WEBVTT
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Welcome to the Sensory Code Podcast.
00:00:02.479 --> 00:00:12.960
I'm Laura Pettix, pediatric occupational therapist, creator of the OT Butterfly, author, neurodiversity advocate, and a neurodivergent mom raising a neurodivergent kid.
00:00:13.199 --> 00:00:22.000
Each episode, I'll teach you how to view behavior through a sensory and nervous system lens because what you see on the surface is never the whole story.
00:00:22.239 --> 00:00:26.160
So pull up a chair, grab your favorite fidget, and lock in.
00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:29.839
I am so excited to be here today.
00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:38.079
We are going to talk about what OTs do with a child's diagnosis, whether it informs our treatment plans or not.
00:00:38.240 --> 00:00:44.719
But first I want to remind you, we are just about two weeks away from my book, The Sensory Code Publishing.
00:00:44.880 --> 00:00:48.320
So if you're listening to this live, please go pre-order the book.
00:00:48.399 --> 00:01:06.480
If you are a parent, if you're a teacher or a therapist and you support a kid who has sensory processing differences and you want to better support their regulation, you want to understand their behavior a little bit better and find some strategies to support them at home or in the clinic or in the classroom.
00:01:06.640 --> 00:01:12.719
And you want to learn from an occupational therapist who is neurodivergent herself, then this is the book for you.
00:01:12.879 --> 00:01:18.560
Just go to the otterfly.com/slash the sensory code and that's where you can pre-order it.
00:01:18.799 --> 00:01:23.680
If you didn't know, pre-order numbers make a huge difference to authors.
00:01:23.840 --> 00:01:27.760
It helps bookstores know how much inventory to order.
00:01:27.840 --> 00:01:32.799
And then it also helps us rise to the top of certain bestseller lists.
00:01:32.959 --> 00:01:41.680
Now, I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I would love to be more visible to parents and teachers and educators around the world.
00:01:41.840 --> 00:01:45.439
And that happens more when there's a lot more pre-orders.
00:01:45.599 --> 00:01:48.799
So if you can, please, please, please go pre-order.
00:01:48.959 --> 00:01:59.200
So for today's topic, I got a question from someone on Instagram who said, Does a diagnosis change the treatment plan that you come up with as an occupational therapist?
00:01:59.519 --> 00:02:06.000
And I am speaking from the perspective of a sensory-based clinic occupational therapist.
00:02:06.159 --> 00:02:08.960
So it might look different depending on what setting you're in.
00:02:09.039 --> 00:02:11.039
So I want to make sure that that part's clear.
00:02:11.280 --> 00:02:29.360
When I was in grad school, they spent a lot of time teaching us about different diagnoses, how they present, how you diagnose it, what the prognosis is, what the precautions are, what best treatments support which kinds of people with a certain diagnosis.
00:02:29.439 --> 00:02:32.719
And we were tested on it over and over and over again.
00:02:32.960 --> 00:02:42.560
But as a clinician, even as an OT student or an intern, it really didn't come into play as much as I was preparing for it.
00:02:42.800 --> 00:02:53.520
Especially when we're speaking about something like autism or ADHD, in the sense that there's so many different possible profiles and presentations.
00:02:53.919 --> 00:03:02.159
So just saying your client who's coming in has ADHD or is autistic, it's not as helpful as you might think.
00:03:02.400 --> 00:03:28.639
Of course, again, outside of a sensory clinic, if you're dealing with more medical-based diagnosis like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, fragile X, all these other kinds of chromosome or medical kinds of diagnoses that will affect more of the cognition and motor patterns and any other kind of physical presentation of something, it's going to play more of a role in how you plan your interventions.
00:03:28.800 --> 00:03:39.120
But again, coming from a clinic-based OT where we were focusing mostly on like learning and behavior and regulation, diagnoses really didn't play as big of a factor as you might think.
00:03:39.280 --> 00:03:50.000
I specifically remember when I was an intern and I was learning from one of my supervisors, and she was telling me about this kid that was going to come in, and she was saying how old he was, what we're going to work on.
00:03:50.159 --> 00:03:53.360
And I remember looking through his file and she was like, Oh, what are you looking for?
