Emotional Problems and Learning Disabilities

Learning or reading disabilities can have destructive emotional effects. Persistent learning failure leads to anguish, embarrassment and frustration. “There is something terrifying about sitting at the back of the class and having somebody ask you questions which you know you will never be able to answer,”¹ an adult dyslexic told British actress Susan Hampshire, who is also dyslexic.

In describing his feelings about growing up with a learning disability, Nelson Rockefeller, who served as vice president of the United States and governor of the state of New York, recalled:

I was dyslexic…and I still have a hard time reading today. I remember vividly the pain and mortification I felt as a boy of eight when I was assigned to read a short passage of scripture at a community vesper service and did a thoroughly miserable job of it. I know what a dyslexic child goes through...the frustration of not being able to do what other children do easily, the humiliation of being thought not too bright when such is not the case at all.²

For some the humiliation becomes too much. In one study, Peck found that over 50 percent of all suicides under age fifteen in Los Angeles County had been previously diagnosed as having learning disabilities. The actual percentage of youngsters labeled “learning disabled” in most school districts in the United States is below 5 percent; therefore, it seems clear that youngsters with learning disabilities constitute a disproportionately large percentage of adolescent suicides compared with the general adolescent population.³

In another study, conducted in Ontario, Canada, the researchers analyzed all the available suicide notes (n = 27) from 267 consecutive adolescent suicides for spelling and handwriting errors. The results showed that 89 percent of the twenty-seven adolescents who committed suicide had significant deficits in spelling and handwriting that were similar to those of the adolescents with LD.⁴

Behavior problems resulting from their negative experiences are not uncommon in LD youngsters. The strain and the frustration of underachieving can cause them to be reluctant to go to school, to throw temper tantrums before school or in some cases to play truant. Cheating, stealing and experimenting with drugs can also result when children regard themselves as failures.⁵

Former U.S.A. First Lady Barbara Bush, who has a learning-disabled son, noted that “learning disabilities can destroy lives. To get a really disturbing sense of this — we need only to look at the estimates of the learning disabled among juvenile delinquents.”⁶ Results from a study in the U.S.A. by the National Center for State Courts demonstrated that youths with LD were 200 percent more likely to be arrested than nondisabled peers for comparable offences.⁷ According to the U.S. Department of Education 60 percent of America's prison inmates are illiterate and 85 percent of all juvenile offenders have reading problems.⁸

Article sources:
1.) Hampshire, S., Every Letter Counts: Winning in Life Despite Dyslexia (London: Corgi Books, 1991), 220.
2.) Rockefeller, N., TV Guide, 16 October 1976, 12-14, cited in J. Lerner, Learning Disabilities: Theories, Diagnosis, and Teaching Strategies (4th ed.), (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988), 4.
3.) Peck, M., “Crisis intervention treatment with chronically and acutely suicidal adolescents,” in M. Peck, N. L. Farberow, & R. Litman (eds.), Youth suicide (New York: Springer, 1985), 112-122.
4.) Hazel, E., McBride, A., & Siegel, L. S., “Learning disabilities and adolescent suicide,” Journal of Learning Disabilities, November 1997, vol. 30.
5.) Hampshire, Every Letter Counts, 291-292.
6.) Ibid., 151.
7.) Broder, P. K., et al., “Further observations on the link between learning disabilities and juvenile delinquency.” Journal of Educational Psychology, 1981, vol. 73, 838-850.
8.) http://www.hcity.com, website maintained by G. Sagmiller, author of Dyslexia My Life.