Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment WISC-IV -- topping out & crazy score deviations

Hi Alyson, welcome.

I'm the same way as you and Austin. Tell me a name multiple times and I may forget but if it's emailed to me I am much more likely to remember. I think this was a factor in my elementary years as I did not stand out that much in the earliest grades when instructions etc are often verbal. Once things became print based I was able to take off more. Or maybe a coincidence, but it makes a nice story.

Polly

We've found dd#2 to be much more visual as well. She is also easily distractable and tends to visually wander around the room so she often isn't looking at what she needs to be learning. I know that she isn't learning anything if she isn't looking at it, but keeping her attention and vision on the topic at hand can be a challenge. She doesn't have that obvious ADHD physical movement thing going, though, so she doesn't appear as distracted as I've found she is over the years of dealing with her. If we can keep her focus and eyes on the topic, she learns and retains it much better, though.

I do wish that the WISC had both auditory and visual memory tests such that it didn't make the entire memory look poor if it is just poor auditory memory.

Alyson,
It's wonderful that your tester is someone who is willing to work with your son on anxiety (which can depress timed scores - when people are frightened, they react more inflexibly and score lower) and WM. I've never been privileged to work with a tester who is also willing to do any kind of 'talk therapy' or 'teaching/mentoring' with my son. I've gotten 'here's your number - schools won't get him - good bye and good luck.'

I'm not exactly encouraging you to actually go ahead with that offer - you know best about that - but I wanted to take a minute to celebrate the sanity.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

Welcome Yoly - great question!

I totally believe that ADD in PG kids is (or can be) such a unique animal that it should qualify as a special kind of ADD. This is a great question, and I encourage you to start a topic about it in the twice exceptional forum, so we can collect whatever been 'dug out of the mist' all in one place.

currently I'm reading :

remember to click on Hoagiesgifted link first before making purchase through Amazon if you decide to buy the book.


Smiles,
Grinity

I think that WISC does test visual memory in the form of Coding. In order to score well on it, you have to memorize the digit-symbol associations and not look at the key all the time.

I found the tables in this Wrightslaw page to be very helpful -- they explain what types of skills each subtest tests. http://wrightslaw.com/advoc/articles/tests_measurements.html#16

From what I understand, some PG kids have personality traits that manifest like ADD. They can look inattentive for a number of reasons: in school, maybe it's because they already know what's being taught or because some element of a discussion caught their imagination and they're engaging in some sort of deep-thinking extension that would leave everyone else totally confused but makes perfect sense to them. Also, lots of PG kids have anxiety issues because of their asynchronous development. Basically, they understand things that they're not yet emotionally equipped to manage, or they have these crazy imaginations that lead them to catastrophize (this was a problem I had and have only as an adult learned to manage!)

The first night we met the psychologist, DS had forgotten his meds that morning. So he was bouncing all over the place, looking through her bookshelves, interrupting with questions, etc. I was so frustrated, but it didn't bother her a lot -- she said it was normal for PG kids because their brains were just constantly going and processing things. (She said this is also why my son has NEVER been a good sleeper.)

So is it a different kind of ADD? That's a tough question! I guess the way I look at it is sort of like this: You can get a headache from bonking your head or from your sinuses...but you still have a headache, and ibuprofen still generally takes care of the worst symptoms regardless. DS takes Vyvanse, and it does help him with his inattention and impulse control (though if you read my first post, you can see it definitely doesn't FIX it -- he took his meds the day he was tested!) The psych was kind of uncertain about how much he needed the Vyvanse until she tested him, and she saw his abilities in the actual intellectual areas and then saw the huge dip when they got to the attention-related activities. So I guess what I'm saying is that whether it's because he's PG or because of some other reason, he still benefits from traditional solutions -- changing diet to reduce preservatives and eliminate food colorings, getting plenty of exercise, working on cognitive-behavioral-based behavior modification and, yes, meds.

I don't know if that helps, but I guess that's how I see it.

Ooh, the psychologist strongly encouraged us to get this book, both for DS and for us. Both my husband and I were IQ tested as kids at 150+ (though this was SB, not WISC, of course). We both struggled with depression, which is not at all unusual for gifted, but I have had serious anxiety issues my whole life. She thinks maybe I could find more lasting relief if I better understood the real root of my symptoms, which she suspects may be more related to being HG than traditional anxiety. She said reading this book would help be better understand that as well as the ADHD-like whatever that DS has going on. So thanks for reminding me -- in my rush to better understand DS's scores, that suggestion had kind of gotten lost in the cluttered hallways of my mind!

