So drumroll please . . . The formal diagnosis goes something like this . . . A Typical Autism - more specifically some variant of PPD-NOS with a secondary diagnosis of a Cognitive Disorder Not Otherwise Specified which is not Mental Retardation (say that three times fast). So now we know what we already knew but have it on paper for all of the agencies that require such a thing. Our boy is just as unique and interesting as we have always believed him to be. ;)
There are other more specific things we were told and specific recommendations for school and such. For instance he processes information very slowly. He will always do so. But, we can make appropriate accommodations for that. In some areas he is very delayed but he can and will improve with the appropriate interventions. He already receives a lot of the help he needs. It will just need to be adjusted and fine tuned.
He has very low verbal cognition but average non-verbal cognition. So less talk and much more visual presentation. We will have to stop talking the poor boy to death as this isn't very useful. All these years of him looking at us like WTF? now makes much more sense. Poor kid. We will have to come up with more visual and hands on stuff. We must also break information down into bite sized tidbits if we want him to remember it. Too much input at one time and he pretty much stops processing. Go figure. We have also discovered that if we make information personally relevant he will retain it with incredible recall and detail. (Seriously the kid can remember an infinite amount of crap from when he was two years old.) However, if we just shovel in novel information and it has no meaning to him personally, he doesn't have the ability to even store it, let alone recall it. This last bit we didn't realize. We will have to come up with new strategies to get the mundane information into that handsome head of his.
I really find this all quite fascinating from a psychological stand point. The brain is amazing.
There are other more specific things we were told and specific recommendations for school and such. For instance he processes information very slowly. He will always do so. But, we can make appropriate accommodations for that. In some areas he is very delayed but he can and will improve with the appropriate interventions. He already receives a lot of the help he needs. It will just need to be adjusted and fine tuned.
He has very low verbal cognition but average non-verbal cognition. So less talk and much more visual presentation. We will have to stop talking the poor boy to death as this isn't very useful. All these years of him looking at us like WTF? now makes much more sense. Poor kid. We will have to come up with more visual and hands on stuff. We must also break information down into bite sized tidbits if we want him to remember it. Too much input at one time and he pretty much stops processing. Go figure. We have also discovered that if we make information personally relevant he will retain it with incredible recall and detail. (Seriously the kid can remember an infinite amount of crap from when he was two years old.) However, if we just shovel in novel information and it has no meaning to him personally, he doesn't have the ability to even store it, let alone recall it. This last bit we didn't realize. We will have to come up with new strategies to get the mundane information into that handsome head of his.
I really find this all quite fascinating from a psychological stand point. The brain is amazing.
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