Paraphrasing the Hydrocephalus Association's Teacher's Guide: Social and emotional issues (Part 1)

For anyone that I've met in the last 5 years that's reading this, or otherwise is coming across my blog for the first time I started writing this blog several years ago about growing up with a neurological disorder, hydrocephalus. I eventually started writing about a wider range of topics. After a few years of writing consistently I needed to take a short break from it. I attempted to start back up soon after but I was burned out on it still, and ended up taking a much longer break than I expected. The reason behind had to do with personal problems that caused me to at least think that I had to drop a lot of things to deal with it. What gave me the inspiration to start back up, ended up being more changes in my personal life. The main thing is befriended and having the opportunity to help a younger person with that has the same neurological disorder that I do.


I'm going to be paraphrasing the Hydrocephalus Association's teachers guide section by section, while writing about similar topics and posts that I didn't finish before taking a break. I'm going to go through it backwards because the topics that seem to be least known is at the end of the guide. I'm going to start with the Social and emotional issues section, and the main topics are isolation, social cues. Skills, and depression. I’m going to focus on isolation and depression, and I'll be writing another post soon that will focus on social cues and skills. My goal is to keep these posts short, and easier to read.


It's common with children with disabilities in general to feel socially isolated. It's even more common with children with learning disabilities, because problems with social cues can be involved, which can cause them to feel left out or feel different. The problems with social cues and skills can cause them to have fewer friends, and cause them to having a harder time interacting with their peers. It might not be obvious either because most of their friendships may be superficial. They may also try to make up for it by only socializing with adults.

The certain result of isolation is anger. This is mentioned two different times in the guide. The first time saying that feeling left out or different can lead to emotional problems. The second time it's a lot clearer. For some children with hydrocephalus the anger can result in violent outbursts that may seem irrational or frightening. Partially because of this it's common for children with hydrocephalus to be misdiagnosed with ADD or emotional disturbance. It's also common with children with hydrocephalus, and likely other disabilities to develop depression or anxiety disorders. Part of the reason for developing depression may be having little hope that their situation would improve.


Personally my reaction to a combination of isolation and consistent bullying in Elementary School was not making much of an effort of coming out of my shell which probably made the isolation part worse. Having a speech impediment, and the slow process to learn how to speak well enough to be understood by most people didn't help other. I had a sudden and obvious situation in the 5th grade that caused me to realize how people saw me, even if it was obvious to me as soon as I started school because I had barely started learning how to talk, and a few other things that I had trouble with at the time that was obvious to other kids, and obvious to me that it wasn't something that was normal for school aged children. My reaction to both the situation in the 5th grade, and the years of isolation of bullying before that was rebellion. I was definitely very angry too, but I didn't really express that anger in obvious ways until I was a teenager. For me the rebellion was pretty low key, but seemed more intense at least because of growing up in the church, and not seeing a huge difference between excessive swearing, and what other kids without, or sometimes with the same background would have done if they went out of their way to rebel.

I had some realizations in early high school that made things even worse for me, and looking back I assume that hormones didn't help much either. I became angrier while still not making it obvious. My reaction was becoming really self-conscious, I already was some, but it got worse. I had become a lot more social in Junior High. But reacting to my realizations made me far less social, hormones probably didn't help with this either. It resulted in more anger that was far more obvious, and more spontaneous and frequent. I ended up reaching out to someone that managed to calm me down a lot in general before I finished high school.



Source:  https://www.hydroassoc.org/docs/A_Teachers_Guide_to_Hydrocephalus.pdf