I'm Going to Help You

That's what the first psychologist kept saying.  She resembled a troll; less than five feet tall, I surprisingly found myself looking down to talk to her.  She almost never wore shoes, only slippers in her home-office, tucked under the side of a large yellow Dutch colonial on a private road in New Canaan. There were images of Golden Retrievers everywhere.  Her therapy dogs were always Goldens, she told me  It seemed sweet, and almost normal, the therapy dog thing.  It made it seem like taking a five year old to a psychologist was a normal thing that normal people did.  But it wasn't.  And despite the New York-accented nasally "I'm going to help you", I knew it wasn't normal.
She hadn't met Max yet, not when she first said it.  We had told her everything we thought we knew.  He was impossible to discipline, despite all efforts with setting limits, sticker charts, cajoling.  The child was miserable, and he was taking us along with him.  He never understood the consequences of his actions, so much so that we doubted that any consequence made sense at all.  He had tantrums that would last an hour, but they weren't about anything.  Things would be OK, everyone walking on eggshells through our lives, when suddenly the bomb that was Max would go off.  He would thrash on the floor so violently that I had to move furniture out of the way to keep him safe, as if he were having a seizure.  Our family was functioning in crisis mode, but the crisis never ended.
We put our hope in the psychologists oddly small hands.  We endured weeks of testing, piles of forms to fill out; we meticulously described eating habits, sleeping habits, family history of everything from depression to learning disabilities.  She spent hours with him, astonished over his lack of desire to be toilet-trained. 
She tested his empathy, his I.Q., his understanding of reality, and a wide variety of aspects of his learning.  He had tremendous difficulty with spatial relations, which seemed to excite her.  The Aspergers Syndrome Diagnostic Scale (ASDS) indicated Aspergers was "Highly Likely".  Of course, we didn't know that the ASDS mattered until years later.  Literally. Years. Later.
When she told us the results of the testing, she leaned forward as she spoke, desperate to share her findings with us.  She diagnosed Max with "Non Verbal Learning Disorder", in which she was an expert.  We were lucky, really, because she was going to help us!  Many people do not accept that NLD exists as a unique diagnosis, but our troll doctor did.  And she just kept smiling, and looking delighted that Max had "NLD", even as she said it was just the worst thing to have because these kids just have no social skills, high rates of depression and anxiety, but, she did assure us, and put in bold in her report "NLD is NOT an autism spectrum disorder".  And she just kept saying that she was going to help us.  But she didn't.
She sent us home with vague advice and a bibliography.  Amazon made loads off Max's "NLD", and still makes annoying NLD book recommendations when we log on.  Months later, things were still beyond miserable, getting worse all the time, so she referred us to our first pediatric psychiatrist.