Learning Disorders Across the Lifespan: A Mental Health Framework

This book addresses the need to view specific learning disorders (SLDs) within a mental health framework, as supported by their placement alongside autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). It describes how policy and practice point to a different perspective – specifically that SLDs are often treated as educational rather than psychological problems – and examines the implications of this dichotomy. The book reviews empirical research that suggests children need access to treatment for clinical components of SLDs that may respond to psychological intervention separately from, and in addition to, educational interventions. It provides a theoretical framework for organizing research findings and clinical perspectives that support understanding the clinical components of SLDs and addresses the need for a mental health framework within which to approach theory, treatment, and assessment of SLDs.

Key areas of coverage include:

• Examining different theoretical orientations to learning disorders (e.g., cognitive, behavioral, neuropsychoeducational, psychoanalytic).
• Adapting evidence-based therapeutic techniques for use with children and adolescents who have learning disorders.
• The need for accurate and well characterized assessment of SLDs.
• How incorporating a cognitive neuroscience perspective into assessment can move LD treatment and research forward.

Learning Disorders Across the Lifespan is an essential reference for clinicians, therapists, and other professionals as well as researchers, professors, and graduate students in school and clinical child psychology, special education, speech-language therapy, developmental psychology, pediatrics, social work as well as all interrelated disciplines.