular activating system is not as effective at screening out and choosing what to focus on. And that is just the input part.

The second part is categorical thinking. Once you get information in your mind, you start grouping things into clusters. Let’s say there is someone writing things on a blackboard that represent things I should be learning. Then there are people talking behind me and that represents something social going on. So I have to decide which one of those things I am going to organize myself around. People who have trouble organizing have problems just deciding the main thing to organize themselves around.

Another part of organization is that some people have intrusive thoughts that prevent them from accomplishing their task. For example, they could be sitting at the table and start sorting their bills, and just as they start to sort the bills they notice some of the bills come in shorter envelopes, so then they start to wonder why that is. Then they start organizing short ones from long ones or some other tangent. That is just the brain having a difficult time focusing and choosing the salient feature of the environment you should be focusing on.

Q: Does disorganization cause or increase stress and anxiety?
A: It does for me! I would say yes. But it depends on the expectations. If you are in an environment that demands you to organize quickly and respond to something someone else tells you to respond to — which isn’t something you would choose to do — then it’s going to be a lot harder. But I have to say that if you are highly motivated, particularly if you are a person with ADHD who is highly motivated by something you are deeply interested in, you tend to be hyper-focused on organizing.

There are a lot of adolescents who can sit for an hour and a half sorting their CD music collections into categories. The problem with organizing for ADHD people is that there is a big motivation factor, too. If it is of average or low interest, people who do not have ADHD can stay focused on the task.

People with ADHD have difficulties initiating average or low-interest tasks. Once they start, sometimes they can continue. But initiating it is very difficult. The part of the brain where initiating behavior comes from is the frontal lobe. That is where initiating anything happens. You can think all kinds of things, but you only choose to initiate very few of the things that go through your mind … thankfully, because many of us would be in prison if we initiated all the things that go through our minds. The initiation of low-interest activities leads to disorganization. Anxiety then comes from the chaos and disappointment that you get from others.

Q: Can becoming organized or embracing a system for daily chores decrease adult or child anxiety?
A: Helping a child organize and using positive motivational techniques like social rewards of encouragement, approval, and even hugs for little kids, helps reduce the anxiety around a task. If children can have a system that organizes them quickly and easily, a system they can master, that’s one skill they can carry throughout their lifetime. And that would take care of one aspect of ADHD or anxiety that they wouldn’t have to deal with any longer. Particularly for kids getting ready to go off to college. They need that skill to succeed.

Q: If an adult or child is highly disorganized, is that a symptom of a bigger issue?
A: Most of the time it is a symptom of anxiety, because that interferes with organizing. Heightened anxiety or hyper-vigilance makes your need to feel comfortable override your need to manage all the things that are important to you. Then there are ADHD types whose brains don’t allow them to categorically think and focus long enough to do what they started out to do, because there are so many other shiny things that get in the way between step one and step two.

Q: I recently interviewed teachers about students’ organization skills. When I asked why some students weren’t turning in homework or completing assignments, one teacher responded, “The lazy ones don’t do their work, there’s nothing I can do about that.” What are your thoughts on that statement?
A. Hmm, to put it as mildly as I can, that is crap. Let’s look at a theory here. Theories do one of four things: They describe, explain, predict or control. The simplest theory is one that just gives something a name. So this teacher’s theory is called “laziness.” It is the simplest way to solve a problem. Call it “lazy,” period. Your work here is done. In essence, it usually ends up describing the person who has the theory. “When I don’t like doing something, I don’t do it and I call myself lazy.” That’s a projection of the teacher’s internal structure.

But the truth is, labeling doesn’t help the teacher or the student. Once you’ve classified him as lazy, then what do you do? How do you de-lazy someone? A theory that leads to some intervention — now there’s a theory you can use. So if you actually want to work with someone, you need to come up with a different theory. It could be that the child is bored. It could be that he doesn’t learn through that channel. It could be that research-based assignments are inappropriate for this person. He might spend three hours looking for the answers and never learning them because he’s tired from trying to figure out where they are — versus if he was just given the answers in the beginning, he could have been studying them.

It could be all kinds of different reasons. But labeling something is the weakest theory. When someone says a child is lazy, I ask, “What is your intended intervention for that? If that is your theory of what the problem is, how are you going to de-lazy that child?” Let’s try to think of some theories that can lead to an intervention to actually help the child.

Q: Researchers are making huge strides in understanding how the human brain works. Do you think this will and should affect how we teach our children? 
A: Absolutely. One thing we have found out is that multi-modal input is the most powerful teaching tool. Most schools are trying to move towards that. Watch, do, teach.

Q: My favorite idea you gave us was to get a separate set of textbooks to have at home. It seemed so simple, but made the biggest difference. What is your personal favorite tip for disorganized students?
A: I actually have two, but they’re kind of related. One is the two sets of textbooks. Most homework doesn’t get done because ordinary good kids just forgot which book to bring home or forgot to grab it when they went back to their locker at the end of the day. Two, for kids who just don’t do well with planners, have them call home and leave a message on the machine at the end of a class or half way through the day. Just a simple “Math page 24” or “Read chapter two for English.” That way, when the parents get home, they can write down the assignments and check that they are complete.

