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.
Gifted on paper, failing in class
Dave met Susan Mann the way he meets most people, by accident. She and her husband Michael are friends of his (she calls herself Irish Suzy, and once she starts talking you can hear why), and when Dave mentioned his own nonprofit work she started telling him about hers. “I really have to get you on the show,” he told her.
Her story starts with two bright kids who hated school. They were smart, the teachers agreed they were gifted, and their grades said otherwise. When she had them tested, both came back low. Really low, in her words. Nobody could explain the gap between what the children obviously were and what they could put on paper.
She kept digging, and the answer cost her plenty. “I put everything on the line,” she said, and she got both children to two fantastic doctors and then some. When they were retested afterward for the gifted program, they were off the charts. They got into the gifted school here in Palm Beach Gardens and went on to full academic scholarships at Oxbridge Academy.
A retired cop from San Francisco
Susan Mann is not a doctor, a mistake Mike made off air. After their pre-show conversation he assumed she was Dr. Susan Mann and kept calling her that. She’s a retired police officer from San Francisco who did her own research because her kids needed it, and the doctors in this story are the specialists she found along the way.
That background shows up in where she wants to take the work. When Dr. Leah Light, the audiologist who treated her children, suggested taking the program into the prison system, Susan Mann’s answer was, “I thought that ship had sailed.” She wants to reach third graders, middle schoolers and high schoolers, and catch them before the label sticks.
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, and she said very few of the doctors involved take any kind of insurance.
What APD sounds like from the inside
She has a quick screen she runs in conversation with kids. First she asks whether they like reading. A child who says they hate it gets the second question, whether they like school, and the answer is nearly always no. Then the real one: what do you hear when the teacher talks? “Nothing. I just stare at a blank space on the wall,” is what they tell her. Somebody in the studio reached for the Peanuts teacher, the wah wah wah, and she agreed that’s about the sound.
At home it looked like this. Her daughter couldn’t hear the words in a song. “My son couldn’t hear a movie,” she said, so he interrupted every film nonstop to ask what people had said.
What VPD looks like on the page and on the pool deck
The visual side showed up in sport as much as school. On their first visit Dr. Light threw a ball at her kids, and it hit them in the chest before their hands closed on it. Now they catch it. At swim practice the coach held up a hula hoop and told everyone to dive through it. “My son dived underneath the hula hoop. He was the only one,” she said. These days, she added, he has a fantastic basketball shot.
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. She doesn’t dress it up, either. A neurologist once asked her what this brain training was like. “I said, ‘Yeah, it’s like therapy,’” she told Mike.
Dave opened the show by making a related point about dyslexia, a word most people know without knowing what it means. He described it as a neurodevelopmental processing problem tied to specific areas of the brain. The testing Susan Mann uses comes out of Australia, where, Dave noted, every child in the school system is screened.
Sixteen weeks, with homework five evenings a week
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. For her own two it worked, and the daughter who couldn’t hear the words in a song turned into a reader. “My daughter has never put down a book since,” she said.
| Piece of the program | What was said on air |
|---|---|
| Screening | A $30 test, run through apps built by two Australian doctors. The public can’t buy the apps; testers need an account with the company. |
| Before therapy starts | A vision check to make sure the child doesn’t simply need glasses |
| Order | Vision first, then hearing |
| Length and rhythm | Sixteen weeks, one visit a week, exercises five evenings a week at home |
| Who is involved | An optometrist and an audiologist in Jupiter, a speech pathologist, an occupational therapist, and the therapists themselves, each in their own office for now |
| Cost | Roughly $2,400 from start to finish |
What the exercises look like
Mike asked what the therapy actually involves, in broad strokes. One exercise is a golf tee turned upside down and a small stick with a ball on the end. Most of us can tap the ball onto the tee without knocking it over. A child with a convergence problem cannot judge the distance, knocks the tee over, and starts again. Picture searches are another: the child cannot find the hidden pictures that the rest of us spot, and the therapy trains them to.
It also came up that this is the same vision therapy plenty of famous athletes pay for to sharpen their game. They just come at it for different reasons, with deeper pockets.
Why the homework is the hard part
Five evenings a week is where families fall down. If both parents are working, she said, nobody is home to run the exercises, and the parents who are home often don’t know what to do with them. Her answer is an afterschool setup where the exercises simply get done.
The hosts floated doing it over Zoom with an online teacher. She was firm that it wouldn’t work for these kids. “You’ve lost these kids so badly already,” she said. “They’re already fried, done.” What keeps them coming back is a person, a mentor and a friend, and prizes for doing the work. Mike agreed that one on one beats another screen, which already comes with built in distraction.
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. If a family can’t afford it, she said, they’ll make sure the child stays on the team. Mike called it Coach Carter, and she agreed before he finished. He also called it a carrot and a stick, with the carrot doing most of the work.
The coach is Dwayne McClain, a Villanova legend who, as Susan Mann put it, retired from the NBA and spent years as the Michael Jordan of Australia, including time 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.
Mike said it better on air. When you’re young and labeled as someone who can’t pick it up, “it’s very easy to internalize that.” Susan Mann added the part a lot of parents of struggling kids will recognize. You get pulled out of class and put in a special class, “and now everyone looks at you differently.”
Her ambition is a template: test kids in Palm Beach County first, show the results, and push for the Australian approach in American schools. Dave’s suggestion was that she become a teacher of the teachers, training schools, nonprofits and centers to run the screening so it doesn’t all depend on one person. She said that’s already possible, as long as whoever runs the test knows what they’re doing, gets the report to the parents, and gets the referral to the right doctors.
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.
Bright Minds Processing is her nonprofit at brightmindsprocessing.org, and we do not test for or treat auditory and visual processing disorders. We don’t offer pediatric occupational therapy either, so for a child, the first call is the child’s own doctor. 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. If you’re not sure whether a relative needs OT or PT, our plain comparison of the two is a good place to start.
Mike caught the other parallel on air. Whatever the therapy, you have to do the work. “It is exactly true,” Susan Mann said.
The show ended the way they usually do, with Dave telling Mike about a breakthrough with his wife. He told her to embrace her mistakes. “She ran over and hugged me for no reason,” he said, and it took the studio a second to catch up.
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.