Marcus has refused to go to school. Again. This time he attacks his mother when she tries to get him to go.
We assess him and find that whilst he can remember words, he cannot remember sentences or phrases. His non-verbal thinking is weak. He cannot think and plan in language. His maths is weak. His Symbol Relations is weak. His reading is at a kindergarten level, writing is not much better. He is 13. His future is bleak.
Marcus begins a full-time program. Progress is slow. His mental health has been badly affected. We need to build a relationship where he feels safe, not pressured, where he can succeed and learn that trying is worth it.
This is a chart of his first assessment (March 2020):
After 2 years Marcus’ cognitive functioning looks like this. I have highlighted the names of the functions we worked on. You can see that some functions have strengthened as an additional benefit after working on others.
This young man will likely finish his full-time program at the end of this year. I expect his Symbolic Thinking and Symbol Relations functions to be at average strength. He will still have to work on his capacity to remember instructions and visual symbols (think words), but he will be back in school and beginning to thrive. He now has the opportunity to have an ordinary life. So do his mother, his father and his sister.