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And I was like, What's his diagnosis?
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And she goes, Oh, you know, it doesn't really matter.
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Don't even like let that inform what you're doing.
00:04:00.080 --> 00:04:02.560
Just here's what you need to know about what he's working on.
00:04:02.719 --> 00:04:07.039
Here are his strengths, here's what he likes to do, here's what his teacher is saying.
00:04:07.199 --> 00:04:09.280
And the diagnosis didn't really matter as much.
00:04:09.439 --> 00:04:13.520
And that was the first time I was like, wait, what do you mean it doesn't matter?
00:04:13.840 --> 00:04:16.399
And now I know what they meant.
00:04:16.560 --> 00:04:23.120
It's not that it didn't matter at all, it's just that it shouldn't have been a priority from the beginning, before I even met the kid.
00:04:23.279 --> 00:04:24.560
It doesn't really affect that.
00:04:24.720 --> 00:04:31.040
What she was giving me was the more important information, which was relating to his current skills and the goals that we needed to work on.
00:04:31.279 --> 00:04:37.120
And if you know occupational therapy, this is really the root of the field.
00:04:37.439 --> 00:04:44.399
We are all about focusing on the function and the client skills of the person in front of you.
00:04:44.560 --> 00:04:58.319
We are looking at the skills that they need, the goals that they are trying to attain, maybe what injury they have sustained, maybe what limitations they might have in their environment or within the task or within their own current skills.
00:04:58.639 --> 00:05:04.480
But the diagnosis itself doesn't really matter so much as the person in front of you.
00:05:04.639 --> 00:05:15.600
To add to that, there are a lot of kids who I saw in the clinic who either didn't have a diagnosis at all, didn't have a diagnosis yet, or had the wrong diagnosis.
00:05:15.759 --> 00:05:22.480
Specifically, kids who were diagnosed as having anxiety and really they were autistic or ADHD or something else.
00:05:22.639 --> 00:05:30.639
Again, because in this clinic-based setting, we're focusing more on diagnoses that are made based off of like a checklist or observations.
00:05:30.800 --> 00:05:39.839
So it's easy to have kids come into the clinic with presenting challenges in the classroom or at home that don't yet have a diagnosis or again have the wrong one.
00:05:40.079 --> 00:05:46.079
So that also tells you why the diagnostics piece is not as huge of a factor as you might think.
00:05:46.240 --> 00:05:48.240
So are diagnoses really necessary?
00:05:48.399 --> 00:05:54.000
I think diagnoses play a huge role in someone's identity and someone's sense of community.
00:05:54.160 --> 00:06:00.800
It also does open the doors for some services and for some supports, whether it's at school or through your insurance.
00:06:01.040 --> 00:06:17.759
And it can be a very helpful guide for parents or therapists or teachers to sort of know a general idea of what they might expect with a kid, as long as you're not using that as like the only vision, the only lens that you're looking through.
00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:20.720
It should be part of the picture, and maybe you keep that in mind.
00:06:20.800 --> 00:06:26.000
Like, okay, I know this client is autistic, so they might have some social communication differences.
00:06:26.319 --> 00:06:31.279
That means that when they're in a social scenario, I might help support them in this way.
00:06:31.519 --> 00:06:43.600
That kind of thing might be helpful, but I'm not going to use it in the sense that this client is autistic, they have social communication differences, so I'm going to focus on that and I'm going to make sure that they know how to communicate like a neurotypical person.
00:06:43.759 --> 00:07:03.439
Do you see the difference where we're using the diagnosis to inform us and sort of have a guide or know sort of what we're getting into, what to expect, but we're not using it as like a box and we're not using it to say that all autistic kids have communication differences that look like this.
00:07:03.920 --> 00:07:08.720
We still want to really, really take the child that is in front of us at that time.
00:07:08.959 --> 00:07:23.680
Now, after saying all of that, I will say that there's one diagnosis that does make a difference for me in terms of how I coach the parents through it and in terms of how I support the child in the clinic, and that is OCD.
00:07:23.920 --> 00:07:27.199
OCD overlaps a lot with some sensory components.
