It is hard to come to terms with an "invisible" disability. My son looked normal when he was born and he passed all the early milestones with ease, yet by the time he was three years old he was struggling. quite seriously, and I had to accept he was not developing as he should.

His nursery school insisted on him being seen by an Educational Psychologist, and he was refused access to mainstream schooling because it was felt he was not capable of adapting to normal school life. He was referred to a medical consultant who said he had developmental delay, and eighteen months later admitted he had "learning difficulties".

This is such a wide ranging phrase, and to most people it is meaningless. I have known people with physical as well as mental disabilities be given that label. Whenever I tried to explain to people what was wrong with my son, and used this phrase, they always asked me what it meant, and I spent a long time trying to explain the various aspects of his development that were not up to the normal stage for his age. People found this to be a complicated and even incomprehensible thing to deal with and often distanced themselves from not only my son, but me too.

Perhaps I was dealing with the situation in the wrong way, but I found it very hard to accept and understand myself!

Later, I realised he was also Dyspraxic, and had a poor spatial awareness, which I now acknowledged is determined by the mental processes of the brain, not the eyes. If spatial awareness was formed solely via the eyes then blind people would never be able to work out where they were spatially as they don't have the visual information to help them. Now that I realise that I learned more about it, and found confidence in explaining to others what exactly was wrong with my son.

As he became older I found it difficult to ignore the fact there was something else still wrong with my son. I had looked at the possibility of him being Autistic in the past, when he was three, but I had been told by the "expert" that he wasn't so had let the matter go. But despite a lot of special needs learning he still found it difficult to understand much of what was going on around him, so I looked further into the possibility of him being Autistic too, and when he was sixteen years old managed to persuade my GP to have him reassessed, including the possibility of Autism. I was proved right - he was also Autistic and always had been. He was severely mentally disabled, yet

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