Recently, on Twitter, I confessed that I had not been able to complete reading NeuroTribes (a very interesting book, and also a lengthy one). The other person insisted that a PhD student should be able to read a book and accused me of lacking academic integrity — basically, that I am lazy and don’t deserve my PhD.

I’m here to say that attitude is inherently ableist. But to give the benefit of the doubt, perhaps most people don’t know that bipolar disorder actually can affect your ability to read. I learned to read early as a child — I was a prolific consumer of text, and I had a college reading level in elementary school (this is called hyperlexia). But after being medicated for bipolar disorder, my ability to sustain focus and momentum while reading a long document has been very limited.

Lithium is probably the biggest offender. It kind of affects how you see words on the page — like a pseudo-dyslexia, the words seem kind of blurry and distorted. It can be impossible to read full books. I can still read journal articles because they generally have a defined structure and an abstract. I can also read poetry, which I enjoy. I recommend seeking out these kinds of texts if reading is something you struggle with.

Most of all, I want you to know that this is common, you are not alone in having an acquired inability to read and you still deserve your career, whatever that may be. It’s not a matter of “intellectual thoroughness”; it’s part of a disability, and it’s more common than you think.

I also find it difficult to watch videos, TV, or movies. The information conveyed through video media covers many modalities — sound (music), speech, visuals, movement (spatial), and the overall plot you’re supposed to be following. Sitting for the length of a movie is hard, but it’s also just hard to follow so many things at once. My brain gets overwhelmed with too much information of different kinds to process (evidence of poor sensory integration, a symptom of autism). But it helps to reduce the overload by using captions (combining speech with visuals, thus reducing the number of information modalities) or watching something animated, which compresses the demands of visual and spatial information greatly.

Have you ever had trouble consuming media?

What strategies have you used?