Family Nurse Practitioner and Parent, Holly Healy offers both personal and professional insights into sensory differences. She recognizes the way that traits of ADHD and SPD present similarly and offers insight into her process as a parent of a child with sensory differences and her work as a diagnostician.
The views expressed in the following presentation are those of the presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of STAR Institute.
 
Resources Mentioned In this episode:
Ahn R. R., Miller L. J., Milberger S., McIntosh D. N. Prevalence of parents' perceptions of sensory processing disorders among kindergarten children. American Journal of Occupational Therapy. 2004;58(3):287–293. doi: 10.5014/ajot.58.3.287


Chang, Y.-S., Gratiot, M., Owen, J. P., Brandes-Aitken, A., Desai, S. S., Hill, S. S., Arnett, A. B., Harris, J., Marco, E. J., & Mukherjee, P. (2016). White matter microstructure is associated with auditory and tactile processing in children with and without sensory processing disorder. Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnana.2015.00169


Ghanizadeh A. Sensory processing problems in children with ADHD, a systematic review. Psychiatry Investig. 2011 Jun;8(2):89-94. doi: 10.4306/pi.2011.8.2.89


Kranowitz, C. S., Wylie, T. J., & Turnquist, T. H. (2006). The out-of-sync child has fun: Activities for kids with sensory processing disorder. Perigee Book.


Miller, L. J., Fuller, D. A., & Roetenberg, J. (2014). Sensational kids: Hope and help for children with sensory processing disorder (SPD). Penguin Group.


National Institute for Children’s Health Quality (NICHQ) Vanderbilt Assessment Scales for Diagnosing ADHD: https://www.nichq.org/sites/default/files/resource-file/NICHQ-Vanderbilt-Asses sment-Scales.pdf


School-Based Intensive Education: https://sensoryhealth.org/basic/school-based-intensive-star-for-school


STAR article: Is It Sensory Processing Disorder or ADHD?: https://sensoryhealth.org/node/1114


Unyte formerly Integrated Listening Systems (iLs): https://integratedlistening.com/


Wood, J. K. (2020). Sensory processing disorder: Implications for primary care nurse practitioners. The Journal for Nurse Practitioners, 16(7), 514–516. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nurpra.2020.03.022

 
Episode transcript: Transcript of the episode’s audio
Carrie Schmitt 
I'm happy to be joined today by one of STAR's Board Members, Holly Healy. Holly, thank you for being here. I was wondering if you would introduce yourself.
 
Holly Healy 
Sure. Thanks for having me. My name is Holly Healy and I have been a board member for two years now. I'm also a family nurse practitioner, and I practice in pediatrics for the past 17 years.
 
Carrie Schmitt 
So I'm really excited to have this conversation because I think you could really help other family nurse practitioners, pediatricians, who also are on the frontlines of encountering people who are coming with concerning behaviors or some school reports that they can't make sense of. So tell me a little bit about how you got connected with the STAR Institute?
 
Holly Healy 
Sure, I'd love to. So when my oldest who is now 11, was around four or five, we started to notice some behavioral differences with her and a lot of dysregulation, so it manifested in behavioral outbursts, and just really difficulty with sleep. And so we went to a counselor to try to figure it out, because we kept saying, well, she's anxious, she's anxious. So the counselor handed me, Lucy Jane Miller's book, and my husband and I read it together. And it was like a revelation. And we thought, this is her. This is this exactly explains, you know, what is going on. And so I read as much information as I could, and we got her into OT, we started changing things at home. And we didn't see a lot of progress at first. And so reading the book, I realized in going on the website, I realized, oh, there are trained OTs, by star, that have gone through a mentorship program. So when we finally kept hitting several wa