Hi everyone!

[Hoppingmouse]

Hi, my name is Linda. My boyfriend is an OT student and through observing me he informally diagnosed me with dyspraxia a while back. I got checked out by a psychologist and she told me I have been having difficulties relating to working memory and perceptual reasoning. My verbal reasoning is very high. I can't remember what the other scores were because I don't have the full report yet from my psychologist but she can't diagnose me with a specific learning disability, even though in my daily life these problems cause me extreme difficulty. I have also wondered whether I have ADD (both involve deficits in working memory which is my worst area). I have issues relating to anxiety which my psychologist believes is causing my problems with working memory, but generally my first reaction is not to freak out about things when I make a mistake... it's just that eventually I reach such a point of frustration that anxiety becomes inevitable. In other words I think the anxiety is the product not the cause.

I have had to give up on nursing as a career because I couldn't organize myself properly. I could never remember what I had to do next and people would interrupt to see if they could help (when all I needed was to remember what I was supposed to be doing). I was never as fast as the other nurses, for example they would get frustrated when I was drawing up medications, and I would forget things I needed, and any procedure was always difficult. It became very embarrassing. I can't do sums in my head so I always need a piece of paper or a calculator.

Learning to drive and to touch type was a real challenge, but now I have a pretty good level of proficiency at both through practice. When I was learning I was pretty much was living on my nerves every time I stepped into the drivers seat.

I would like to learn how to improve myself and get support for my condition. The problem I see is twofold. 1) I don't have a diagnosis. 2) Even if I did I live in Australia, where the local GP thinks dyspraxia means a type of brain injury, and most people don't know anything about it. My psychologist is probably the most qualified person I could talk to in the state, but about all she has suggested is psychotherapy for my anxiety and becoming a 'classic academic' (like there is any such job...). I have done an honours degree and I know the demands of research on my poorly organised brain, unfortunately. Currently I am looking at doing exercise physiology as a career because of less multitasking but its gonna mean another degree.

These questions should probably go on a discussion forum somewhere but I'd love to find out if there is anything else that is taken into consideration for a diagnosis of dyspraxia besides the WAIS? Does anyone know the criteria for getting diagnosed with the WAIS?

Cheers

[AlleyCat]

Hi Linda and welcome to the forum. I have to say that it seems as if your GP and the psychologist you saw are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard! If the GP thinks that dyspraxia is something which only occurs as the result of a brain injury, then he or she has got a lot to learn. Whilst it is true that people can acquire dyspraxia after having a stroke or as a result of a head injury, the vast majority of people who have it have what is known as developmental dyspraxia, which is present from the earliest years of life and has no obvious cause. Developmental dyspraxia should be taken no less seriously than dyspraxia which is acquired as the result of a head injury or stroke, because its effects on someone's life chances can be massive. As you have already discovered, having developmental dyspraxia can prevent someone from pursuing the career they want and, in my opinion, in the vast majority of cases this is due to other people's ignorance of the condition. Most people with dyspraxia seem to have a mild or moderate form of it, but even this can lead to someone not achieving the success which he or she deserves, as other people can be intolerant of someone who perhaps takes a bit longer to do a physical task or who doesn't grasp how to do it the first time.

The psychologist's suggestion that the only career path for you might be as a 'classic academic' just makes me want to scream! It's basically a dismissive fob-off and exactly the career path that my own mother used to go on about as being the one for me as, apparently, I was 'so clever.' Instead of going on about how clever I supposedly was and praising my academic work, I would have much preferred her not to have dismissed the teenage me, who was telling her that I struggled to do practical things and that I was (rightly, as it turns out) worried about what future implications that would have for me. If she hadn't dismissed me like she did, because I was 'clever,' then I could have been diagnosed with dyspraxia years before I was and perhaps had some kind of support. When people insist that we ought to be able to find a career because we are 'good academically', the result often is that they fail to look realistically at what we might be able to achieve (and be happy doing) if we received the right kind of support.

