The Cost of Undiagnosed Nonverbal Learning Disability (NVLD)
Nonverbal Learning Disability
Individuals with Nonverbal Learning Disability (NVLD) struggle with social and spatial abilities. This can mean things like (but not limited to) fine and gross motor skills (using scissors or riding a bike), spatial awareness (bumping into people and things), organization and planning, and even understanding and maintaining relationships (interpreting expressions, tone, or humor). This not only makes learning these types of tasks difficult, but it also incurs many hidden costs over the course of a lifetime if NVLD goes undiagnosed - and, more importantly, unaddressed.
The emotional costs of NVLD are likely the easiest to imagine. It’s tough to make friends with peers when you struggle with personal space and never laugh at their jokes. In many cases, this difficulty leads to social isolation, loneliness, depression, and anxiety - all of which are also associated with physical health problems later in life.
Extending from these emotional repercussions are the professional costs of unaddressed NVLD. A person who has difficulty understanding expressions and tone of voice is often viewed as unable to “read the room.” Consequently, they are essentially shut out of many of their desired career paths, and they are also passed over for promotions to managerial roles that require good interpersonal skills. In other words, undiagnosed NVLD often costs individuals both their ideal career and their ideal earning potential.
The monetary impacts don’t stop at earning potential. Individuals who do not address NVLD also tend to spend more on work-arounds, tutors, coaches, assistants, therapists, and other ways of compensating for their learning disability. This can add up to tens of thousands of dollars per year - or more depending on the level of assistance needed.
Finally, the #1 hidden cost of an unaddressed NVLD is time - the most scarce, unrenewable resource we have as humans. One of the most common weaknesses associated with NVLD is slow processing speed; this means it takes longer to consolidate information, process it, and develop a response. This challenge can lead people to do double or triple the work of a non-NVLD individual - taking/reviewing notes multiple times or discussing and re-discussing a challenging social situation. Over time, this adds up to many many hours spent unnecessarily, with a myriad of opportunity costs.
The hidden costs of undiagnosed NVLD are emotional, professional, monetary, and temporal - but they don’t have to be unavoidable. Cognitive exercises like those offered at Eaton Arrowsmith re-train the brain to build up better processing speed, executive functions, reasoning, visual perception and more. These exercises get to the root cause of NVLD instead of just compensating for it, which means more opportunities across the board.