Mental Health

Life can be full of puzzling challenges.  Dear Wabby offers a new perspective on an old situation, to illuminate a possible path forward.

Dear Wabby,

I probably shouldn’t be wasting your time. I’m afraid that you’ll laugh at me, use what I tell you to hurt me, tell me I deserve to suffer, tell me there’s no hope. But I don’t understand why I feel so BAD when I act so GOOD.

I’ve tried to be a good person. I’ve followed all the rules. After high school, I was lucky to get a good job as a secretary, worked hard, and, after a few years, even bought my own house. My boss says I’m very good at what I do, but he’s just saying that because he secretly believes I’m incompetent. He feels sorry for me but is too kind to fire me.

I’m not pretty or talented, but I did date a few guys. Eventually, I fell in love, and married a divorced man. Roscoe is such a lovable, wonderful guy, down on his luck when I met him. He was heading for alcoholism, and I thought I could save him. I made sure we never had alcohol in the house, we avoided parties with his drinking friends, and I helped him get a real job.

Roscoe had a 4-year old daughter, Alicia who came to live with us. We got along well.
Alicia became more relaxed and happy with consistent parenting. I enjoyed parenting, and thought we had a happy family going. Even so, I couldn’t shake the feeling that any moment my happiness would be taken away.

I let go of my girlfriends lest they try to seduce Roscoe. I wasn’t sure I could trust them. But that didn’t end my anxiety.

A year into our marriage I realised Roscoe’s late nights at the new job were actually his “long way home” via the pub and some younger women.

THE STARVING BRAIN SYNDROME

by Eva van Loon

Neuroscientists who study the human brain have pointed out a basic fact about homo sapiens babies that the long-standing arguments about nature vs nurture seem to have missed: there isn’t a single human culture on the face of the planet that doesn’t employ speech (or music, for that matter), but there are plenty of cultures, including Canada’s First Nations, that depended solely on oral transmission of culture and did not care two hoots about becoming a literate society.

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by Eva van Loon

“A change of heart changes everything,” claim the Heartmath people.

The who?

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by Eva van Loon -Cognition Therapist

In the poetic last scene of the old film Fahrenheit 451, exiles who have committed the twin sins of literacy and critical thinking walk about their fogged-in hidden habitat repeating entire books to themselves. Each fugitive from “justice” and “civilisation” chooses to become the living text of a favorite, excellent book—that is the salvage plan for humankind and its culture.

It’s a scene to move teachers to tears.

Educators have wrung their hands over the perceived loss of literacy (and numeracy) for three or four decades now. A society where half the population cannot grok a printed page, much less produce one, is a frightening manifestation of Jane Jacobs’ warnings in Dark Age Ahead. To be one of a literate few reduces the good reader to a stranger in a strange land.

Despite a legion of well-intentioned programs designed to get kids excited about reading, literacy levels continue their general decline, according to standard tests. Every program works…a little…for some, but nothing does the trick entirely.

A frequent complaint about reading programs concerns their dumbed-down, trivial content, as if literature is too difficult for the learning reader, as if poets and writers must all have been literacy stars before they set down one immortal word. The boring, boring! contents of these programs fail to deliver the savor of our collective wisdom and experience. Worse, a reading program without poetry severs literature from music and math, and ignores a world of histories in which the poem and the song antedate the written word.

by Eva van Loon -Cognition Therapist

First, the bad news (which you parents probably already sense is the truth about our kids today), fingering the failure of our educational system to cope with today’s reality and give our kids the cognitive survival tools they’ll need. Are you ready?

(Keep in mind these stats are American; things are not so bad in Canada and definitely not so bad in Powell River.)

• Children today spend less time playing outdoors than any previous generation. Mothers cite safety concerns as a primary reason.

• Today’s children have more restricted ranges of free play, have fewer and less diverse playmates, and are more home-centered than any previous generation.

• Children’s free play and discretionary time declined more than 9 hours less a week over the last 25 years.

• Children under 6 spend an average of 1.5 hours a day with electronic media. Youth between 8 and 18 spend 6.5 hours a day with electronics—over 45 hours a week!

• Obesity in children has increased from about 4 per cent in the 1960s to almost 20 per cent in 2004.

• 62 per cent of children do not participate in any organized physical activity; 23 per cent do not participate in any free-time physical activity.

• The per cent of children who walk or bike to a school less than a mile away has declined 25 per cent in 30 years. Barely 21 per cent live within one mile of their school.

• While 71 per cent of adults report having walked or ridden to school, only 22 per cent of children do so today.

Now put together this picture with what you already know of the soaring incidence of learning disabilities, deficits and behaviour problems. Gee…could there be a connection?

Eva van Loon Cognition Therapist

The innumerate among us are innumerable now. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines an innumerate as “unacquainted with the basic principles of mathematics and science.”
When I was in primary school, there were few innumerates among us. I recall a sense of balance among school subjects, specifically of equal concentration on mathematics (which we called arithmetic) and language. There were, of course, a few luckless non-starter students, derisively called ree-tards, who displayed early signs of illiteracy and innumeracy and consequently did not escape school until too big for the biggest desks.

