I personally found the differences in terminology and use of criteria between school and professional psychologists/etc one of the more difficult issues to understand and wrap my head around in order to advocate when I was starting out on the journey of a parent with a child who was clearly struggling. My knowledge at this point is terribly outdated, because my children were young when DSM-IV was still used, and before RTI was introduced into our schools.
Just my perspective, but what ultimately matters more isn't the actual terminology or even perhaps the boundaries/definition as much as providing guideposts for parents who need information and help - and monetary resources. For all that it was beyond frustrating advocating for my child at his public school, the issue wasn't so much about us or about lack of understanding or lack of wanting to recognize needs on the part of the school - I think the larger part was lack of adequate funding and lack of adequate staffing - not all due to funding, my understanding from a friend who was studying to become a speech pathologist at the time my ds was young was that our school district couldn't find enough OTs and SLPs to hire to meet need even if they had the $ to hire as many as they felt they needed.
So back to the DSM - having a DSM diagnosis really did help us in advocating, in more than one way. The first way was having a solid report that stated clearly that my ds had a diagnosed issue. The IEP process doesn't look for that diagnosis - it looks for impact on academics and access to FAPE. Somewhere in the middle ground we ran into a lot of school staff arguments that our ds wasn't struggling - basically arguments that felt planted due to a push to not qualify students due to the issues I mentioned above. Packed on top of that was the difficulty to recognize that ds was struggling when comparing a 2e student to the full population of students in his grade - yes, he was having enough issues to be recognized as struggling by his teachers but no, his test scores and school evaluation measures didn't fall far enough below the very low cut-offs to qualify directly for services. To be fair, there were also most likely quite a large chunk of non-2e kids who faced the same issues with cut-offs simply because the bar was so very very low. With the DSM diagnosis, we were able to point to a report that stated, ds struggles with (fill in the blank), and then correlate that to how the challenge impacted him at school.
The second way having the DSM diagnosis helped was giving me, as ds' parent, an understanding of what ds' challenges were, as well as opening a discussion with his evaluator re the road forward, what his needs in the short term and the future would most likely be, and where I could turn to get help (inside and outside of school). It also gave me a medical code which in some instances helped get insurance to cover other therapies.
I haven't read the entire update to the DSM-V re SLD. I thought (and I might be really wrong about this - would love some clarity!)... that when the DSM-V was being developed, referring to SLD (the specific language) was something new and intended to help line up the DSM a bit closer with school/IEP language? Wasn't part of the issue that dyslexia wasn't actually addressed in DSM-IV? Or am I remembering that really fuzzily at best?
FWIW, I am still struggling to this day trying to understand my 12 year old's reading challenge - and wish like everything we had a clear diagnosis from the DSM that fit it!
Best wishes,
polarbear
