Every teacher told Susan Mann her two children were gifted. Both were also testing near the bottom of the scale and could not get through a page of schoolwork. “They can’t be gifted if they can’t do their schoolwork,” she said. So she had them tested.
What she found ended with both kids on full academic scholarships and with a nonprofit she now runs out of Palm Beach County. She joined Dave and Mike on this week’s Pain 2 Power to explain it.
By The First Rehabilitation Team · Reviewed by Dr. Dave Kashuba, Ph.D.
Two disorders your evaluation form has no box for
The turn came from her husband. He heard a radio segment describing someone who cannot follow instructions at work, who loses the second or third word of a sentence and then stands there with no idea what to do. He came home and said he thought he had auditory processing disorder. She listened and thought about her kids.
It runs in families, and it travels with a second condition she had never heard of. Visual processing disorder is the one where a child reads a sentence and skips it, twists the letters, or reaches the bottom of a page with no idea what they just read. Both of hers had both, badly. An audiologist in Hollywood, Dr. Leah Light, put it plainly: your kids cannot hear the teacher talk.
That reframed years of trouble. At swimming her children were constantly corrected for not doing what they were told. “But they didn’t know what they were told,” she said.
Her bigger frustration is administrative. A psychological educational evaluation in Palm Beach County offers two boxes, ADHD or dyslexia. “They are not allowed to diagnose VPD or APD, and the school does not recognize it,” she said. Families who want an answer pay for it themselves.
The eyes and ears are only the messengers
Mike reached for face blindness as a comparison, the processing fault where someone looks straight at a face and cannot recognize it. The lesson Dr. Light gave Susan Mann was that even though we call these vision and hearing problems, the organ involved is the brain. The eyes and ears are only messengers.
Her description of the fix is that the wiring is off, and the therapy trains the eyes to work together at the same time, then does the same for the ears. Both sit in the same region, so work on one carries into the other. One exercise is a golf tee turned upside down and a small stick with a ball on the end. A child with a convergence problem cannot judge the distance, knocks the tee over, and starts again.
Sixteen weeks, once a week, five evenings of homework
The program runs sixteen weeks. You go in once a week, you leave with exercises to practice five evenings, and you come back for the next set until you graduate. Susan Mann quoted a $30 test to start and roughly $2,400 for the whole course. Her own two were retested afterward, scored off the charts, and took full academic scholarships to Oxbridge Academy. Her daughter could not hear the words in a song before that. “My daughter has never put down a book since,” she said.
Why the next program is a basketball team
Girls will sit down and do the therapy. Boys, in her experience, fight it. So the program she is building in Palm Beach Gardens is a travel basketball team with a condition attached: you play if you keep turning up for the therapy, and once you graduate you keep your place. Mike called it Coach Carter, and she agreed before he finished.
The coach is Dwayne McClain, a Villanova name and a retired professional who played for years in Australia, including with the Sydney Kings. That pulled Dave sideways, because Dave trained the Australian swim team in Perth, where McClain trained too. Australia is where the testing comes from as well, and Australian schools screen every child.
The number Mike went and looked up
Susan Mann puts the rate at one in four children, at any age. Mike brought his own research: a child who does not graduate or earn a GED is 380% more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system. Those figures belong to the guest and to Mike, not to us. What was familiar to everyone in the studio was the shape of it. A child who cannot follow the instruction gets labeled a bad listener, believes it, and stops trying.
Where this brushes up against our work
One thread runs straight into our building, and it arrived through her husband. After his traumatic brain injury, Susan Mann found in her research that the same processing therapy is used with brain injury and stroke patients.
A line worth drawing clearly. Bright Minds Processing is her nonprofit at brightmindsprocessing.org, and we do not test for or treat auditory and visual processing disorders. We treat the adult side of that sentence. Occupational therapy after a stroke or brain injury covers upper extremity function, attention and memory strategies, and the daily business of dressing, cooking and getting back to work, which we wrote up separately in what post stroke occupational therapy actually involves.
Mike caught the other parallel on air. Whatever the therapy, you have to do the work. “It is exactly true,” Susan Mann said.
Listen to the full conversation on the Pain 2 Power podcast page, watch past episodes in our video library, and see what people ask us most in the occupational therapy FAQ. If someone in your family is recovering from a stroke, a brain injury, or surgery and daily tasks have become the hard part, call us at 561-624-4263 or request an evaluation.
This article is general information, not medical advice. Every situation is different, so please consult a qualified professional about yours.