00:07:27.279 --> 00:07:30.000
There's research that shows that there's a high number of statistics.
00:07:30.079 --> 00:07:31.519
I can't quote it off the top of my head.
00:07:31.600 --> 00:07:35.360
I will try to link the article if I remember at the end of the episode.
00:07:35.519 --> 00:07:48.959
But there is a high overlap between people who have an OCD diagnosis and people who experience sensory processing differences, particularly in the sensory avoider realm or being sensory sensitive.
00:07:49.199 --> 00:08:02.240
It overlaps with those people who have OCD that's like, quote, just right, that have that just right OCD, where the clothing needs to fit just right, a word needs to come out just the right way, they have to crunch the food in the just right way.
00:08:02.399 --> 00:08:05.120
And so it really overlaps with the sensory component.
00:08:05.360 --> 00:08:07.839
But I learned a lot from Natasha Daniels.
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She is an OCD and sensory and anxiety overlapping expert in the mental health space.
00:08:13.680 --> 00:08:28.079
And I remember her talking about how the approach to supporting a kid with OCD might conflict with how you support a child who has anxiety and sensory processing differences or just sensory processing differences without the anxiety.
00:08:28.240 --> 00:08:36.240
That's because, as you know, I am constantly encouraging parents and teachers to accommodate sensory needs, right?
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If something is too itchy or too uncomfortable or too much, then let's make it less for the child.
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Let's cut the tag off.
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Let's turn down the volume so that their nervous system can be more regulated in order to pay attention in class.
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But with OCD, if you accommodate too much, it's more like you're continuing to feed into that feedback loop, which can magnify the experience of OCD for that person.
00:09:03.759 --> 00:09:07.840
I am not an OCD expert, so I don't even know if I properly convey that.
00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:34.480
I just know that if there's a whiff of OCD in the child's presentation and the things that they're being challenged with at home or at school, I will put a bookmark there and always leave a note to refer to an OCD specialist and bring that up to parents so that they know that we want to at least rule out that diagnosis first before we fully jump into an intervention at the clinic or if I'm just coaching them one-on-one.
00:09:34.720 --> 00:09:36.639
So let's think about how this might look.
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Let's say you go into a clinic to work with an OT and your child has an ADHD diagnosis.
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But let's say the OT doesn't look at that part yet.
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All they're gonna look at is they're going to assess your child's sensory processing abilities through observation and parent report.
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They might get some report from the teachers, and then they might also do some sensory motor testing, test their fine motor and their gross motor, maybe even their visual motor skills.
00:10:00.480 --> 00:10:12.639
And with that information, the OT is going to look at what gaps your child might have in terms of the areas of need where they need most support based on their findings from the observation and from the testing.
00:10:12.879 --> 00:10:17.759
Then if they have enough to go off of, they might already start working with your child.
00:10:17.919 --> 00:10:24.000
But aside from that, say you come to me and you're asking for support with your child's behaviors at home around bath time.
00:10:24.240 --> 00:10:35.519
Say they're consistently melting down around bath, you can only do bathtime twice a week because they really cry every time they have to take off their clothes and transition into the bath and cry when you pour water over their head.
00:10:35.759 --> 00:10:42.159
I'm gonna ask you a lot more questions around their behavior at home, things that you've already done as a parent to support them.
00:10:42.240 --> 00:10:48.720
I might ask them about what's going on at school, I might give you a sensory profile, I might observe them in the clinic if I was working with you in the clinic.
00:10:48.879 --> 00:10:52.320
And from there, then I might say, Does your child have a diagnosis?
00:10:52.559 --> 00:10:59.600
If you tell me I'm not sure yet, or yes, they are autistic, yes, they have ADHD, I might say, okay, that's good to know.
00:10:59.759 --> 00:11:04.159
And I might change the way that I interact with your child.
00:11:04.399 --> 00:11:11.840
I might know that maybe your child with ADHD needs a little bit more novelty in the way that we offer bath time.
00:11:12.240 --> 00:11:21.840
But to be honest, I might just go off of what I'm seeing in front of me and I might just note that in the chart and say, oh, this child happens to have a diagnosis.
