Dyslexia is the common term for what the psychology industry terms "Reading Disorder." According to the DSM (psychology's bible of mental disorders), people with reading disorder exhibit oral reading that is "characterized by distortions, substitutions, or omissions; both oral and silent reading are characterized by slowness and errors in comprehension." (DSM-IV, p. 48). The DSM estimates that about 4% of school-age children have reading disorder.

The main symptoms of the disorder are an "inability to distinguish or separate the sounds in spoken words" and "trouble with rhyming games" according to the National Institute of Mental Health, and an "inability to distinguish among common letters or to associate common phonemes (letter sounds) with letter symbols" according to the DSM.

Researchers have proposed various theories of the causes of reading disorder (dyslexia), including genetics, brain makeup, etc., but no single theory has been widely accepted. Brain imaging techniques have shown differences in activity in various regions of the brain between normal and dyslexic patients, but these differences in activity do not provide sufficient proof of the causes and cures of dyslexia.

We believe that while dyslexia is a very real learning challenge, it should not be considered a mental disorder. Children who have difficulty reading don't have a mental disorder; they simply need more help and training in handling the English language. It becomes an educational issue, not a psychological one.

Making a learning challenge a mental disorder is typical of those in the psychology industry, who thrive on labeling as many human experiences as possible and then offering a treatment only they can provide. This type of labeling has produced such off-the-wall disorders as Mathematics Disorder, a disorder that plagues school children who have substantial difficulty with math. No longer does a tutor help--now we need a psychotherapist and mind-altering drugs to understand how to add and subtract.

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