I just want to do the best for my son.
When he was in second grade, the notes starting coming home. The calls to pick him up early from school. Unruly? Defiant? Whatever…sometimes you just get one of those teachers…
But honestly, I began to see some of the same behaviors at home. I didn’t want to accept it, but it was true—sometimes. Most of the time, he was the same happy, energetic kid he’d always been. But increasingly, he’d fall into distracted, sullen fits, especially when homework time came around, of course. It made me wonder what they were doing to him in school!
Finally, after sharing experiences with some friends whose kids had undergone similar things, I relented and had my son evaluated. EVALUATED. It’s a creepy word…makes me picture mad psychiatrists with crazy hair and crazier ideas poking around in my son’s brain. But I didn’t know what else to do.
The results were unsatisfying and, in hindsight, predictable. ADHD. Of course, ADHD. I didn’t know what to make of the diagnosis. DIAGNOSIS. Another I’ve come to dislike. It gives me stomach-pangs of fear and distrust. It feels official and heavy, but not necessarily true or helpful.
SO, with the ADHD diagnosis came the prescription. Prescriptions, actually, because my son and I now embarked on a winding journey of frustration as we struggled with medications, dosages and side effects. I didn’t like this process. It felt like so much guesswork
But I wanted to do the best for my son.
On again, off again, the medications seemed to have helpful effects for him at school. Fewer notes, fewer calls. Which sometimes made it easier to overlook the worrying side effects—no appetite, inconsistent sleep, and some ferocious moods after school.
Maybe because they could tell we were playing along with “the plan”, the school started moving on some of the provisions of my son’s new IEP. This movement took the form of afterschool homework support, and another EVALUATION. The results of this evaluation were undecided about the previous ADHD diagnosis, but pretty confident-sounding about classifying my son as having a non-verbal learning disorder, NVLD. His teachers and afterschool helpers nodded earnestly in agreement.
Myself, I wasn’t so clear about what it would mean for my son to have NVLD versus ADHD…or NVLD and ADHD…or neither, because I could easily imagine another EVALUATION with another DIAGNOSIS in another year. What I was clear about was that, in trying to dig into the source of my son’s issue, I was simultaneously feeling more and more invested, more and more “dug in”, but less and less certain that the overall result of all these efforts were actually helping him in the long run. Although he was seemingly more “compliant” at school, he seemed less energetic, eager and curious than before. And more isolated, disconnected from his old interests and friends.
Which brings me here. I’ve been so busy and committed to this dark and twisty rabbit hole that I’ve been ignoring a sort of mounting fear…a quiet panic that everything so far has amounted to a confusion, chasing after this symptom or that result, but missing the root cause entirely. What should I do?
Because I just want to do the best for my son.
Neurologics finds root causes. Using quantitative encephalography (qEEG) and advanced analysis, we directly visualize brain activities in real-time, as your child actually thinks. We use these measurements to construct a deeply informative Brain Map that pinpoints problems and rules out previous misdiagnoses. And we build custom programs to optimize exactly the brain activities that need work. Escape the rabbit hole. Contact Neurologics today.