New lessons about my Dyslexia: Neurodiversity, mental health and managing people

Feb 9, 2023 / The Magpie at Midnight / Leave a comment

A distant diagnosis

I’ve written before about having dyslexia but I don’t often write about the impact of it on me personally. I think in part this is because I was diagnosed more than twenty years ago at university, and while research and understanding have moved on since then, I’ve not been keeping up. Dyslexia is commonly understood as a learning disability that predominantly affects a person’s ability to read and write, but I think recent research is beginning to show it’s more complex than that and comes with an array of advantages too.

I’ve always thought some of my odd quirks were just that, personal oddities that were unique to me, and not the consequence of structural differences in the brain. For example, I’ve always found it easier to read reports and documents I’m working on off physical paper rather than a screen, while this seems to bother other people a lot less. When we moved in my day job over to mostly remote working I didn’t get a home printer as part of my setup, and I think it took me a lot longer to adapt than others.

One of the things I’ve not reflected on is the impact my dyslexia may have on my mental health, specifically the sometimes crippling anxiety I’ve had in the past around work and ‘being productive’. I had always assumed that I was one of the people who had adapted to their dyslexia, after all I have completed a Ph.D., regularly write, and have a job as a researcher in mental health in the charity/ non-profit sector. However, this week something happened that demonstrated to me that the two things may be far more closely linked than I had realised.

Visio-spacial memory and text editing

I did know that there was a link between dyslexia and strong visio-spacial memory, but I didn’t really draw the link across to how this would affect the way I work with text. I’ve always put that in the ‘why you like arts’ bucket of understanding myself and didn’t really think it was relevant to my writing, which I also like to do a lot of.

However this week an incident happened that showed me very clearly how I use visiospacial memory when I work with text-based documents, and how that can go wrong in collaborative endevours. I’ve been working on a project with another person. I think that person is a bit worried I won’t finish before my babies come, and while I was poorly over the holiday they decided to try to help by doing some work on the document.

We’ve moved over recently to working on a shared digital document, rather than having individual drafts that we share after the fact. I think this is really common practice for many people, but we are a bit behind and still getting the hang of it. So without talking to me about what would be helpful, this person went into the document I was working on, re-wrote sections, added sections and moved blocks of text about.

It turns out that for me, having a clear visual map of where the text is on the page in memory is key to being able to progress a piece of work. When I returned to work to find my document changed so significantly in its visual layout, I actually couldn’t remember what I was meant to be doing or what I had planned to do anymore.

I think the worst aspect of this is that because we had been working on a live document, there wasn’t a previous version to go back to in order to catch up with myself, and the other person hadn’t tracked their changes either. For at least an hour or so I felt truly stuck.

Personal links between neurodiversity and mental health

Even on a good day, my anxiety levels are probably set a bit higher than the average person, and in the past, I’ve suffered from significant anxiety, both in relation to work and my personal life at times. At the moment I’m full of pregnancy hormones and riding a bit higher than usual with my anxiety, so emotional regulation is proving to be challenging.

Being confronted with a document on an important project that didn’t seem to be mine anymore sent me into a panic, and within about fourty five minutes I was having a mini breakdown in my bathroom.

I think overall I’ve been set back by a few days as I’ve tried to retrace my steps and get back to where I was before Christmas so I can work productively again. It’s probably taken longer to settle my anxiety back down to a comfortable level again too.

Learning

I guess my big learning from this is that if someone is going to help me write, I need them to agree ahead of time on how they are going to do that helping. I don’t think this is controversial and probably applies to anyone with some form of neurodiversity or work-related anxiety.

I think for people who have some form of neurodiversity, workplaces or creative projects that are set up by people who don’t have those experiences may be more stressful, and contribute to more mental health challenges than they would for a neurotypical person. This is because processes that work well for those people may often have the opposite effect for someone whose brain just works differently.

I know plenty of people who would have been really pleased that someone did some of their writing for them, but for me, it was disorienting and completely disruptive to my thinking and creative process.

