Learning Difficulties - Do I have a condition?

[anonymous656]

Hi there,

I have been having learning difficulties all my life and would like to find out whether I have some kind of a disorder.

I've always found that I seem to struggle with following simple instructions and often forget what someone has told me very quickly. I will have to ask the same question multiple times and this tends to annoy some people. This seems to affect me during social conversations also, and I sometimes find it difficult to follow what people are saying. Due to a very poor short term memory, I just seem to forget what was previously said and lose track of the topic discussed.

Throughout school, I often found myself putting in a ridiculous amount of time in preparing for an exam. I'd spend hours reading a paragraph over and over again, and still often not completely remembered what I had read. Partly, I think this is to do with my poor short term memory but I also am inherently a very stressful person and I'm sure this had been an added factor.

The worst thing about all of this is the feeling that regardless of how much effort that I put into something, I'll achieve only achieve very average results.

My current job requires that I have to interview clients to understand their key processes as well as working with a large amount of documentation. During my interactions with the client, I have been finding that I am forgetting what had been previously said. I struggle to process information in my mind in a way that it is logical and has a structured flow. It just seems that any information that I take in is either forgotten or blurred. This causes alot of confusion, and by the end of my discussion, I will have retained/understood very little of what had been said to me.

In working with documents, and performing simple tasks (such as identifying what documentation has been received and what is still outstanding), I often lose track of the documents that I have already counted as having been received. I frequently will have to start over, and eventually will get to a point where I am frustrated and stop the task completely.

The above is one of many examples where I have found myself losing track/forgetting things very quickly and easily and causing me alot of inefficiency. My inability to complete the task causes me to panic, and ultimately nothing gets done.

I am at a point in my life now where I believe that it is critical that I am able to rectify these fundamental flaws. It is really since I started work a few months ago that this issue was really made very apparent to me. I have previously ignored it and refused to believe that there was anything wrong with me. I have lost all confidence/self esteem, been in long-term depression and cannot seem to enjoy the things that I usually would.

I believe that if there is some way that I can identify what my problem is, then maybe I can do something about it.

Will really appreciate your help in helping me find out whether I have some kind of a disorder based on the problems that I have mentioned above. Is there any medication available that might be able to assist me?

Thanks for your help,

anonymous

[Paxiled]

I wouldn't go diagnosing yourself from the internet.  These diagnoses are way overblown anyway, more for psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies earning insurance money than anything else.  The label isn't important; what you can do about it safely is.  Good luck.

[anonymous656]

Hi there, thank for your response. I am going to a doctor tomorrow for a test
but after doing some research on the net, it seems that almost all of the characteristics that I mentioned above are consistent with Inattentive ADD or SCT (Slow Cognitive Tempo).

[Paxiled]

In order to treat something you have to know what you're treating.  I think this is the province of neurologists, but in any case you need to see a specialist in learning disorders to see if this is something physiological or something that can be cured by cognitive learning techniques.