Breaking Barriers

Jonathan Mooney was diagnosed with dyslexia when he was in the fourth grade, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in fifth grade. He didn’t learn to read until he was twelve and he dropped out of school in sixth grade.

“When I was twelve years old,” he recalls, “I had a plan for suicide.”

And Jonathan Mooney now? He’s bright and thoughtful. Engaging and funny. A graduate of Brown University with an honors degree in English literature and a 4.0 grade-point average. He was a Rhodes Scholarship finalist. At age thirty-one, he’s an author of two books, a nationally recognized speaker, and an activist and lecturer in forty-three states and three countries.

“While I had a rough road,” Mooney says, “the end of that road was very different from what was predicted for me.”

There are thousands upon thousands of other Jonathan Mooneys in our world, children and young adults with mental health and learning disabilities who perhaps do not feel as profoundly disenfranchised as Mooney did at the time. Perhaps they will not become as profoundly successful as he has. But they are facing many of the same challenges and trying to overcome many of the same stigmas.

“There are so many parents who are told their child has a dim future and that message really drives home the stigma,” Mooney says. “Young people with cognitive differences can be just as successful as anyone else if our institutions accommodate them and recognize them as people outside the lines.”

Learning Outside the Lines, in fact, is the title of Mooney’s first book (now in its eighteenth printing) and he will bring his outside-the-lines message to the Twin Cities on August 13, as one of three keynote speakers at the Third Annual National Ted and Roberta Mann Foundation Symposium. The event, co-sponsored by Minneapolis-based PACER Center, is focused on enhancing awareness of and identifying strategies for helping children and young adults with mental health and learning disabilities.

Mooney will be joined by fellow keynote speakers Adolph “Doc” Brown and Richard Pimentel. Both are nationally recognized in their own right, and their symposium addresses will be born largely from having also experienced the stigmas associated with mental health and learning disabilities. If there is a common theme embraced by all three speakers, it’s this: Rigidity is the enemy in the classroom, in the workplace, in attitudes and treatment, sometimes even from within a family.

Consider this: The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons. Neurons do the brain’s work, receiving, interpreting, and sending messages to other neurons—typically a thousand others. Mathematically speaking, the possibilities carried on within the human brain are nearly endless. No two brains can possibly think alike. So why should a child who has a mental health or learning disability be stigmatized? Why would anyone think that two brains could possibly operate the same way?

Chew on this postulation offered by Rochester-based child and adolescent psychiatrist Susan Jenkins: “We all have learning disabilities.”

To illustrate, Jenkins uses her husband as an example. He has a keen sense of direction, “a compass in his head,” she says. “But he cannot tell his right from his left, and I’m the opposite way.” Her husband has been reluctant for years to set a table for dinner, Jenkins says. She finally realized it was because of his right-left challenges in deciding which side of the plate the fork should be placed.

An acquaintance suggested that Jenkins’ husband think of the plate as a clock. Voila! He had a new way of thinking of the task and a new sense of where forks, knives, and spoons belonged.

“What people need to understand about a learning disability is that it’s the extreme end of a very specialized brain,” Jenkins says. “We don’t need to separate people who have very specialized ways of thinking.”

Inspiring Examples

Richard Pimentel’s entire adult life has been devoted to challenging how we think about and address disability. He lost his hearing in 1969 when a rocket exploded near him while he was serving in the Vietnam War. The accident set him off on a lifetime of service and of battles against insidious stigmas.

Pimentel was one of the driving forces behind passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. He has authored or contributed to dozens of programs that have helped people with disabilities find and keep jobs, maximize their potential as workers, and change employers’ attitudes. His story was the subject of the 2007 film Music Within and his hearing was recently restored, thanks to devices developed by The Starkey Hearing Foundation of Eden Prairie.

When Pimentel returned from Vietnam with a goal of becoming a professional speaker, the Veterans Administration, he says, told him that was not realistic because no one with hearing loss had done so before.

The career advice hardly swayed Pimentel. “We need to separate the concept of disability and the concept of impairment,” he says. “The impairment resides within the individual; the disability resides within society. If I’m in a wheelchair, I’m not disabled until I run into a building with no ramp. If I have a mental illness and can’t get through a narrow mind, that’s just as limiting to me…People with disabilities don’t have to overcome their 
disabilities; they have to overcome how they are looked at.”

Adolph Brown would certainly agree. Trained in child and family psychology, Brown calls himself a “master teacher.” He addresses a broad spectrum of groups in his speeches—from CEOs to disadvantaged schoolkids. He often has a surprise or two in store for his audiences and they for him. After hearing Brown speak at a Virginia school, a young man who was carrying a gun was so taken with Brown’s message he turned over his weapon to him.

Brown often draws from his own experience, having grown up poor (“I was brought up in a time when some people thought that was a disability”) and later as a father raising a daughter with cerebral palsy.

Most children with learning disabilities, Brown says, have higher-than-average IQs and if their disabilities are detected and addressed early in life, they’re treatable. Brown’s own daughter, who was born with hydrocephalus (excessive fluid on the brain), is treated with a shunt and is a real-life example of whence he speaks.

“She provides quite the dilemma for public educators,” Brown says. “She’s a gifted learner like her mother, but people will call her things like ‘tard’ and she comes home and tells us that she’s hurt by it. And here you have a second-grader who has the vocabulary of a sixth-grader.”

Room For Improvement

Barry Garfinkel, MD, a child and adolescent psychiatrist who practices in Minneapolis and is a member of the Mann Foundation Symposium organizing committee, sees much to be hopeful about in how we understand and treat mental health and learning disabilities. He also sees room for improvement.

“Colleges,” Garfinkel says, “have been so good at adapting special learners like Jonathan Mooney. All of the best colleges accept people without a high school diploma. All are looking to make the non-traditional learners, those with special needs, fit in.”

At the same time, he cautions, there is no textbook way to treat every child or young adult with a mental health or learning disability. “The textbooks are important in training educators, psychiatrists, and developing pediatricians,” he says, “but we really have to go by the individual child’s needs to plan the best education possibilities.”

As Garfinkel and other experts in the field assert, it’s more important to focus on and nurture abilities while still acknowledging disabilities than it is to keep the focus squarely on the disabilities. “With any learning disability or mental health difference, we really try to see the commonality and diminish the differences,” Garfinkel says. “We all have talents, we all have strengths, but sure enough there are areas with an equal amount of weakness that need special help.”

If only all the stigmas Jonathan Mooney and others have faced could be bundled up and hauled away for good. “A lot of young people with learning disabilities are given the message in school that they’re stupid, crazy, and lazy,” Mooney says. “My message is that as a culture we need to stop talking about what’s wrong with kids like me and start talking about what’s right. We have to accommodate these differences and change the institutions that young people learn in as opposed to trying to change the young people who have the differences.”