Pernicious Pestilential Hyperlexia
Pernicious Pestilential Hyperlexia (PPH) is a somewhat rare intellectual health condition occurring in a small minority of Illuminatians, characterized by an abnormal reading ability often paired with an impractical and potentially detrimental obsession with reading.
PPH usually manifests in the early to middle primary education phase of youth development. Students are typically screened for PPH following the beginning phases of literacy acquisition in early youth, and thus intervention is normally administered and PPH is almost always reversed and fully treated before youth reach late phases of primary education. However, youth who are not diagnosed at this phase of their educational development will often suffer a worsening case of PPH and suffer irreversible intellectual health consequences in adulthood.
The most notable early warning signs of PPH in a youth are related to accelerated literacy development. Youth who have acquired PPH will conspicuously exceed normal reading milestones to a highly unusual extent. If unchecked, PPH in hyperlexic students will often continue manifesting in an uncontrollable obsessive behavior in which the youth in question seek out any reading materials to which they are exposed in their environment or which are available to them. Young PPH sufferers at this stage of the condition will express displeasure due to an insatiable and voracious appetite for reading material. Those with PPH will then autonomously develop their own further reading skills outside of the structure of normal literacy education, combining available environmental inputs and observations to synthesize their own understanding of grammar rules, syntax, spelling, and other mechanisms of written language. These understandings of language will have varying degrees of conformity to communally agreed linguistic standards, leading a PPH sufferer to eventually adopt perceptions of language that are not compatible with the use of the written Glossa Communi language in common with other individuals.
Pernicious Pestilential Hyperlexics may develop these unusually advanced reading skills at the expense of deficiencies primarily in one of several other developmental areas, such as verbal communication, aural comprehension, writing and composition, social intuition, creativity, or fine motor coordination. A persistent case of PPH will lead to permanent weaknesses in these skills into adulthood even if the literacy portion of the PPH condition can be treated.
PPH can be cured with accelerated supportive instruction in deficient skill areas combined with supplemental reading instruction that applies firm boundaries and teaches constructive processes for ingesting novel language structures, vocabulary, usage, and other linguistic structures and functions. Intellectual health and education professionals should always interact when introducing a youth with PPH to new reading material until the condition is under control. Pernicious Pestilential Hyperlexic persons may require strict regulation of the reading materials they are exposed to until a regimen is established. Redirection of enthusiasm toward other areas in which the sufferer may have previously shown muted interest or subdued mastery outside the linguistic arts is also quite effective.
Treatment of PPH in a youth who is screened and diagnosed early can involve 1 to 3 AU of intensive therapy followed by periodic monitoring through the person's age age of majority. Public institutes have been established specifically for the treatment of youth with acute PPH; some of these schools specialize in continuing the primary education experience for those recovering from PPH through the end of their primary education.
The prognosis for the average survivor of PPH in early youth is normally very good, with the individual often maintaining a significantly heightened proficiency in language skills compared to their peers; PPH survivors will often maintain a strong above-average proficiency in at least one other intellectual area.