The most commonly recognized form of dyspraxia is motor-dyspraxia, which was once widely referred to as "clumsy child syndrome". Less commonly recognized is a condition that would probably fall under Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Recognized in the DSM schemata. This entails not only issues with motor-coordination and planning, but also the same issues with intellectual/cognitive planning.
I know one person diagnosed with the latter. She was less impacted by the social elements seen in Autism, although this varies as she and her peers enter and exit developmental stages. Sometimes she just seems very sweet and a bit naive (at times overly influenced by others, and at others, out-of-step with current behavioral/attitude or fashion trends), whereas at other times the difference between herself and her peers socially is quite marked.
Her ability to comprehend from non-verbal cues sometimes lags her peers but not to the extent usually needed to trigger the diagnostic criteria for AS or Kanner type Autism. Significantly, she is much better at knowing what to do when she understands someone else's emotional state (she knows to cheer along with, commiserate and comfort others physically and verbally, and how to achieve this), so her social reciprocity and inter-relations are much less impaired than is typical in Kanner and AS type Autism.
So far as I know she does not, nor ever did experience aversion to eye-contact, which I believe is more common (but not universal) to AS and Kanner type Autism, but she did fail to comprehend without explicit instruction that there was such a thing and that it mattered. She has been coached to mimic behavior that passes for eye-contact, and to my knowledge it is now a rote habit that is much less exhausting and distracting to her than it is for me, and that I understand it to be for many others with AS/Kanner type Autism who have acquired similar adaptive competencies.
She has particular problems ordering tasks and sorting significant from irrelevant information. An example is that having learned to do maths tasks with a particular set of physical "counting objects", she was unable to perform the same task with different counters. She could only perform the steps by rote as an entire routine, and did not understand them as discrete steps. This is similar but not the same as inflexible adherence to routine often seen in more classic types of Autism, as she only manifests the "inflexibility" cognitively, and copes much better with change and interruption to routine than is common among Autistic people who demonstrate this level of adherence to rote routine seen in task performance with global/mental dyspraxia.
To what extent global/mental dyspraxia is related to other ASDs/PDDs is not entirely clear. Diagnostically, the DSM does not include global/mental dyspraxia as such, but the only person I know with such a diagnosis, certainly manifests Autistic traits and deficits, and would in my understanding meet the criteria for PDD-NOS.
05 May 2009, 9:59 pm
