I did a full psycho-neurological assessment about five years ago courtesy of a not-for-profit organization dedicated to assisting adults with learning disorders in their careers. The testing indicated I had real problems with “immediate and long term visual and non-verbal memory.” Not long after I had an appointment with Dr. Atilla Turguay (one of the top experts on ADHD in Canada) who does a quick three-part test of working memory and did okay on verbal and numerical but miserably on the visual part. When I told him the results on the psychological testing he just nodded. I have been taking karate now for about seven years. I started because it was recommended by the psychiatrist who diagnosed me with ADHD. I now have a first degree black belt and am preparing for a grading for a second degree this fall. I get by. I have to make some minor adjustments in my learning style to accommodate problems with focus and attention but I do have a black belt so I must be doing something right. Knowing that I had this visual working memory problem I also started classes in Kobujutsu a few months ago thinking it would help with the visual working memory problems. It’s been tough going. Time after time I have find myself standing on the dojo floor, just after the sensei has demonstrated something and is waiting for me to duplicate what he has just shown me. I am searching my mind for a mental picture of what he has just done and there is nothing. He’s waiting. I’m waiting. Nothing is happening. Eventually I do something and get corrected again (my sensai has the patience of Job) and wait for the mental picture…and wait. This Sunday I am being graded for a yellow belt, the first belt after white which is what you start with. The symbolic meaning of the white belt is that it is a clean slate…nothing on it. You know nothing and you don’t know you know nothing. A yellow essentially means you now know enough to know you don’t know anything. The point of all this is how much harder it has been for me to learn weapons than just straight karate. There is something about extending my control beyond my physical self that stops me dead. In Kobujutsu you usually start training with the bo (a six-foot wooden staff). I have to imagine that I am striking some target that is at least three or four feet from where I am gripping the bo. And that’s where my brain gets into trouble. What keeps me going, class after class, is the knowledge, no really the hope, that this training is making a difference in my visual working memory. I wish I could say that I know it is making a difference but I don’t. I just hope.
Earlier this week I was with a group of people and one of them shared that she had been depressed recently and a friend had told her she was self-centered. Someone else shared they had the same experience with another friend when speaking to them about their social anxiety. A third related something similar when sharing with someone about panic attacks. I was appalled and intrigued at the same time. I have had depression and seem prone to it. I have been diagnosed with social anxiety and have, in the past, had panic disorder.
Am I self-centered?
The truth is that some decades ago when I was in my last year at university and going through a bout of real, black-dog depression the psychiatrist I was seeing fired me saying I wasn’t cooperating with him. I went home one weekend and my mother said to me, “You just can’t be always thinking of yourself.” I then telephoned the psychiatrist and begged to be taken back saying that I would try to do whatever he asked me. He agreed and within days I seemed back to normal. Were my friends right then, that depressives and anxiety sufferers are self-centered?
I think not. Just because getting out of self is effective with these disorders doesn’t mean sufferers are self-centered. Besides, the trouble with that line of reasoning is that if you believe that then everyone who has depression or anxiety or panic attacks is self-centered and what kind of world would that be?
Well it would be a world not unlike that described in Erewhon by Samuel Butler in the 19th century in which criminals are treated as being ill and confined to asylums and citizens with mental illness are put in prison. Erewhon, in its earlier chapters, appears to be a utopia but this is not the case and on close reading it is actually a satire. In other words putting the mentally ill in prison is a joke.
The world of mental disorders, in my experience is a world where only the very frontiers are now being mapped and where neuroscientists are currently revising almost everything we know about how our brains work. Besides if you believe you are self-centered when you are suffer from depression or anxiety then everyone who is depressed or anxious or has panic attacks is self-centered and this would be a world without compassion. It would be a world I wouldn’t want to live in. It would be an Erewhon and Butler called it Erewhon because if you look at it backwards, it is nowhere.
The Toronto Sun reported today that the Scarborough-North York trustee for the Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB), John Del Grande, has called for an emergecy meeting to reopen the TCDSB’s decision to drop the Arrowsmith Program, for reasons of cost, just two days before the school year end last June. This latest move happened just hours after some parents of chidren who had been in the program filed a lawsuit naming the Minister of Education, Kathleen Wynne and the province’s supervision team as well as the TCDSB. The notice of application for judicial review asks for the immediate reinstatement of the Arrowsmith program and that the court review the decision to cancel it. Lawyers acting for the parents claim the supervision team headed by Norbert Hartman was acting outside of its jurisdiction when they cancelled the special education program. John Del Grande said that the move goes against the decision of the Board’s special education advisory committee which had recommended keeping the program until at least 2011. One of the parents involved in the suit said, “All we want is a fair shake for the kids.”
A month or so back I wrote that one of the first neuroplasticity programs, Arrowsmith, was about to be dropped by the Toronto Catholic District School Board fo reasons of cost. It’s a little more complicated than that. The Board had asked Arrowsmith to waive their fees over the next two years while the Board conducted a study to see specifically if the program made a difference to subjects in the classroom. There is a similar program using Cogmed Working Memory Training currently running at Sick Children’s’ Hospital in Toronto under the auspices of Rosemary Tannock. Arrowsmith refused and the Board dropped it. Well now it seems that the parents of the children who were enrolled in the program, there are about 70 of them, are taking the Board to court to get them to reverse the decision saying, according to an article in the Toronto Sun, that “the children enrolled in the program will be irreparably harmed.” Named in the suit are: Education Minister’s provincial supervisor Norbert Hartmann, associate supervisor Norm Forma and the Toronto Catholic District School Board. Michael Watson, a partner at Gowling, Lafleur, Henderson LLP, speaking on behalf of the parents said, the case, which has yet to be proven in court, isn’t about money, it’s about helping those children. ” Parents can disagree with decisions of the board … what’s really different about this case is we say this decision was made completely unlawfully and contrary to various provisions of the regulations under the Education Act and beyond the jurisdiction of the supervision team,” Mr Watson says that this team has interfered with and meddled in a very important special education program of the board under the guise of a budget matter. He went on to say that the parents fundamentally believe in the Arrowsmith Program and that it has achieved results.