Alyson,
I'm so glad you are here. I think that there is a good chance that your psychologist is correct. When I started posting on a different HG/PG forum, back when DS13 was first diagnosed (and before this one existed) there was a very unactive sections about 'Adult Giftedness.' I know that I've grown to be a much more calm and balanced person during this journey, because I can see that back then, about every 3 months, I make these long venting post about 'who did what to whom' and how miserable it made me. That was 4 years ago - not long on the 'major life change' scale, and about a year ago I realized that I never had that feeling that 'life is soooooo awfullllll' anymore to such a full degree.

Some of that is that I'm no longer under the exquisite stress of watching my son be so misplaced at school. Some of it might be a natural process of maturation. But I really think that getting to know myself as a 'rather unusually gifted person' (who can't spell) and having a place to share the 'small highs and lows' on a daily basis has made so much of the difference.

What is totally gone is the feeling that something mysterious and bad is wrong with me that I'm not like other people. I think a lot of HG women grow up this way, but I recently read Deirdre Lovecky's Different Minds, and she points out that the 'typical' Gifted/ADD girls is able to do well in school by being hypervigelient, and can never be relaxed and confident that she is actually prepared for any academic situation. As I read this I remembered that this was true once I got to Middle School and High School, because things seem to 'jump out of the ether' at me on a regular basis. I'm not sure that I could be clinically diagnosed as ADD, but I do have plenty of gifted +ADD traits, and was constantly teased about being a 'space cadet' as a girl. And things do jump out of nowhere on a regular basis - of course that might be perfectly normal, LOL, and I just mind it more because of my perfectionism (which, to me is more of a lack of having other people around who are comfortable discussing such things as peers - I call it 'lack of reference,' and it's one of our great confusions.

Anyway, I'm now wondering how much growing up a Spacey, Gifted Girl contributed to my being always on guard and worried. I think that teachers in particular were pretty good at communicating their disappointment that a 'bright girl like you doesn't care enough to write in neat handwriting and look up the words I don't know in a dictionary.' Of course to me the correctly spelled words looked as 'funny' as the incorrectly spelled ones. I must have some emotional block about -el words, such as 'modle' or 'model' because they both look terribly wrong to me.

Anyway Alyson - welcome! search 'perfectionism' and and enjoy our years of chewing over this interesting questions!



It's worth a try anyway...
Love and More Love,
Grinity

I just checked back in here after being away a couple of days on deadlines (one of the curses of the gifted adult who went through regular schools as a kid, I believe, is pathological procrastination, which I inconveniently pair with perfectionism), and my heart is pounding reading your message! I have never, ever seen my academic experience so clearly and succinctly crystallized as it is in the excerpt above: I was, and I still am, a "spacey, gifted girl." WOW! Thank you for that.

FWIW, my current psychologist actually did diagnose me as ADD. It was a roundabout way of getting to it, actually -- I've struggled with depression and anxiety my whole life, but I'd come to realize that what brought on my depression, more than anything else, was anxiety. I've always been pretty introspective about these matters, and once I realized that, I was sort of on a new mental journey to try and root out the main anxiety triggers. Eventually I realized my anxiety was often caused by situations I brought about through procrastination, poor planning, forgetfulness, and organizational problems -- you know, that pesky working memory/executive function stuff. I talked to my psychologist about this and we did a screening. She said I did come back as exhibiting clinical symptoms that did lean more toward the inattentive end of the ADHD scale (though she did point out I do have hyperactive problems like nervous behaviors -- twisting my ring all the time, shaking my leg up and down, etc.) She and I worked on medications for a while, and now I am off all SSRIs and SNRIs that I was on and I'm simply taking an ADHD med to control those issues. It's a work-in-progress, but it seems to be effective for now. (knock on wood)

Okay, so I apologize for thread-bumping an old topic, but I had to reply, because your message was so, so relevant to where I am right now...and how I'm managing my son's issues, as well.

Thank you all SO MUCH for your warm welcome -- I am so happy to have found a group of people I can talk openly around. Too often we have to hide our concerns and struggles because most people aren't open to hearing about the problems of parenting a PG kid -- to them, it's as inexcusable as a supermodel complaining about having too many admirers. To find a community of people I don't have to tiptoe around discussions of intelligence (and all the related baggage!) is such a huge relief. Thank you all!

alyson