12:37pm May 6, 2014

A note about NLD.

NLD is a catch-all term for learning disabilities that are not in verbal areas.

NLD is just as broad as “verbal learning disability” would be.

NLD is not a guarantee that you have good verbal skills.

NLD is not a guarantee that you are bad at all nonverbal things equally.

I was diagnosed with NLD as a teenager, and I have excellent nonverbal skills in some areas, and even a slightly higher performance than verbal IQ – but my performance subtests were both at the top and bottom of the range of the test. Block design and matrix reasoning were relatively high, that weird thing where you have to copy the symbols was extremely low, just as an example.

Overall if I had to quantify verbal versus nonverbal skills, I’d say I have better nonverbal than verbal skills. But in reality, what I have is some verbal and nonverbal skills that are extremely good, and some verbal and nonverbal skills that are so bad they qualify as learning disabilities. So I was diagnosed with NLD on the basis of the specific nonverbal areas I’m bad at. Just like I’m hyperlexic and that involves both good verbal skills in some areas and horrible verbal skills in other areas.

I’ve seen a lot of bullshit floating around about NLD recently, basically oversimplified stuff like “if you can draw well you don’t have NLD”. I was professionally diagnosed with NLD when I was about 17, and I have won awards for my artwork since I was 12, had my photography used as an award given to other people the same year I was diagnosed with NLD, and been shown in galleries on multiple occasions.

Pretty much all autistic people have both verbal and nonverbal learning disabilities. It’s part of being autistic. Autistic people can also have verbal and nonverbal areas of strength at the same time as having verbal and nonverbal learning disabilities. (Hell, so can nonautistic people.) It’s extremely rare for someone to across the board be terrible at all verbal things and good at all verbal things, or vice-versa. Generally people have strengths and weaknesses in both areas.

The reason the concept of NLD exists, is because people were extremely focused on verbal learning disabilities like dyslexia, while ignoring the fact that there were people whose learning disabilities were wholly or partly in nonverbal areas. People focused especially on people where there was a big discrepancy between verbal and nonverbal skills, and who had problems with nonverbal skills across the board, because that’s the most clear-cut situation. But it’s hardly the only situation. Saying that people with NLD have to have great verbal skills and universally bad nonverbal skills is like saying that people with dyslexia can’t read at all and are great at spatial reasoning – it’s oversimplified in the extreme.

Basically, try to imagine a world where there were lots of specific learning disabilities in nonverbal areas (and yes I know there are disabilities for some of these) – one for spatial reasoning, one for inability to draw, one for handwriting, one for math, one for social skills, one for understanding facial expressions and body language, one for etc. And that there was no word for anything like dyslexia, hyperlexia, alexia, and all the verbal learning disabilities.

At that point someone would’ve created a term called Verbal Learning Disability. And it would cover every single learning disability that involved words, no matter how many there were and how unrelated to each other there were. And people would assume that if you had one of these learning disabilities then you had to have all of them. And they’d assume that if you had Verbal Learning Disability then you’d have to have great nonverbal skills. And etc.

And that’s how people think about NLD today a lot of the time, and that’s why it doesn’t work to think of it this way.