On Wednesday, the third night of the Democratic National Convention, Gus Walz's father, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, made headlines by formally accepting the vice presidential nomination.
The 17-year-old stood up during his father's speech and said, “That's my dad,” before adding, “I love you, dad.”
The governor and his wife, Gwen Waltz, revealed in an interview with People magazine that their son was diagnosed with a nonverbal learning disorder as a teenager.
A 2020 study estimated that up to 2.9 million children and adolescents in North America have a nonverbal learning disability (NVLD), which affects a person's visuospatial abilities.
The number of people diagnosed with the disorder is likely far smaller than the number of people living with it, said Santosh Girirajan, the T. Ming Zhu Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and professor of genomics at Penn State.
“These people are typically very intelligent and very verbal, but they have poor motor and spatial coordination,” he told NBC News. “It's called a learning disability because there are so many other cues beyond verbal cues that help people retain information.”
People with NVLD often struggle with visual-spatial skills such as reading maps, following directions, recognizing mathematical patterns, remembering how to navigate space, putting blocks together, etc. Social situations can also be difficult.
“Body language and some of the things we think of as everyday social norms may not be understandable to them,” Girirajan said.
Unlike other learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, signs of the disorder usually do not become apparent until adolescence.
In early elementary school, learning is focused primarily on memorization – remembering words and doing simple math equations – and people with NVLD are typically good at these skills. Social skills are also more concrete, such as playing tag at recess.
“But as we get older, there are a lot more nuances to understand in social interactions, like sarcasm, that kids may not pick up on,” said Laura Phillips, senior neuropsychologist and director of the Center for Learning and Development at the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit in New York.
In her own practice, she sees adolescents with NVLD who typically have average or above average IQs at a time when school requires more integrated knowledge and executive function, such as reading comprehension and integration of learning across subjects, and who also typically seek help for other causes, such as anxiety and depression, which are common in people with NVLD.
May be misdiagnosed as autism
Amy Margolis, director of the Environment, Brain, and Behavior Institute at Columbia University, is part of a group of researchers who began calling the disorder “developmental visuospatial dysfunction” to better describe how it affects people with it.
Margolis said that people with NVLD, contrary to what the name suggests, are “highly verbal.”
Learning disabilities are sometimes misdiagnosed as autism spectrum disorder. Margolis led a 2019 study that found that while children with autism spectrum disorder and NVLD often have overlapping characteristics, the underlying neurobiology — what's going on in the brain that causes these characteristics — differs between the two conditions.
Margolis is trying to get NVLD recognized in the DSM-5, the handbook health care professionals use to diagnose mental illnesses. Without such official recognition, people with NVLD may struggle to get the resources they need, like placement in special classes or extra support at school.
“Without an officially recognized diagnosis, it's difficult for parents to know how to gather information and communicate to others what challenges their child may have,” Phillips said, adding that widespread awareness is key to helping these families overcome NVLD.