Of all the conversations I have, in assessments, in staffrooms, and on the podcasts I get asked onto, the one people are least prepared for is the link between dyslexia and mental health. A parent will describe a child who is bright and funny at home but flat and anxious by Thursday of a school week. A teacher will describe a capable pupil who has quietly decided they’re stupid. An adult will tell me about years of feeling they were the problem.

None of that is a coincidence, and none of it is fixed in stone. This article sets out what the research actually shows, drawing on my own published work and the wider evidence, so that we can talk about dyslexia and wellbeing with some clarity rather than a lot of assumption.

What the evidence shows

I’ll start with the uncomfortable bit. Neurodivergent young people, including those with dyslexia and other specific learning difficulties, report more emotional difficulty and anxiety than their peers. This is well established. Work by Nalavany, Carawan and Brown (2011) and by Tarrasch, Berman and Friedmann (2016) both document those raised levels, and I place my own recent research within that evidence base in Ross, Malone and Wood (2025), in Education 3-13.

Emotional wellbeing and learning aren’t two separate tracks running quietly side by side. When young people struggle to manage their emotions, their engagement in learning tends to suffer with it (De Neve et al., 2023). So wellbeing isn’t a nice extra that sits next to academic progress. It’s part of how the learning happens in the first place.

That means the relationship runs both ways. Literacy difficulty can wear away at wellbeing, and worn-down wellbeing makes learning harder. If we fix the reading and ignore how the child feels about it, we’ve solved half the problem and told ourselves it was the whole thing.

Here’s the part I most want people to sit with. The distress that comes with dyslexia is very often not caused by the difficulty with reading and spelling on its own. It’s caused by what happens around that difficulty: how a young person comes to see themselves, and how visible their difference gets made.

The story a young person tells about themselves

In my study of young people’s own experiences, “I’m Dyslexic but What Does That Even Mean?” (Ross, 2021) in the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, I found that a young person’s understanding of their own dyslexia sat underneath how they got on with everyone around them: their teachers, their friends, and the support itself. A young person who sees dyslexia as a real, workable difference engages very differently from one who has quietly absorbed the idea that they’re just failing.

That echoes what I found earlier with parents, in Supporting a child with dyslexia (Ross, 2019): the families who made sense of dyslexia as a genuine difference, rather than a deficit, were able to hold onto a positive story. A child’s sense of who they are isn’t a side issue in any of this. It sits close to the centre of how they feel.

Being singled out

The second thing is visibility. There’s a well-documented research base showing that when learners are singled out from their peers, or their difference is made obvious, both their wellbeing and their engagement suffer (De Neve et al., 2023; Francis et al., 2019). Even kind, well-meant support can do this. Writing before the teaching frameworks were updated, Knapton (2022) pointed out that traditional differentiation, handing a child something visibly different to do, can quietly single young people out. I dig into this tension in Wood, Ross and Malone (2025) in Pastoral Care in Education, and in our companion case study in Education 3-13.

So the way we choose to support a young person can protect their wellbeing or chip away at it. It’s rarely the intention behind the support that does the harm. It’s how visible it makes the child.

The battle at home

The third thing plays out in families. In my chapter “It’s a Battle!” (Ross, 2021), I looked at how often parents describe securing support as a fight, and at what that drawn-out fight costs them. That cost is real and it’s measurable. In the All-Party Parliamentary Group’s Human Cost of Dyslexia report (Ross and Hicks, 2019), where I led the analysis of more than 1,300 survey responses, 95 per cent of respondents worried about what the future held for their dyslexic children, and 95 per cent felt they lacked the skills and knowledge to support them. A household carrying that kind of strain is part of a child’s emotional weather. Wellbeing doesn’t live only at school.

The wider context: a mental health crisis in schools

None of this happens in a vacuum. When I researched provision for vulnerable young people in A case study: developing a safe space for vulnerable young people at school (Ross, 2019), in Support for Learning, the backdrop was already stark. Government figures showed the proportion of young people aged 5 to 15 with a documented mental health problem in England rising from 3.9 per cent in 2004 to 5.8 per cent in 2018. That was before the disruption of the pandemic, which I looked at separately in my work on educating during COVID-19.

So we’re asking young people who already carry a higher risk of anxiety to make their way through a system that’s under real strain. A dyslexic young person’s mental health isn’t a niche concern tucked away in the corner. It sits right inside one of the biggest challenges facing schools today.

What this means

If you take one thing from the research, let it be this. Supporting a dyslexic young person’s reading and supporting how they feel about themselves are the same job. We can’t reliably do one well while ignoring the other.

That has consequences worth naming. It means an assessment should tell you something about a young person’s confidence and self-belief, not just their reading age. It means “support” that singles a child out might be doing harm even while it does good. And it means the emotional experience of the child, and of the family around them, belongs in the middle of the conversation rather than in the margins.

This is also the thread running through my current work. My 2025 Churchill Fellowship, on how neurodivergent girls and young women can be better supported as they move beyond school, took me to Australia and the United States, and the finding I keep coming back to is about the choices we afford young people: how much room we actually give them to understand themselves and to ask for what they need. That turns out to matter for wellbeing at every age. I’ve set out what protects it, in practical terms, in the companion piece to this article.

If you’d like to talk through how any of this applies to a particular young person, or to a whole school, you can book a free 20-minute call.

Questions people often ask

Does dyslexia cause anxiety and low self-esteem? Not directly, and not inevitably. The research links dyslexia with higher rates of emotional difficulty, but a lot of that distress comes from how a young person learns to see themselves and how visibly their difference is handled, and both of those we can influence. The difficulty is real. Much of the damage to wellbeing is preventable.

Can improving a child’s reading improve their mental health? It can help, but only if we also look after their confidence, their identity and their sense of belonging. Reading gains won in a way that singles a child out can leave wellbeing untouched, or worse. How we do it matters as much as what we do.

My child seems fine academically but anxious about school. Could dyslexia still be part of it? Possibly. Some able young people mask their difficulties, working extraordinarily hard to keep up, and the anxiety shows up before the academic difficulty does. A thorough assessment looks at the whole profile, including how a young person experiences learning day to day.

Is this only a childhood issue? No. A lot of dyslexic adults carry the emotional legacy of their school years for a long time. It’s never too late to understand your own profile, and doing so is often a real relief.

References and further reading

The research below is by Dr Helen Ross and is publicly accessible; several papers are open access. Where I’ve drawn on the wider literature (for example De Neve et al., 2023; Nalavany et al., 2011; Francis et al., 2019; Knapton, 2022), full citations sit in the reference lists of the papers linked here.

See the full list of publications.

Dr Helen Ross is a dyslexia and SEND specialist, researcher and qualified diagnostic assessor based in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. She holds a PhD from the University of Bath, is a 2025 Churchill Fellow, and is the author of Literacy Learning Journeys: Dyslexia Across the Ages, 0-18 (Speechmark/Routledge). Her peer-reviewed research on dyslexia, wellbeing, families and inclusion appears in journals including the British Journal of Special Education, Support for Learning, Pastoral Care in Education and Education 3-13, and she has given evidence to the House of Commons and reviewed for the Council for Science and Technology. She works with families, schools and organisations across the UK and internationally. If you or a young person you care for is struggling, please do reach out to your GP or a mental health professional. The research here is meant to inform and empower, not to stand in for individual support.