Earlier this week, there was an article in The Boston Globe about sensory processing disorder. It stated that a group of researchers, families, and occupational therapists is aggressively lobbying to get sensory processing disorder included in the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is currently being drafted.
Many readers may wonder, what is a sensory processing disorder?
Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) is a neurological disorder that causes difficulties with processing information from the five senses: vision, auditory, touch, olfaction, and taste, as well as from the sense of movement (vestibular system), and/or the positional sense (proprioception). For those with SPD, sensory information is sensed, but perceived abnormally. Unlike blindness or deafness, sensory information is received by people with SPD; the difference is that information is processed by the brain in an unusual way that causes distress, discomfort, and confusion.