Every year, International Dyslexia Week is celebrated in early October, with a number of events and initiatives across Denmark. To mark the occasion, Helle Prætorius Øhrwald talks about her experience with the functional impairment that affects an estimated 400,000 Danes.

For many years, Professor Øhrwald has not talked about her invisible challenges to read and write, which have affected her since she started school.

"Dyslexia is not something you include on the first page of your CV, because it’s not going to help your career. For me, it's something that runs in the family. We all have a problem with spelling and reading to one extent or another," explains Helle Prætorius Øhrwald.

She describes dyslexia as a spectrum in which you may need more or less help expressing yourself. And according to the professor, her challenge is at the mild end. But nevertheless, she’s often felt inadequate.

"I was born in 1966 and come from a generation where there was no focus on dyslexia like there is today. I haven't had any special aids, and I’ve had to learn to compensate for dyslexia. However, I still meet people who assume that I’ve been lazy or slapdash when there are spelling mistakes in my texts or emails," she says.

"It's a bit like reading Chinese"

Helle began her schooling at Klemensker Central School; a small village school on Bornholm.

"I had Mr. Madsen the first years of school. He was always giving spelling tests where we had to take turns going up to the board and spelling a word. If you couldn't, you had to sit down again. Little Helle was sent back to sit down straight away every single time, because she couldn't even spell simple words like 'now' or 'ice'. All the other children started reading books, but I just looked at the pictures and guessed the rest," she says.

Later, Helle designed her own system to compensate for her dyslexia.

"I’ve taught myself to look at patterns and to recognise them. When I look at a word, it doesn't consist of a bunch of letters in a logical order. I look more for the shape of the word – it's a bit like reading Chinese, where everything has a unique character. That's how I see things, and maybe that means that my brain is modulated a little differently."

Today, Helle is an internationally recognised professor of medical physiology. She is a qualified medical doctor and holds a PhD in experimental research. She has also spent time as a postdoc at the National Institute of Health in Maryland, USA.

Her research looks at kidney function and she hopes to improve treatment for people with frequent urinary tract infections.

"My research has nothing to do with language as such, but part of my job is to read a lot of articles and write a lot on my computer. I also have extensive evaluation work and I read perhaps between 300-350 applications to foundations and committees every year," she says.

Helle Prætorius Øhrwald also explains that her dyslexia has given her a unique eye for systems, and this is a great advantage in academic work.

"I’ve become good at recognising patterns or finding key data in complex juxtapositions. I'm pretty quick at figuring out correlations, and I use these a lot in my work as a researcher."

It is taboo to be dyslectic in academia?

For most of her life, Helle kept her dyslexia secret from other people. But no more. It infuriated her when people just assumed that spelling mistakes were an expression of laziness or low intelligence.

"I've probably spent twice as long writing my texts as most others, because it takes me longer to read, and I check ten times that I've actually spelled everything correctly. But recently I decided that it was time to start telling my colleagues about my dyslexia."

Helle believes that it is important that someone in her position comes forward and tells others that you can become a doctor or even professor despite having dyslexia.

"My handwriting is very ugly, and I’ve exaggerated it to hide my dyslexia behind carelessness. The good thing about being a doctor is that no one can read what we write in our prescriptions anyway, so it probably doesn't make much difference," she laughs and continues:

"But I think it's important that people in high academic positions say that of course you can have high ambitions for your career, even with a functional impairment."

Helle Prætorius Øhrwald has not previously come forward because she was worried that colleagues might think that she needed special support or help to do her work.

"My ‘coming out of the closet’ as a dyslexic has sort of snuck up on me, and that’s definitely because a challenge like dyslexia is still taboo in the academic world," she says.

"It takes one to know one"

Earlier this year, Helle Prætorius Øhrwald took part in a debate on Twitter that was criticising students for spelling mistakes.

"If you work with language on a daily basis, then I can understand getting annoyed when things aren’t spelled correctly. But the students were totally exposed in that Twitter thread, and I felt like I had to get involved," she says, and elaborates:

"I believe that more young people today with a mild degree of dyslexia make it through the school system without people around them being aware of the dyslexia because you can hide it with digital aids. But this doesn’t mean that these students are stupid and idle. I think it's important to speak up when I see other dyslexic people getting trapped or treated unfairly."

As a teacher, Helle Prætorius Øhrwald focuses on accommodating students with disabilities such as dyslexia, and she believes that many in the academic world could be a little better at doing the same.

"In the medical degree programme, we have a select mass of students who are dedicated, have very high grades and are independent. But nevertheless we see a lot of variation in the way they learn things. Some are really good at looking at formulas or graphs, while others need to have things explained differently. I try to incorporate all these components into my teaching so that there is something for every type of student," she says and concludes:

"I can quickly tell whether a text I’m handed is written by someone with dyslexia. And as much as possible, I try to give special support and advice to the student, because I know exactly what it's like. It takes one to know one."

Contact

Professor Helle Prætorius Øhrwald
Aarhus University, Department of Biomedicine
Phone: 87 16 77 12
Email: hp@biomed.au.dk