Dyslexia Misdiagnosis

*NOTE* Something went funky the first time I posted this (had a few blogger is unavailable warnings). As a result it seems that there was some paragraph formatting errors, as well as the loss of the end of one paragraph, and the complete deletion of another. Which made my post both confusing and actually contradicted itself by deleting my counterarguments :) I have reposted it with the changes italicized. *ENDNOTE*


The great posts over at Dr. Eide's Nuerolearning Blog continue. Yesterday brought us a post on the mis-diagnosis of dyslexia. I've certainly seen enough evidence of this in the past. However, I also feel that it is worthwhile discussing the overuse of the term Dyslexia for any academically evaluated reading problem that may be the result of other conditions.

Dyslexia is one of those disorders that lead to a lot of pseudo-specialized clinics popping up that rely on reading and decoding tasks to "diagnose" the condition. Unfortunately, like many of the education based disorders it is one that is typically defined by the resulting symptoms as opposed to the underlying causal criteria.

A quick look at definitions of Dyslexia online come up with such gems as:

"a reading disorder characterized by reading ability below the expected level given a child's age, school grade, and intelligence."

"An impairment of the ability to read."

Well there is a heck of a lot of things that can cause those symptoms. Actually last time I checked every diagnosable learning condition caused those.

The EIDE blog points to potential differential diagnosis:

• Carelessness / Motivation
• ADD/ADHD
• Pervasive Developmental Disorders
• Depression / ODD
• ID/MR

While the Eide blog posting describes these as conditions that are often misdiagnosed when students are actually experiencing something more inline with specific Dyslexia, I would argue that this is certainly a two way street with a number of individuals with these conditions being quickly given a dyslexic label by those who assess for the presence of dyslexia alone.

In the end we are probably looking at cases where people are being overly influenced by the type of conditions they are looking for as opposed to evaluating with a blank slate type of mentality. It very likely goes in both directions, and I strongly suggest glancing at the Eide posting.

It's brief but worth a read. CLICK HERE to take a look. Make sure you go all the way to the bottom to see a great reading list and suggested links.