00:11:22.080 --> 00:11:26.240
But again, sometimes I work with parents who don't even have a diagnosis yet.
00:11:26.480 --> 00:11:35.600
If you came to me with the same presentation and you said, my child has a diagnosis of OCD, that's when I would consult with a mental health therapist and say, what's the plan here?
00:11:35.840 --> 00:11:38.000
Is this part of their just right OCD?
00:11:38.159 --> 00:11:43.600
How are you supporting them to avoid this feedback loop and to help them move past that?
00:11:43.759 --> 00:11:58.240
Then I would focus on what I can do as the OT is providing sensory regulation strategies and sensory integration in the clinic or by sensory-based activities for you to do at home to help regulate their nervous system before they get into the bath.
00:11:58.399 --> 00:12:02.720
But if I know there's OCD in the picture, maybe I might not be as heavy on the accommodations.
00:12:02.799 --> 00:12:05.679
It kind of looks different when we're talking about that.
00:12:05.840 --> 00:12:13.600
But whether or not your child has ADHD, autism, anxiety, or something that you don't know, but they're just struggling with bath.
00:12:13.759 --> 00:12:19.279
They're really struggling with homework, they're really struggling after school and their aftercare program, getting in trouble.
00:12:19.519 --> 00:12:26.080
I'm really only focusing on their behaviors and trying to ask you questions to help me fill out the picture.
00:12:26.240 --> 00:12:34.159
And whether or not they have a certain diagnosis does not prohibit me from giving you tips and strategies to support that child.
00:12:34.320 --> 00:12:47.200
In summary, a diagnosis can really be informative and give you good context as a therapist, but it's not necessary to create an intervention plan.
00:12:47.440 --> 00:13:03.200
And unless it's something like a medical diagnosis with specific precautions or something like OCD with a whole different branch of strategies to try, then it's not really going to sway or change much of my actual intervention plan.
00:13:03.440 --> 00:13:12.480
It might change or inform the way that I interact with your child, but not necessarily make me change what I do in the intervention.
00:13:12.639 --> 00:13:14.240
Anyway, that was a great question.
00:13:14.320 --> 00:13:15.840
So thank you to whoever asked it.
00:13:16.080 --> 00:13:27.039
If you have any questions that you want me to cover, feel free to send me a DM on Instagram at the OT Butterfly and in the word right before it put podcast question so that I could search in my DMs and find it easily.
00:13:27.279 --> 00:13:29.120
I will be back next week.
00:13:29.440 --> 00:13:42.159
Wait, before you go, I wanted to remind you that you can find more from me on my website at theotbutterfly.com, including all of my PDF offerings, courses, workshops, one on one coaching, and of course, my books.
00:13:42.320 --> 00:13:47.440
If you want to do me a solid, please leave a podcast review on whatever platform you're listening on.
00:13:47.519 --> 00:13:50.320
It just helps people find my content easier.
00:13:50.639 --> 00:13:53.519
Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.319
Welcome to the Sensory Code Podcast.
00:00:02.479 --> 00:00:12.960
I'm Laura Pettix, pediatric occupational therapist, creator of the OT Butterfly, author, neurodiversity advocate, and a neurodivergent mom raising a neurodivergent kid.
00:00:13.199 --> 00:00:22.000
Each episode, I'll teach you how to view behavior through a sensory and nervous system lens because what you see on the surface is never the whole story.
00:00:22.239 --> 00:00:26.160
So pull up a chair, grab your favorite fidget, and lock in.
00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:29.839
I am so excited to be here today.
00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:38.079
We are going to talk about what OTs do with a child's diagnosis, whether it informs our treatment plans or not.
00:00:38.240 --> 00:00:44.719
But first I want to remind you, we are just about two weeks away from my book, The Sensory Code Publishing.
00:00:44.880 --> 00:00:48.320
So if you're listening to this live, please go pre-order the book.
00:00:48.399 --> 00:01:06.480
If you are a parent, if you're a teacher or a therapist and you support a kid who has sensory processing differences and you want to better support their regulation, you want to understand their behavior a little bit better and find some strategies to support them at home or in the clinic or in the classroom.
