In this article, I aim to give you a slice of what a day in the life of someone with a more rarely discussed hearing disorder, APD,  would look like. It may be eye-opening to an extent as well as shocking to some but I sincerely hope that you leave with some newfound enlightenment on how seemingly sometimes ‘invisible’ disabilities affect 22% of the population in the UK.

 

As a 16 year old with APD (auditory processing disorder), listening is rather difficult for me. I was diagnosed with APD a couple of months ago but I was relatively sure I had some kind of hearing difficulty. I would frequently get awful headaches whenever exposed to a noisy environment and could rarely hear what was being said.

 

It turns out that even in a quiet room I will only hear 50% of what you say.  In a louder environment  with background noise, it will be slightly over 20%. These test results I found completely shocking. I had no idea that it was this serious – neither did my parents, or my friends or teachers. It caught us all of guard. What I found further eye opening is that APD (although not to the same extent) affects around 7% of school children who are commonly misdiagnosed with ADHD or dyslexia.

 

To understand, in simpler terms, how APD creates chaos in ones life, you must understand where it creates the difficulty. Auditory processing disorder makes it incredibly difficult for someone to focus on one noise and differentiate the rest, which often results in mishearing things or a complete blur of jumbled words. Someone with APD would significantly struggle with filtering the noise in a room, much like how a faulty filter would struggle to catch the grains of sand from the water in some sort of experiment. This means I cannot track what is going on when I enter an environment with more than one conversation.

 

Auditory processing disorder despite being invisible impacts those with it greatly. It would help an immeasurable amount for people with APD for people to face them when they speak and to repeat things if needed. Also, generally being understanding and being able to accommodate other people's needs into your day – whether that is catching an earlier train or scheduling your meeting slightly later so it is less busy and noisy – would assist people like me so very much. Finally, just being kind – more than anything else.