Читать книгу Dyslexia and ADHD - The Miracle Cure - Wynford Dore - Страница 13

Amongst the ill informed, there has always been this long-running view that problems such as dyslexia and ADHD are not real conditions. Going back to the seventies and eighties, a lot of people thought they were nothing more than excuses given by middle-class parents, who wanted their children to be high achievers.

Even today, these attitudes still manifest themselves. In November 2005, an hour-long Dispatches documentary entitled Dyslexia the Myth went out on Channel 4 in the UK. This programme attacked everybody in the learning difficulties world. It attacked teachers for using the wrong teaching methods; it attacked the Dyslexia Institute for using the wrong programmes; unbelievably, it attacked the Dore Achievement Centre saying that we had ‘no research’; it attacked parents for not communicating enough with their children.

As you can imagine, it just incensed everyone. Every parent and every teacher knows that children with learning difficulties are suffering from something very, very real. The fact that some so-called experts still refuse to acknowledge that learning difficulties have any scientific basis is scary.

I am amazed how little some people have actually thought through the problem. The fact is learning difficulties like dyslexia are real conditions. If you teach a child something and they have already forgotten it the next day, are they being difficult? Do they choose to forget what they have already learned? Of course not! It is a tragic condition and it is astounding how little understanding exists about what these children and adults have to put up with. No one chooses to be forgetful, no one chooses to be disorganised, no one chooses to find reading difficult, and no one chooses to find concentration difficult. These things are beyond their control and it is very cruel to think of them as stupid, lazy or thick.

We now know that many children with issues like Susie’s are actually extremely bright. It is the level of a person’s creativity that gives us a clue about their underlying intelligence. Hence, there are many famous businessmen, scientists and artists who have enormous creativity and intelligence, but struggle with the basics such as reading and writing. Indeed, you might be surprised at the number of people rumoured to have ADHD or dyslexia.

Many high-profile people are reported to suffer, or have suffered. Amongst them are Richard Branson, John Lennon, Tom Cruise, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, David Bailey, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Alva Edison and Albert Einstein. But for every one of these high-profile folk there are a million more with similar symptoms that do not fulfil their potential. In fact, it is clear that they frequently suffer from the depressive tendencies that so often manifest themselves alongside learning issues – and, when this is the case, it affects them seriously and detracts from their quality of life despite their outward success. If we are ever going to move forward on this issue, it is vitally important that people understand the problem. Only when this happens can we start to develop a very different society.