Case Study 17 – Examining the impact of child with comorbid ASD and ADHD

The department had informed that, I had assigned with a new case. The child was about 4 year’s old male who was diagnosed as ASD with ADHD. The only thing which I came to know regarding the child was that he is a challenging case and is going to be great challenge for me. I got tensed by their words.

He came to my cabin with a gloomy face. I started to take sessions for him. On the first day itself he was very aggressive throughout the session. I took many activities, but he was not interested in any of that, instead he banged each material and threw them off. I tried to engage the child with the usual activities but he was not cooperative for the sessions. Sometimes he was very quiet child however was having attention seeking behavior as I observed.  His parents got tensed after seeing his responses. I counseled the parent about his problems and importance of intervention. On the next day I welcomed him with his favorite toys and he attended the sessions for a while. Slowly I made rapport with the child. He started to give better responses.

Gradually I changed the pattern of therapy instead of full activities; I introduced commands in between the activities.  When his PLS were set I moved to matching skills, for which I gave the child different matching activities like puzzles etc. When he achieved his matching skills, I moved on to identification skills. Finally he identified, now he could identify all the lexical and English alphabets (capital and small) and numbers up to 100. Next I moved on to writing skills. I gave the child to different pre writing tasks. Gradually he achieved writing skills. He is able to write English words and numbers and he is able to do ‘count and write’ and single digit ‘addition and subtraction’. Finally his discharge time arrived and he got his academic skills for his age level. I felt happy about his achievements and felt proud.

Note: Every child has different intervention and adequate stimulation helps the children to develop their age adequate skills.

NEETHU NATESAN V N

SPECIAL EDUCATOR