As for the WAIS, there is no reason why you shouldn't have been diagnosed with dyspraxia as a result of this, as that's how I got my diagnosis. I'd actually gone for an assessment for suspected dyslexia, a diagnosis I would have preferred (as far more people are aware of it) but the psychologist said that the areas I scored significantly lower in indicated I had dyspraxia. He actually stated on my report that I had dyspraxia, with the result that I was able to get some kind of support from my University. It's quite possible that you could also have ADD- although my diagnosis was just for dyspraxia, I've often thought that various things I did as a child indicated I had the inattentive subtype of ADD. Someone with ADD would have a deficit in working memory, as well as having problems with the visual parts of the WAIS. When I did the WAIS, the main part of the assessment which the psychologist said indicated I had dyspraxia was the Processing Speed index, which consisted of Digit Symbol Coding and Symbol Search tests. To score well in these parts of the assessment, you need to have good motor speed, which is something someone with dyspraxia would not be able to achieve. When you get your report back, if your scores in the Processing Speed part of the WAIS are low, in my opinion it would definitely indicate that you have dyspraxia. As I have said, there is no reason why you could not be diagnosed with dyspraxia as a result of completing the WAIS, but I'm not sure what you would do if your psychologist is refusing to do this. I am wondering which part of Australia you are in, as perhaps there are psychologists in areas such as Sydney and Melbourne who would be more competent than the one you saw. If you want more information on dyspraxia, you should take a look at the UK Dyspraxia Foundation website. There's also a Dyspraxia USA website, which has quite an informative page for adults with dyspraxia. I would have thought there would have been an Australian one you could go to for advice, but unfortunately the website for the Australia Dyspraxia Association didn't seem to want to load when I tried to go on there earlier today.

[Hoppingmouse]

Thanks AlleyCat. I appreciate that you can relate to my situation. Unfortunately the only site I have seen for Australians is for dyspraxic children and I think even they are poorly funded. I read they were appealing for more money a while back and now their website isn't working. Promising isn't it?

In my case I don't really know if I would meet the criteria by the WAIS because of the processing speed tasks, which I don't think were fantastic but I don't remember her saying they were especially low. I am not great at clerical tasks but I have had a bit of practice by now since I am 27 and over the years have definitely had some practice working against my strengths (especially in honours year which involved a lot of clerical type checking...I nearly quit a dozen times). In the processing tasks I also had a couple of errors which the psychologist did not expect, so I was obviously working at my maximum speed. I have always been slower learning motor tasks. For example I was the poorest at typing class at high school, always the last to finish, but by now I have had so much practice writing assignments that I guess I am about average for someone my age. I think the real trouble happens when I am asked to do something I haven't done before.

I remember my psychologist said that my working memory was in the bottom 10% and that was my lowest score, but she still considered it a borderline result. It seems that OTs base their assessments differently. Maybe that would compensate for learned skills such as typing and more basic clerical tasks.

[Hoppingmouse]

Well my WAIS scores are in. verbal 108-119 at 85th percentile, Perceptual reasoning 84-97 at 25th percentile, Working memory 72-85 at 6th percentile, processing speed 82-98 or 23rd percentile. I am confused. She also said there isn't a big enough difference between some of the scores. She also said something about if one score had been a point lower I would have qualified for a learning disability but I don't know which one (or which learning disability). Anyone have clues?
From your experiences is this a typical or near typical result for dyspraxia. Is my psychologist just nitpicking at numbers? Thanks.

[AlleyCat]

Didn't she give you the exact score for each, rather than just the ranges? It would be easier to see what's going on if you had those, as the difference between the bottom and top ends of each of the ranges is statistically very important. I'm surprised that you weren't given an overall score for Verbal IQ and an overall score for Performance IQ, as the difference between these two is often used to determine whether someone has a specific condition, such as dyslexia or dyspraxia. I was told that, if there's a difference of 10 points between overall Verbal IQ and overall Performance IQ scores, it indicates that there's a problem. When people have dyspraxia, the Verbal IQ score is normally significantly higher than the Performance IQ score- I read that, vice versa, when people have dyslexia, the Performance IQ score is often significantly higher than the Verbal IQ score. However, if someone has more than one condition (eg both dyslexia and dyspraxia), I would have thought that the profile wouldn't be as clear cut as this.

Your verbal score is higher than the scores for the other sections, so it could be said that you have dyspraxia, although I'm a bit surprised that your verbal score wasn't even higher than it is, as your posts on this forum indicate that you have a high level of language ability, so this leads me to wonder if you could have ADHD as well as dyspraxia? I recall reading that people with ADHD might not do particularly well in any section of the WAIS because they get distracted so easily. I also remember reading that the working memory score is often particularly low in people with ADHD- your score in that section indicates that your working memory is likely to be causing you significant problems in your day-to-day life. I'm not sure what learning disability the psychologist was thinking of (perhaps you could ask her?), but it's clear that your working memory is letting you down. If you're interested in reading more about WAIS profiles and how they relate to diagnoses of dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD, a good book is That's the Way I Think Dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD explained by David Grant.

If you can get it, it would definitely be worth having an assessment with an Occupational Therapist. I've never been offered anything like this over here in the UK, and I'm not sure what the chances of having something like this would be in Australia, but they're probably quite common in the US. Out of interest, I was looking on Youtube for Manual Dexterity tests and found this, which is used in the US:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXn0Eea18Pk

If people suspected of having dyspraxia (or developmental coordination disorder, as it is sometimes called) were given these types of tests to do, it would very quickly be obvious that there was a problem with coordination and we would be less likely to be expected to go into areas of work which are unsuitable for us.