Learning Disorders Across the Lifespan : A Mental Health Framework

This book addresses the need to view specific learning disorders (SLDs) within a mental health framework, as supported by their placement alongside autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). It describes how policy and practice point to a different perspective – specifically that SLDs are often treated as educational rather than psychological problems – and examines the implications of this dichotomy. The book reviews empirical research that suggests children need access to treatment for clinical components of SLDs that may respond to psychological intervention separately from, and in addition to, educational interventions. It provides a theoretical framework for organizing research findings and clinical perspectives that support understanding the clinical components of SLDs and addresses the need for a mental health framework within which to approach theory, treatment, and assessment of SLDs.

Key areas of coverage include:

• Examining different theoretical orientations to learning disorders (e.g., cognitive, behavioral, neuropsychoeducational, psychoanalytic).
• Adapting evidence-based therapeutic techniques for use with children and adolescents who have learning disorders.
• The need for accurate and well characterized assessment of SLDs.
• How incorporating a cognitive neuroscience perspective into assessment can move LD treatment and research forward.

Learning Disorders Across the Lifespan is an essential reference for clinicians, therapists, and other professionals as well as researchers, professors, and graduate students in school and clinical child psychology, special education, speech-language therapy, developmental psychology, pediatrics, social work as well as all interrelated disciplines.

Amy Margolis, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and Research Scientist at New York State Psychiatric Institute. She is the Director of the Environment, Brain, and Behavior Lab and the NICHD-funded Columbia Psychology and Psychiatry Learning Disability Innovation Hub. She holds a doctorate in Applied Educational Psychology: School Psychology from Teacher’s College, Columbia University and is trained as a clinical neuropsychologist with two decades of experience assessing and treating children with learning and attention disorders. Dr. Margolis is Principal Investigator of several federally funded projects that use neuroimaging (magnetic resonance imaging [MRI] and electroencephalography [EEG]) in longitudinal birth cohorts to study the effects of prenatal exposure to neurotoxicants on brain and behavior outcomes, with a specific focus on learning (academic skills) and attention problems. Most recently, she has served as the text reviser for the chapter on Specific Learning Disorder for DSM 5TR and as Co-Chair of the ECHO (Environmental Influences on Children's Health Outcomes) Neurodevelopment Working Group.

 

Dr. Margolis is the author of more than 50 peer review papers, many documenting the effects of chemical exposures on neurodevelopment broadly and learning problems specifically. Her work has shown that chemical exposures are overlooked etiologic factors in learning problems particularly among children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds who have been largely excluded from neuroimaging research. She has documented links between reading problems and prenatal exposure to air pollution, environmental tobacco smoke, and flame retardants. In addition, she has identified the shared neurobiological substrate of anxiety and reading problems. Finally, she has published extensively on nonverbal learning disorder (NVLD); she published the first community-based prevalenceestimate of NVLD and documented dysfunction in the brain’s spatial circuit in children with NVLD. Along with Dr. Broitman, she is the author of a comprehensive text on assessing and treating youth with NVLD.

 

Jessica Broitman, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst practicing in Berkeley since 1980. She began her career in Boulder, Colorado, in 1973. As a member of the Intensive Treatment Team of the Boulder Mental Health Center, she ran the Gordon Beyer project, which was one of the first residential treatment programs for young people with schizophrenia and bi-polar illness in the country. After moving to California in 1980, she became the Program Coordinator for the Creative Living Center, a day treatment program for adults with mental illness. During this time, she became involved with Joseph Weiss, Hal Sampson and Control Mastery Theory. She formalized the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group as a nonprofit organization in 1993. She is President Emerita of SFPRG. She was instrumental in the initiation of SFPRG’s Psychotherapy Training Center and Clinic and served as the Executive Director for 15 years. In 2017 she helped create the International Control Mastery Therapy Center and currently serves as the President of the CMTCenter. She frequently lectures on Weiss’s Control Mastery Theory worldwide.

 

Dr. Broitman has been involved in researching and treating children with nonverbal learning disabilities and their families for more than 25 years. She co-authored 5 books on that topic for practitioners and parents: including: Nonverbal Learning Disabilities in Children: Bridging the Gap Between Science and Practice (2011) Treating NVLD in Children (2013) and NVLD and Developmental Visual-Spatial Disorder in Children (2020) as well as numerous chapters and articles. She is currently involved in several research projects concerning the treatment and understanding of NVLD and has a special interest in helping professionals and families understand and treat this disorder and is available for consultations.