scotopic sensitivity Meares-Irlen Syndrome

Scotopic sensitivity Meares-Irlen syndrome:
My wife has always declared herself to be Dyslexic. She had a difficult time at school, being seen as naughty. She has spent her working life avoiding text and built a career in accountancy. She reads, but never books, always short magazine articles. I know it might sound strange but I had never taken too much notice of her Dyslexia declarations. If she was, it never caused our family any difficulty. She worked happily, drove a car and got on with life in a very successful way. So things plodded on.

Some years ago, I came across a paper by Prof. Wilkins of the University of Essex. He had found that there were substantial numbers of children helped by being assessed and then offered the use of colored plastic overlays, when reading. Some children had quite severe difficulties with dramatic results whilst many were made more comfortable, with academic gains as a consequence. The numbers he was talking about equated to the equivalent of a whole secondary school in my LEA. This was very exciting from the point of view of raising achievement, let alone individual effects, such as enhanced exam grades, life chances, self esteem effects etc. I looked into a course run by the Irlen Institute but this was prohibitively expensive. I was working as an LEA psychologist in those days and there was no way, of getting the course paid for. A few years later I was working in a University and received a referral from the special needs tutor, who had made an assessment using an instrument designed to assess and prescribe a coloured overlay if appropriate. The assessment instrument was the Intuitive Overlays Test, devised and standardized by Prof. Wilkins of Essex University. By the end of the day I had ordered this test and a week later it arrived.

Before a psychologist can use any test with a client they must be trained and then supervised in the use of that test. Personally after that I like to do a few trial runs, on friends or family, just to become fluent and slick in the use of the test. So it was a few weeks later that I sat opposite my wife, with nothing on my mind beyond running the test smoothly and efficiently. Naturally she asked what this test was for. I explained about letters jumping, dancing around, blacking out of areas, halo effects, underlining and other visual effects such as eye strain and over brightness of black on white. To which she commented something along the lines of good because that is what I have. As the test progressed my wife became increasingly excited. The text had stopped moving. As different colours were tried and improvements found the more delighted she became. She settled on a colour, which she keeps at work and uses to read and in particular to overlay her computer screen. She reports no more headaches and an ability to read in a much more relaxed fashion now.

I then started to take the Intuitive Overlays Test with me on assessment visits. I started to include questions designed to pick up on scotopic sensitivity in my interview. My anecdotal field based findings matched those of Prof. Wilkins, there were a substantial number of children and adults who are helped by colored overlays.

If you or your child is experiencing visual effects such as thus cited above: text wobbling, moving, flickering, blocking out, underlining, halo effects, head aches, a feeling of over brightness then it would be useful to have an assessment in this regard. Contact our site manager Dan Petrov for contact details of a psychologist offering assessment in this specialism.

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