Q: After we checked out a separate set of books, we had a few people say we were “enabling” our son’s irresponsibility. What is your response to that?
A: If you know someone has difficulty with something and the goal is for them to learn what is being taught, this might not be the best time to teach them they need to remember their textbook. You’re setting them up for failure. Find something else to use to teach responsibility, but not grades and knowledge. If you want to teach them to remember things, use their baseball glove or the trash, but don’t use textbooks as a way to teach that, because in the process they’re not learning what they’re supposed to be learning.

Q: Do you think our public school system stresses kids out?
A: It’s such a mixed bag. I’ve been in schools that are so well laid out and established with teachers that are so flexible with multi-modal techniques, the kids just flourish. It is such a school-by-school case. Teaching is an art as much as it is a profession. And part of it is the quality of the artist — the teacher. You can give a terrible teacher a great system and they won’t be good. The big variable is recruiting good teachers. Teachers who love what they do.

Q: How do you know if a teacher is good?
A: That has to be established while they are in college. Some colleges are sending their prospective education majors out to real classrooms their first year. That is the number-one improvement made in training teachers. They’re going out into the schools and making decisions much earlier than in the past. Getting these students out into real-world teaching environments lets them experience the profession’s day-to-day challenges. They find out if it is or isn’t for them, before they invest years in an education major. Once you have the degree, you feel like you have to stay with the profession, even if you hate it.

Q: Are the tests in public schools given by licensed psychologists?
A: The tests schools give used to be very similar to the ones I would give. Even though there are school psychologists, most are not licensed psychologists. Most districts have gone to curriculum-based measurement tests, so instead of looking for learning disabilities or problem areas, they try to determine how a person’s learning is based on their ability to master the curriculum. These tests look at “what we teach in math” and how fast or accurately a student can do a bunch of math problems for the curriculum at their grade level.

Q: You know, I think our public schools are pretty broken. What is your opinion on curriculum-based testing?
A: It does have some value. But my thought is that schools give the tests because the student is probably already having trouble. So what you end up with is, “We thought you weren’t good at math, but now we know.” You just know to what degree.

Curriculum-based testing doesn’t help with identifying the underlying difficulties that are causing the problem. Maybe it’s a visual-perceptive problem. Maybe if you look at math problems that are all crowded together on a sheet, you can’t differentiate between them to solve them. These tests don’t identify what the problem is. They define it by assuming you have average ability, and if your ability to match the curriculum is at the “17th percentile or lower of the grade below you,” you need extra help.

There are laws that regulate special education, but each district implements them differently. The curriculum-based tests can help some, but they don’t look at the underlying processes that may be causing the problem. It could be anxiety, memory, visual perception, fine motor skills or any number of other issues. So the biggest downfall of curriculum-based testing is that you miss a certain percentage of kids and never really focus on and help solve the underlying problems.

Q: Do you think teachers should be given more training in the psychological and emotional needs of children?
A: It does help. I just did a workshop for grade-school teachers dealing with kids with anxiety and ADHD issues. The teachers were very receptive and I felt they came away with ideas that will be helpful to them. A sophisticated understanding of child development and developmental psychology in learning environments is extremely beneficial. But again, it comes down to the quality of the teacher. That is the key. If the teacher is a good teacher and likes their job, they will use the information. If not, they’re going to go back and say, “That guy was an idiot.”

Q: Are there any tests they could give to help identify who would be a good teacher?
A: No, it’s just not that simple. If you look at the human experience, people change over time. So you might be a great teacher for the first ten years, then something happens and you just wish you could quit, but now you’ve got the golden handcuffs. Your insurance and your retirement put your back against the wall, so you have to stick it out — and that doesn’t make for a good teacher anymore.

Q: What is the biggest failing of our public schools, from your point of view?
A: Utilizing new information about how people learn and incorporating practical applications of that information in the classroom. We need to have more up-to-date information and training available. That, of course, means they will be going to more teacher resource meetings, which means the kids won’t be in school then, but that is something we need to figure out. Because keeping the teachers on top of the new research and ensuring they use it in the classroom is vital.

Q: The public education system diagnoses children with learning disorders differently from the private sector. How does this impact those children?
A: I think that schools are charged with the responsibility to teach children an established, developmentally appropriate curriculum. Their way of looking at a problem is directly linked to the learning process and how it affects performance in school. It’s attached only to the curriculum.

Outside school, we are looking at a much broader picture. It includes that child in all environments, not just classroom learning. What we try to do is help identify more of the underlying processes and what is happening across several environments. Schools are much too narrow sometimes and don’t realize the effect of all the variables, for example, neurological problems — in particular learning disabilities — because you can’t see them. So they might not recognize the problem until a kid is in 8th grade, and then it’s virtually too late.

The diagnostic categories used by the public schools cause problems in communication between schools and the private sector. I do think it is getting better, because of things like 504 plans that can be implemented if a child is not eligible for special ed. But a lot of it has to do with the interaction of professionals and schools, and that is hard to make happen.

I think the lack of clear communication between schools and the private sector has a negative impact on kids. It’s gotten better, but it’s still not where it should be.

[hholllyy426]

I didn't read it all but from I have read I agree with him so far. Will read more later, thanks.

[Barabell]

Bump to read later.