00:01:06.640 --> 00:01:12.719
And you want to learn from an occupational therapist who is neurodivergent herself, then this is the book for you.
00:01:12.879 --> 00:01:18.560
Just go to the otterfly.com/slash the sensory code and that's where you can pre-order it.
00:01:18.799 --> 00:01:23.680
If you didn't know, pre-order numbers make a huge difference to authors.
00:01:23.840 --> 00:01:27.760
It helps bookstores know how much inventory to order.
00:01:27.840 --> 00:01:32.799
And then it also helps us rise to the top of certain bestseller lists.
00:01:32.959 --> 00:01:41.680
Now, I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I would love to be more visible to parents and teachers and educators around the world.
00:01:41.840 --> 00:01:45.439
And that happens more when there's a lot more pre-orders.
00:01:45.599 --> 00:01:48.799
So if you can, please, please, please go pre-order.
00:01:48.959 --> 00:01:59.200
So for today's topic, I got a question from someone on Instagram who said, Does a diagnosis change the treatment plan that you come up with as an occupational therapist?
00:01:59.519 --> 00:02:06.000
And I am speaking from the perspective of a sensory-based clinic occupational therapist.
00:02:06.159 --> 00:02:08.960
So it might look different depending on what setting you're in.
00:02:09.039 --> 00:02:11.039
So I want to make sure that that part's clear.
00:02:11.280 --> 00:02:29.360
When I was in grad school, they spent a lot of time teaching us about different diagnoses, how they present, how you diagnose it, what the prognosis is, what the precautions are, what best treatments support which kinds of people with a certain diagnosis.
00:02:29.439 --> 00:02:32.719
And we were tested on it over and over and over again.
00:02:32.960 --> 00:02:42.560
But as a clinician, even as an OT student or an intern, it really didn't come into play as much as I was preparing for it.
00:02:42.800 --> 00:02:53.520
Especially when we're speaking about something like autism or ADHD, in the sense that there's so many different possible profiles and presentations.
00:02:53.919 --> 00:03:02.159
So just saying your client who's coming in has ADHD or is autistic, it's not as helpful as you might think.
00:03:02.400 --> 00:03:28.639
Of course, again, outside of a sensory clinic, if you're dealing with more medical-based diagnosis like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, fragile X, all these other kinds of chromosome or medical kinds of diagnoses that will affect more of the cognition and motor patterns and any other kind of physical presentation of something, it's going to play more of a role in how you plan your interventions.
00:03:28.800 --> 00:03:39.120
But again, coming from a clinic-based OT where we were focusing mostly on like learning and behavior and regulation, diagnoses really didn't play as big of a factor as you might think.
00:03:39.280 --> 00:03:50.000
I specifically remember when I was an intern and I was learning from one of my supervisors, and she was telling me about this kid that was going to come in, and she was saying how old he was, what we're going to work on.
00:03:50.159 --> 00:03:53.360
And I remember looking through his file and she was like, Oh, what are you looking for?
00:03:53.520 --> 00:03:54.800
And I was like, What's his diagnosis?
00:03:54.960 --> 00:03:57.280
And she goes, Oh, you know, it doesn't really matter.
00:03:57.439 --> 00:03:59.919
Don't even like let that inform what you're doing.
00:04:00.080 --> 00:04:02.560
Just here's what you need to know about what he's working on.
00:04:02.719 --> 00:04:07.039
Here are his strengths, here's what he likes to do, here's what his teacher is saying.
00:04:07.199 --> 00:04:09.280
And the diagnosis didn't really matter as much.
00:04:09.439 --> 00:04:13.520
And that was the first time I was like, wait, what do you mean it doesn't matter?
00:04:13.840 --> 00:04:16.399
And now I know what they meant.
00:04:16.560 --> 00:04:23.120
It's not that it didn't matter at all, it's just that it shouldn't have been a priority from the beginning, before I even met the kid.
00:04:23.279 --> 00:04:24.560
It doesn't really affect that.
00:04:24.720 --> 00:04:31.040
What she was giving me was the more important information, which was relating to his current skills and the goals that we needed to work on.
00:04:31.279 --> 00:04:37.120
And if you know occupational therapy, this is really the root of the field.