It’s certainly helped me think about how I ‘help’ some of my own staff in my day job. I know that several of the staff I have line managed in the past have some form of neurodiversity. Do I always agree with them ahead of time what would actually be helpful? I think I do most of the time, but there are probably moments where the pressure of deadlines and workloads mean that I have fallen short of my own advice here, so that’s been helpful to reflect on, too.

Thank you for reading. I also write, make art and films. You can read my short fantasy stories here on Simily. If you like these prompts and want to get a copy of a free short book of them I wrote, and to hear more about my writing projects please join my mailing list here. You can see my films at my YouTube channel here. You can see things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying. If buying art is not your thing, but you would like to support what you see you could buy me a KoFi, and I also have a Patreon Page.

Creativity, Dyslexia and Me: Part Two

Apr 20, 2022Apr 19, 2022 / The Magpie at Midnight / Leave a comment

In Part One of this little series I wrote a bit about my own experiences with dyslexia, and some of these things that I found interesting in the introductory sections of the paper ‘Not all those who wander are lost: Examining the character strengths of dyslexia’ by Chathurika Kannanga, Jerome Carson, Sowmya Puttaraju and Rosie Allen. I found that post quite helpful to write personally, and I think a few other people have found it interesting too.

However, I didn’t manage to get past the introduction of the paper to get into what the authors actually did, which is a bit of a shame, so I did want to write a bit about that here.

Dyslexia and character strengths

So the authors of the paper start with the question – what might the character strengths of people with dyslexia be when compared to a general population? I really like that this is a paper that takes a strengths based approach to this issue, but the approach they took left me with some doubts about the actual findings that I’ll come to a bit later.

To assess character strengths in people with dyslexia what they did was ask lots of people to take an online survey using the Values In Action Character Strengths Inventory (VIA).

This tool is a long survey (240 items) which asks people to answer questions about the extent to which a range of characteristics are ‘very much like me’ which scores a 5, across a range of responses down to ‘very much unlike me’ which scores a 1. The tool assesses 24 character strengths using ten questions to measure each one.

They managed to get 89 people with confirmed dyslexia to complete the survey, which for these kind of studies is not a particularly big number, but it’s not too small either. They then used the collective scores from these 89 people to rank character strengths in order from the strength that the group scored most highly in, down to the one that the scored least in.

So you end up with something that looks a bit like Top of the Pops, but instead of pop music it’s a chart of character strengths. They then took that list and compared it to the lists produced in other studies that had asked the same set of questions to groups of people from the general population in the US, and in the UK (note here that this is population data, not a sample of people who have been confirmed as not having dyslexia).

What they found was that the top six character strengths among people with dyslexia were (in this order):

•   curiosity
•   fairness
•   kindness
•   judgement
•   honesty
•   leadership

The extent to which people with dyslexia differ on these strengths from people who don’t have dyslexia was a bit confused to me. For example ‘curiosity’ came in at the top for the group of people with dyslexia, and while I personally strongly relate to this as a curious person, it’s important to note that it only came in third for the US and UK general population groups, which doesn’t feel like feel like a big difference when you take into account the fact that the list included twenty four character traits.

The second characteristic on the list for people with dyslexia was kindness, which was also second on the list for the group from the UK general population, and first on the list from the US general population. So there was really no meaningful difference at all there.

Creativity, which was the interest that led me to this paper in the first place, came in at number eight for the people with dyslexia. This made a full third of the way down the list, and was the same ranking for the UK general population, with rank from the US general population trailing behind only a little bit, at number eleven.

The biggest difference the authors point to is leadership, which comes in at number six for people with dyslexia, while it comes in at ten for the UK general population, and fourteen for the US general population. In the top group of traits this was the only one with a really noticeable difference across different groups, and perhaps this relates to the ‘big picture thinking’ that they cite people with dyslexia as being good at in the introduction.

For me the findings of this paper offer at best a muddled picture, meaning that maybe the key finding is that we just aren’t that different from everyone else. From a personal perspective, went into reading this paper with an idea that learning more about dyslexia would mean learning a bit more about myself, and there are problems with the methodology which mean that I don’t really feel much wiser after reading it.