Then came New Math. The word arithmetic, formerly well understood as a synonym for ciphering–addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and a few extras like telling time and Roman numerals–disappeared. Bye bye, rote learning and chanting tables. Memorisation was bunk, apparently. It was all Mathematics now, each chapter of our texts prefaced by philosophical discourse that mystified the teachers and parents as much as the students. As a new teacher in the 70s, I remember thinking we’d perhaps thrown the baby out with the bath, as the saying goes.

New Math opened up a new field of academics, the what’s-wrong-with-our-kids-that-they-can’t-do-math? field. Sheila Tobias’ 1978 book, Overcoming Math Anxiety, made math incompetence a political issue, claiming it was not failure of intellect but a failure of nerve. In 1988 mathematician John Paulos gave the math disaster its correct name in Innumeracy; Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences. He suggested innumeracy is a failure of critical thinking.

by Eva van Loon Cognition Therapist

My funky California university is hot about transformative learning. Call it insight learning, because it is the kind of learning that hits you like a lightning flash. It rocks your world. Great stuff. But those flashes of insight are not all of learning, and not all of transformative learning, either. Sure, going to India and experiencing Tamil village life will change your life, but it won’t teach you to read better.

Decades of teaching have taught me there are two areas of learning. One, there’s the stuff you think about, sometimes long afterwards, chewing it over until finally it finds its place in your organism—or passes out of your life, like food you’re done with. Call that content learning.

Two, there’s stuff you have to struggle to make second nature, like riding a bike or driving, before the powers that be will even let you on the road. Getting a driver’s license is transformative in just about anyone’s book. Suddenly, you can move around your world with ease, just because this riding or driving skill has lodged itself unforgettably in your subconscious.

I’d call that transformative, wouldn’t you? It’s functional learning, too. It’s down there, in the subconscious, where you never have to work it all out again. It’s become automatic, like walking.

Think about your brain as a two-storey office: content learning happens upstairs in the conscious; functional learning happens downstairs where the shipping dock is and nobody sees it.

Reading is supposed to be like walking: automatic. A functional reader sees a sign and comprehends it without even remembering the words or shapes. Numbers, same thing. Basic logic, same thing. It must be automatic. Immediate. A subconscious, unforgettable skill. If you have to think about how to do it every time, it won’t work.

by Eva van Loon, Cognition Therapist

Auditory-processing deficit shows up far more commonly than attention deficit in cognition-therapy assessments—it’s the major problem among students today. Often, the deficit is huge: a teenager, hearing things as if the brain were only five years old; an adult hearing as if the brain were ten. Such big gaps block literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking to the point where school and work are next to impossible.

Nothing is wrong with the person’s hearing. Sound travels from the ear to the brain just fine. Then it’s as if the brain says, “Just where do you want me to put this jumbled mess of noises?” There’s no thought structure, no framework, to help the brain sort out sounds.

Do you have this deficit? If others have to tell you things several times, if you have trouble coping with several directions at once, if you promptly forget what you’ve heard, if your handwriting is an irregular mess, or if you procrastinate or distract yourself, your auditory processor likely is not working as it should.

This deficit is not a disease, but can be the result of early trauma, such as an accident, bullying, relocation, or even being yelled at in school. For some, there’s no clear trigger beyond the common conditions of life today. What is clear in every case is that auditory-processing deficit blocks the repair of any other deficit that may be present, such as attention.

Auditory-processing deficit is often called CAPD (Central Auditory Processing Deficiency). Testing for CAPD, however, can miss the deficit if timing is not part of the test. A student cleared of CAPD may still show signs of auditory-processing deficit.

by Eva van Loon

Sing along to the advice I give inquiring parents who want to know What They Can Do to prevent or cure learning disabilities:

“Blow up your TV; throw away your sodas;
give away the Ritalin; try to be home;
get some music lessons; do a lot of dancing;
memorise the tables on your own.”

Many parents suspected those drugs anyway, and just knew they were right about piano lessons, memorizing, and the infamous “New Math” of the Seventies. It’s fun to watch them blench at the notion of Doing Without TV.

“But we only let the kids watch a little bit,” they invariably protest. “Only the good stuff.”

There is no good stuff. Seriously. It’s not the content; it’s the screen itself. Recent research vindicates what many have sensed all along: TV, however good the content, is toxic to children.

One study concludes that, for every hour of TV a child under seven watches daily, there’s a 10% greater likelihood of developing ADHD. So, if a child watches ten hours’ TV per day, it doesn’t matter if parents mute commercials and restrict content to education and nature channels. They’ll soon be dealing with ADHD (and paying therapists like me to fix it).

Another study notes that the human brain makes more high-confidence errors in a cluttered environment. That means kids making zillions of mistakes in video or computer games will still enjoy it, but kids making errors on a piece of paper or a single problem on an educational TV screen at school will be fighting to keep some self-esteem.

Finally, since 1974 my own experience with kids diagnosed with “Learning Disabilities” tells me that the majority have had very significant long-term exposure to TV and/or computer screens—and those are the same kids who haven’t developed normal visualisation skills.