00:04:37.439 --> 00:04:44.399
We are all about focusing on the function and the client skills of the person in front of you.
00:04:44.560 --> 00:04:58.319
We are looking at the skills that they need, the goals that they are trying to attain, maybe what injury they have sustained, maybe what limitations they might have in their environment or within the task or within their own current skills.
00:04:58.639 --> 00:05:04.480
But the diagnosis itself doesn't really matter so much as the person in front of you.
00:05:04.639 --> 00:05:15.600
To add to that, there are a lot of kids who I saw in the clinic who either didn't have a diagnosis at all, didn't have a diagnosis yet, or had the wrong diagnosis.
00:05:15.759 --> 00:05:22.480
Specifically, kids who were diagnosed as having anxiety and really they were autistic or ADHD or something else.
00:05:22.639 --> 00:05:30.639
Again, because in this clinic-based setting, we're focusing more on diagnoses that are made based off of like a checklist or observations.
00:05:30.800 --> 00:05:39.839
So it's easy to have kids come into the clinic with presenting challenges in the classroom or at home that don't yet have a diagnosis or again have the wrong one.
00:05:40.079 --> 00:05:46.079
So that also tells you why the diagnostics piece is not as huge of a factor as you might think.
00:05:46.240 --> 00:05:48.240
So are diagnoses really necessary?
00:05:48.399 --> 00:05:54.000
I think diagnoses play a huge role in someone's identity and someone's sense of community.
00:05:54.160 --> 00:06:00.800
It also does open the doors for some services and for some supports, whether it's at school or through your insurance.
00:06:01.040 --> 00:06:17.759
And it can be a very helpful guide for parents or therapists or teachers to sort of know a general idea of what they might expect with a kid, as long as you're not using that as like the only vision, the only lens that you're looking through.
00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:20.720
It should be part of the picture, and maybe you keep that in mind.
00:06:20.800 --> 00:06:26.000
Like, okay, I know this client is autistic, so they might have some social communication differences.
00:06:26.319 --> 00:06:31.279
That means that when they're in a social scenario, I might help support them in this way.
00:06:31.519 --> 00:06:43.600
That kind of thing might be helpful, but I'm not going to use it in the sense that this client is autistic, they have social communication differences, so I'm going to focus on that and I'm going to make sure that they know how to communicate like a neurotypical person.
00:06:43.759 --> 00:07:03.439
Do you see the difference where we're using the diagnosis to inform us and sort of have a guide or know sort of what we're getting into, what to expect, but we're not using it as like a box and we're not using it to say that all autistic kids have communication differences that look like this.
00:07:03.920 --> 00:07:08.720
We still want to really, really take the child that is in front of us at that time.
00:07:08.959 --> 00:07:23.680
Now, after saying all of that, I will say that there's one diagnosis that does make a difference for me in terms of how I coach the parents through it and in terms of how I support the child in the clinic, and that is OCD.
00:07:23.920 --> 00:07:27.199
OCD overlaps a lot with some sensory components.
00:07:27.279 --> 00:07:30.000
There's research that shows that there's a high number of statistics.
00:07:30.079 --> 00:07:31.519
I can't quote it off the top of my head.
00:07:31.600 --> 00:07:35.360
I will try to link the article if I remember at the end of the episode.
00:07:35.519 --> 00:07:48.959
But there is a high overlap between people who have an OCD diagnosis and people who experience sensory processing differences, particularly in the sensory avoider realm or being sensory sensitive.
00:07:49.199 --> 00:08:02.240
It overlaps with those people who have OCD that's like, quote, just right, that have that just right OCD, where the clothing needs to fit just right, a word needs to come out just the right way, they have to crunch the food in the just right way.
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And so it really overlaps with the sensory component.
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But I learned a lot from Natasha Daniels.
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She is an OCD and sensory and anxiety overlapping expert in the mental health space.
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And I remember her talking about how the approach to supporting a kid with OCD might conflict with how you support a child who has anxiety and sensory processing differences or just sensory processing differences without the anxiety.
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That's because, as you know, I am constantly encouraging parents and teachers to accommodate sensory needs, right?