Problems with the method

I think where the paper really falls down for me is the method they used, which the authors of the paper also recognise as a key problem. The VIA is tool is a 240 item questionnaire, and was not designed with dyslexia in mind in particular. 240 items is a lot of items, and I think using this tool in a study about character strengths really undermines the credibility of this paper.

People who struggle with reading may well have self-selected themselves out of this study. I have dyslexia, and I cope with it well enough to have a career in research and a side line in writing things, but I think I would probably have quit after about 20 items. Maybe after 50 if I was having a good day. I may have persisted to the end if I knew the researchers and wanted to help out, but that wouldn’t have made me the typical ‘person with dyslexia’ either.

I think the consequence of this may mean that only a particular type of person with dyslexia would have persisted until the end, which means that a lot of ‘average people with dyslexia’ may be missing from this data set. In a study about character strengths this could really skew the sample in favour of a particular set of those strengths, just by making to survey hard for people to fill in.

The authors themselves mention this as a significant limitation, and I appreciate them doing so. For me this casts doubt on the findings because it’ unlikely to be a sample of the average person with dyslexia, just the persistent ones.

I think in the next iteration of this research the team should recruit a group of people with dyslexia to redesign the survey with them so that it would be more appealing to the ‘average person with dyslexia’ if such a thing exists.

I hope that this has been interesting for dyslexics and non dyslexics alike. If you are a dyslexic writer like me, let me know in the comments – do any of these things match your experiences too?

Thank you for reading. I also write, make art and films. You can read my short fantasy stories here on Simily. If you are interested in the process of creativity and want to get a copy of my free short book of creative prompts, and to hear more about my writing projects please join my mailing list here. You can see my films at my YouTube channel here. You can see things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying. If buying art is not your thing, but you would like to support what you see I also have a Patreon page here.

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Creativity, Dyslexia and Me: Part One

Apr 13, 2022Feb 9, 2023 / The Magpie at Midnight / 5 Comments

When I started writing this post I had an idea that I would post it as part of my series about ideas from science that may be helpful to creative folks to know. However, as I was writing it I realised that my take on it was probably going to be a little more personal than I had in mind of that series, so I think it needs to stand a little away from that, although it will still be of interest to people who like those posts, I hope.

I came across the paper ‘Not all those who wander are lost: Examining the character strengths of dyslexia’ by Chathurika Kannanga, Jerome Carson, Sowmya Puttaraju and Rosie Allen when I was doing a general search for peer reviewed papers on creativity, and was immediately struck by the title. Most people will know that dyslexia is a form of learning disability, but the idea here is that alongside the problems that dyslexia can bring, there are also abilities or strengths.

Dyslexia and me

So here’s where it gets a bit personal. Up until the age of about 9 or 10, I couldn’t really read or write. I think I must have been pretty good at the performance of reading or writing because people (by which I mean teachers) didn’t seem to notice, but unfortunately for me, the products of these performances were not intelligible to anyone but myself.

Back in the 1980’s I don’t think dyslexia was a well understood thing in small country schools in the UK. My father has told me that it was at a parent’s evening, where a teacher had already told him that I was ‘doing fine’, where he encountered some of my writing that was so confusing that he determined that things definitely weren’t ‘fine’, at all.

I was lucky enough to have parents who understood that I was clever enough to be able to do these things, but some how I couldn’t, and I was luckier still that they could afford to employ a tutor to work with me on school evenings (apparently only acceptable to 9 year old me because he wore a leather coat and had an earring).

By the time I got to secondary school a year or two later, I could read and write well enough to keep up in most classes. In English however I was still considered to have a learning disability, and received the kind of ‘support’ that was effective in demonstrating to my peers there was something wrong with me, but not effective in actually helping with the problem as it focused on poor spelling.

Now we all have autocorrect in our word processing programmes, no one needs to be able to spell perfectly, but back then it was considered a big thing. So much so in fact, that any creative abilities in writing seemed to take a back seat to things like spelling, and I ended up feeling like science was a much better fit for me than the arts and humanities (our art department wasn’t exactly an embarrassment of riches either).

