I was first introduced to the idea that a child could have a complex interwoven group of disorders versus just one definable disorder about five years ago when we did a neurofeedback intensive with a therapist in Utah. On the first day there, we conducted a quantitative EEG (QEEG) to measure LuLu’s brainwaves and do a statistical analysis on the electrical activity in various parts of her brain. As the therapist was downloading and reviewing this data to send to the neurologist for analysis, he couldn’t help but take a peek. He declared (and had seen several hundred of these) that LuLu wasn’t “quite RAD” yet she was “more than RAD”. These words were both alarming and comforting at the same time.

We had been given a diagnosis of Reactive Attachment Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder nearly two years earlier by a local therapist and pursued some attachment therapy. This same therapist, after 6 sessions suggested that perhaps our then 3-year-old daughter might have Bipolar. This seemed a bit questionable to us, and we had decided that the techniques this therapist was trying weren’t working (and she had admittedly never worked with a child this young.) So we sought out other attachment therapists and made some progress…

Yet, in the fall of 2001, when I got the opportunity to go to an ATTACh conference, I jumped at the chance. There I was introduced to numerous interventions and found neurofeedback to be an interesting possibility. When this therapist pronounced LuLu as “more than RAD” my first thought was “there’s something worse than RAD???”. He laughed and explained that LuLu’s brain waves did not show the typical pattern of children who had been diagnosed with attachment disorder. But that LuLu’s brain waves showed severe patterns of dysfunction in many, many areas. In a prophetic way, this therapist mentioned OCD, Tourettes, strong math computation ability, sensory integration dysfunction, high functioning autism, and auditory processing disorder as distinct possibilities, based on what he saw on this QEEG.

That was five years ago, and everything this therapist hypothesized about my daughter’s brain waves has been diagnosed independently by others. (And she is very good a math computations.)

It was then that I started to do a paradigm shift from believing that my child just needed to have the right kind of therapy and therapeutic parenting and “decide” to attach to us to understanding that she was truly disabled in many, many ways. Because LuLu’s diagnoses list just continued to grow, I started telling my listserve friends that LuLu had “the combo platter” and the name just stuck. Since then I have met countless others whose children have the combo platter too.

Strange thing about those combo platters, unlike the blue plate special, these platters come in so many different combos it’s hard to identify exactly what’s on the plate!

Many parents wonder and even worry over what caused their child to have the combo platter. I suppose if we truly understood the “cause” for mental disorders we’d be in a better position to cure them. But for me, the pursuit of why my daughter has the combo platter seems a futile one.
I do believe, as many professionals and parents do, that our children’s early childhood neglect and abuse actual alters the neurochemistry in the brain. Alter the brain chemistry and you alter the person’s ability to behave, learn, and function.

But being able to pin her disorders on a particular person or even a group of people in China seems not only impossible but impossibly naive. And even if abusive people were the culprit, how does that solve LuLu's disorders?

More to come…

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