Article You May Hear But I Can’t – Jessica Reeves

As a 16-year-old with APD (auditory processing disorder), I find it quite difficult to listen. I was diagnosed with APD a couple of months ago, but I was relatively certain that I had some sort of hearing problem. I often got terrible headaches whenever I was in a noisy environment and could rarely hear what was being said.

It turns out that even in a quiet room, I can only hear 50% of what you say. In a louder environment with background noise, it will be just over 20%. These test results shocked me. I had no idea that was the case this is serious – neither parents, nor friends, nor teachers. It caught us all off guard. Even more, I found that APD (although not to the same degree) affects about 7% of school children who are commonly misdiagnosed as ADHD or dyslexia.

To understand, in simpler terms, how APD wreaks havoc on your life, you need to understand where it creates difficulties. Auditory processing disorder makes it incredibly difficult for a person to focus on one noise and distinguish the others, often resulting in mishearing or complete blurring of jumbled words. Someone with APD will have great difficulty filtering out the noise in a room, just as a faulty filter has difficulty picking up grains of sand from water in some experiment. This means I can’t keep track of what’s going on when I enter a Wednesday with more than one conversation.

Hearing processing disorder, despite the fact that it is invisible, has a profound effect on those who suffer from it. People with APD would greatly benefit from having people look at them when they speak and repeat things if necessary. Also, common sense and the ability to accommodate other people’s needs in your day – whether it’s catching an earlier train or scheduling a meeting a little later so it’s less busy and noisy – goes a long way for people like me. Finally, just being nice is more important than anything else.