The Importance of Vision Therapy for the Gifted with Dr. Linda Silverman

Dr. Lynn Hellerstein of Vision Beyond Sight speaks with Dr. Linda Silverman, a licensed clinical and counseling psychologist, and the founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development and its subsidiary, Gifted Development Center. She talks about the importance of vision therapy for gifted and twice exceptional children, adolescents and adults.

Click here and tune in to the show now to explore:

• The mission of the Gifted Development Center
• How most psychologists do not believe in vision therapy
• The testing results for clients that lead to the need for vision therapy
• The benefits seen in children who have completed a program of vision therapy
• How vision therapy improves IQ scores
• What optometrists who work with the gifted can do

Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical and counseling psychologist.  She founded and directs the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development, and its subsidiary, Gifted Development Center in Westminster, Colorado.  In the last 43 years, she has studied over 6,500 children who have been assessed at GDC, the largest data bank on this population. Her Ph.D. is in educational psychology and special education from the University of Southern California.  For nine years, she served on the faculty of the University of Denver in counseling psychology and gifted education.  She has been studying the psychology and education of the gifted since 1961 and has written over 300 articles, chapters and books, including Counseling the Gifted and Talented, Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner, and Advanced Development:  A Collection of Works on Gifted Adults and Giftedness 101. She founded the only juried psychological journal on adult giftedness: Advanced Development.

Her mission is to enhance global understanding of the inner world of gifted and twice exceptional children, adolescents and adults. Twice exceptional means giftedness combined with another exceptionality, such as visual processing deficits. She grew up in Buffalo, New York. She earned her bachelor’s degree at State University of New York College of Education at Buffalo, and her master’s and doctorate from the University of Southern California. Her father was an accountant and her mother was an artist. She married Hilton Silverman when she was 19, and they were married for 57 years. They raised two of their own children and helped to raise 16 teenagers; at one point they had a group care home. She has three grandsons. She is passionate about the gifted and continue to contribute to the field at the age of 81. She hopes to make other psychologists aware of the benefits of vision therapy.

Connect with Dr. Linda Silverman and the Gifted Development Center:

Website | Facebook | YouTube

“A lot of twice excpetional kids who desperately need vision therapy are gonna go to a vision therapist or an optometrist, might get that Test for Visual Perception Skills and do very well, and the optometrist might conclude that they do not need vision therapy. That test can obscure a real need for vision therapy because the child can solve those particular items without visual processing. They can do it through their abstract reasoning.” – Dr. Linda Silverman

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