I wasn’t actually formally diagnosed with dyslexia until after I’d been in university for a year, and since then I’ve not done a huge amount of research into it, which is curious because it would probably have helped me understand myself better. Since that time I’ve been more and more drawn to creative projects, and have taken classes and taught myself all sorts of creative things while still keeping one foot in the sciences, and never quite settling to ‘specialise’ in anything, which probably hasn’t helped my career really. When I saw this paper I thought maybe the science on dyslexia can help me play to my strengths a bit better.

What we now know about dyslexia

According to the paper, dyslexia is a ‘visual processing defect’ with an impact on literacy skills, and there are issues in sustaining vital attention which fits quite well with my experience.

Where it is spoken about publicly, it is typically discussed or written about as a disability or a problem, and in the mind of the public probably equates to ‘people who can’t read or write well.’ The central idea of the research paper, ‘Not all those who wander are lost’ is that dyslexia is not only a problem, it is also a strength, and not just a single strength, but many.

While I had been aware of the links between creativity and dyslexia for a while, I was surprised by the raft of things cited just in the introduction of this paper that people with dyslexia are good at (by which I mean better than the average person without dyslexia). This list of things both filled in some blanks for me about my personal experience, and pointed in the direction of what I may want to read next.

Here some of the things that the paper mentioned that people with dyslexia are better at, which resonated with my own experiences (and does not at all cover everything said there):

Better accuracy in processing three dimensional information – this includes being able to complete tasks that involve visual spatial skills such as drawing, mechanical puzzles and building models more easily. One of the things that really stuck out for me was the suggestion that we can be alert to lots of information at once, including detecting anomalies and being sensitive to changes in the environment. I’ve noticed that I tend to be very distractible, and don’t exactly flourish in open plan offices, and tend to be pulled in quite easily to ‘things’ that are going on, so this tracks for me. I also began to think that maybe there is a story there about an agency of dyslexic spies!

Interconnected reasoning – we can bring together many sources of information, some of which may be unexpected and make connections between things that may not occur to people with more typical brains

Narrative reasoning – apparently we have better abilities to remember information that is embedded in story, and it is common for people with dyslexia to enjoy creative writing despite difficulties they may have with writing.

Problem solvers – people with dyslexia can be good at problem solving as they are more likely to draw on ideas from different, sometimes unconnected, places. There is a high incidence of dyslexia in entrepreneurs, which I found kind of interesting.

Big picture thinkers – this may also relate to the way people with dyslexia connect different sources of information in ways that people without it may not, leading them to think ‘out of the box’. As I hinted at above, in my own day job career I’ve found myself roaming around research areas (including psychology, ethics, epilepsy, learning disability, mental health and more general social sciency stuff), rather than ever truly settling on one thing, and never quite fit into the academic mold that rewards people who dive deeply into one thing. My magpie brain is constantly picking up on new things it perceives as shiny.

Creativity – this wasn’t a surprise for me as I’m seem unable to comfortably stick to one medium, and am constantly picking up new creative projects

Unexpected (for me) skills:

Empathy – in my day job I have ended up in an area that really requires good interpersonal skills. It didn’t really occur to me that these softer skills may be a dyslexic thing, and that may relate to the way that the public story of dyslexia has been about difficulties with reading and writing!

Networking and team building – This is also something I found surprising. In person I am quite good at working in a team and do like to talk to people and network, but I’m actually finding these things quite difficult to do in the world of remote working and zoom calls, and wonder if this relates to the whole ‘good at processing information in 3D space’ thing, because the flattening of the world through a zoom screen has had the effect of flattening me too.

Memory and memory recognition tasks – I’ve always felt I had a terrible memory – and I do for names and dates, but actually not really for other things. It’s more that I doubt my memory and find myself checking even when I’ve remembers correctly – my narrative recall is good, as would be predicted by this work.

I realise at this point that I’ve not really talked about what this group of researchers actually did in their own research – I think I will leave that for a part two of this post as it’s already rather long.

I hope that this has been interesting for dyslexics and non dyslexics alike. If you are a dyslexic writer like me, let me know in the comments – do any of these things match your experiences too?