The Adventure of the Co-Occurrence

This week I listened to an interview with Dr. Amanda Kirby, the UK's leading expert in dyspraxia. One of the things she talked about was how people who are neurodivergent, the general term for being dyspraxic, autistic and many other things, are extremely likely to have a co-occurrence of conditions. She uses an analogy where each diagnosis is a bucket and each trait is a ball thrown into the bucket. In order to obtain a full diagnosis you need to fill the bucket with balls, so you can end up with a bucket that has quite a few balls in but don't have enough to have a diagnosis of that condition. 

One day I'll find a subject which doesn't have a related Peanuts image...

This got me thinking about my own brain. I know that my dyspraxic bucket is full, but what of the other buckets? It's something I've always wondered- just how neurodivergent am I? Before I go on, I should point out that self-diagnosis is not the way forward and you should speak to a GP or other professional if you have concerns. This is an exercise and I'm not going to claim outright that I have any of these conditions.

Let's go through some neurodivergent conditions and see if some balls end up in the buckets. I'll start with dyslexia, a condition that dyspraxia is often confused with. There's a similarity in that they are both essentially processing disorders but dyslexia is specifically about processing language. This is an area which I have very few balls. English has long been one of my strengths. From a young age I was reading books for older age groups and towards the end of primary school I was in a gifted and talented group for English. I also coped well when I started to learn other languages at secondary school and got a 'B' at GCSE in two foreign languages. 

Next up, dyscalculia. This is to do with maths and one definition describes it as 'a persistent difficulty in understanding numbers'. Out of all the conditions I'm discussing today this is the one that I know the least about but it immediately rings bells with me. Whilst in school I generally excelled in English, I struggled with maths to the extent my parents sought out extra tuition outside of school for fear I wasn't going to make a C grade at GCSE. It's hard for me to say whether this is truly dyscalculia but traits like 'weak mental arithmetic skills' and 'high levels of mathematics anxiety' certainly seem familiar. I do feel a level of anxiety when I have to do some mental calculations for whatever reason and feel much more comfortable writing them down or preferably using a calculator, even for simple sums. There are definitely quite a few balls in this bucket.

Onto the more well known conditions now and attention deficit disorder, ADD. You can often add an 'h' for 'hyperactive' but there's no way that aspect describes me- I have always been, and remain, incredibly lazy. Then again, I whilst I don't buzz around the place, I find it really hard to sit still for any length of time and I couldn't imagine working in an office all day. An important trait of ADD is a limited attention span which I certainly have. I struggled to watch any film that is longer than two hours, often shorter if the film is less engaging. I really hate training and meetings because I can soon lose interest and want to move around. 

Finally, let's look at autism. This is an interesting one because I work with children with autism so I know a fair amount about it. Two of the big areas, which are linked of course, are 'communication' and 'social interaction'. This is where things get really tricky. I know I'm not the best communicator and I do find social interaction difficult but are my minor issues really autistic traits? I think it's safe to say I couldn't fill the autism bucket with balls and there's no way I'd be diagnosed with autism. But there are certainly things I relate too. 

There are two traits in particular of autism which I relate. One is sensory difficulties. I don't like loud, high-pitched sounds, which is a really specific thing but comes up more often than you might expect. There's something about the noise of motorbike racing past that I find deeply uncomfortable. Then there's the autistic trait of having obsessive special interests. I find the old interests don't do away but I gradually become obsessed with new things and sometimes revert back to old ones. Doctor Who, film and wildlife are the three big ones and it's the latter that I've fallen back into big time over the last few months. 

The thing about all this is that the brain is complicated and there are problems with the way we diagnose neruodivergent conditions. It's almost certain that people with one diagnosed conditions have strong traits of some of the others. Indeed, every human being has some traits, some more than others. No two people with dyspraxia or autism or anything else are the same and whilst the label can be helpful in giving them support and an identity, it can be limiting in really describing the person's needs. My dyspraxia bucket is full and the other buckets have a distribution of balls amongst them too. The brain is a hugely complicated organ and it will take a lifetime for me to understand how mine works.