Why is having a diagnosis so important to teachers?

I recently saw a post from a teacher asking for help pulling together a list of common disabilities to educate her peers.

But is this ability to recite from memory out of the DSM5 actually even helpful for our kids in school?

I think if you’re looking to teach your educators about disability, it’s time to scrap the labels.

Yes, I mean the very same labels that privileged kids get FAR faster once flagged- even as under-resourced families struggle with doctors failing to diagnose, because of specialist’s outdated educations and the important-but-kinda-crappy public health system.

So if you want to educate a group of people on disabilities in children they interact with daily, PLEASE don’t have them memorise a check list.

Teach them the difference between capacity; and ability.

Teachers NEED to see the inside of a WHODAS and how capacity works vs ability.

Or at least map the common attributes of different diagnosis’s back with a WHODAS, or another type of functional assessment.

Once they learn to stop using ridiculous phrases like, ‘if she only applied herself,’

They will start to understand how daydreaming does not exist and is actually a child dissociating as a stim to defragment their overworked brain.

Once they learn behaviour is communication too, the child avoiding eye contact and ignoring their demands isn’t going to be written off as defiant and disrespectful.

Maybe they will take that knowledge and be open to learning how to communicate WITH a child whose verbal functioning drops to zero when physically heightened, and for whom eye contact is extremely painful when their sensory needs aren’t met.

When an educator is taught that capacity and ability ALWAYS co exist,

They can start to understand what a child forced above their capacity looks like.

They will understand the reason men and women aren’t being diagnosed with ADHD, Tourette’s, Autism, BIG diagnosises… Until their 30’s or 40’s.

Labels don’t matter as much as the ability to identify a lack of functioning, over functioning, consequences of over functioning, what a child’s capacity is, what their actual ability is without needing to over function in school hours.

A list won’t help a single of one the myriad of undiagnosed children.

Educating on labels,

But not focusing on recognising & celebrating ability while learning about how it is intrinsically tied in (and also, no way related!) with a child’s functional capacity,

ALWAYS makes inclusion trickier for the actual child.

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