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If something is too itchy or too uncomfortable or too much, then let's make it less for the child.
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Let's cut the tag off.
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Let's turn down the volume so that their nervous system can be more regulated in order to pay attention in class.
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But with OCD, if you accommodate too much, it's more like you're continuing to feed into that feedback loop, which can magnify the experience of OCD for that person.
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I am not an OCD expert, so I don't even know if I properly convey that.
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I just know that if there's a whiff of OCD in the child's presentation and the things that they're being challenged with at home or at school, I will put a bookmark there and always leave a note to refer to an OCD specialist and bring that up to parents so that they know that we want to at least rule out that diagnosis first before we fully jump into an intervention at the clinic or if I'm just coaching them one-on-one.
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So let's think about how this might look.
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Let's say you go into a clinic to work with an OT and your child has an ADHD diagnosis.
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But let's say the OT doesn't look at that part yet.
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All they're gonna look at is they're going to assess your child's sensory processing abilities through observation and parent report.
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They might get some report from the teachers, and then they might also do some sensory motor testing, test their fine motor and their gross motor, maybe even their visual motor skills.
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And with that information, the OT is going to look at what gaps your child might have in terms of the areas of need where they need most support based on their findings from the observation and from the testing.
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Then if they have enough to go off of, they might already start working with your child.
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But aside from that, say you come to me and you're asking for support with your child's behaviors at home around bath time.
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Say they're consistently melting down around bath, you can only do bathtime twice a week because they really cry every time they have to take off their clothes and transition into the bath and cry when you pour water over their head.
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I'm gonna ask you a lot more questions around their behavior at home, things that you've already done as a parent to support them.
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I might ask them about what's going on at school, I might give you a sensory profile, I might observe them in the clinic if I was working with you in the clinic.
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And from there, then I might say, Does your child have a diagnosis?
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If you tell me I'm not sure yet, or yes, they are autistic, yes, they have ADHD, I might say, okay, that's good to know.
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And I might change the way that I interact with your child.
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I might know that maybe your child with ADHD needs a little bit more novelty in the way that we offer bath time.
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But to be honest, I might just go off of what I'm seeing in front of me and I might just note that in the chart and say, oh, this child happens to have a diagnosis.
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But again, sometimes I work with parents who don't even have a diagnosis yet.
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If you came to me with the same presentation and you said, my child has a diagnosis of OCD, that's when I would consult with a mental health therapist and say, what's the plan here?
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Is this part of their just right OCD?
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How are you supporting them to avoid this feedback loop and to help them move past that?
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Then I would focus on what I can do as the OT is providing sensory regulation strategies and sensory integration in the clinic or by sensory-based activities for you to do at home to help regulate their nervous system before they get into the bath.
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But if I know there's OCD in the picture, maybe I might not be as heavy on the accommodations.
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It kind of looks different when we're talking about that.
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But whether or not your child has ADHD, autism, anxiety, or something that you don't know, but they're just struggling with bath.
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They're really struggling with homework, they're really struggling after school and their aftercare program, getting in trouble.
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I'm really only focusing on their behaviors and trying to ask you questions to help me fill out the picture.
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And whether or not they have a certain diagnosis does not prohibit me from giving you tips and strategies to support that child.
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In summary, a diagnosis can really be informative and give you good context as a therapist, but it's not necessary to create an intervention plan.
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And unless it's something like a medical diagnosis with specific precautions or something like OCD with a whole different branch of strategies to try, then it's not really going to sway or change much of my actual intervention plan.
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It might change or inform the way that I interact with your child, but not necessarily make me change what I do in the intervention.
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Anyway, that was a great question.
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So thank you to whoever asked it.
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If you have any questions that you want me to cover, feel free to send me a DM on Instagram at the OT Butterfly and in the word right before it put podcast question so that I could search in my DMs and find it easily.
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I will be back next week.
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Wait, before you go, I wanted to remind you that you can find more from me on my website at theotbutterfly.com, including all of my PDF offerings, courses, workshops, one on one coaching, and of course, my books.
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If you want to do me a solid, please leave a podcast review on whatever platform you're listening on.
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It just helps people find my content easier.
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Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.
