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Originally Posted by Blaspheme
While it's by no means a diagnosis, a number of things you describe fall into the range of Autism Spectrum disorders. Self injury is a classic hallmark of these conditions, as is the emotional instability. His being bright, but unable to function in a standard school classroom would also be consistent with that.
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This is what I thought at first glance, too...(Asperger's, actually, was what popped into my head) but the fact that he has a sense of humor, and appears to be able to relate socially to raveneye made me think that maybe it's something else. However, it couldn't hurt to have a professional evaluation. I find it hard to believe that he could go undiagnosed this long if it was an autism spectrum disorder, but he could be just borderline enough to get by, and if his mom is similarly affected (which it sounds like she is - the impatience, the lack of affect, the odd staring, etc.) she might not notice that anything is wrong.
Raveneye, does he have any "stereotypies" - repetitive self-soothing behaviors like rocking, bouncing, head shaking, etc.? (Symptoms of ASD)
Can you get him to talk about feelings? If you show him a picture of some kind of emotional tableau (a kid who's dropped his ice cream cone and looks sad, for example), can he tell you what's happened and how the kid feels and why? Can he recognize facial emotional expressions? Inability to do these tasks are symptoms of ASD, and if you can either rule in or out some of the symptoms it might be easier to get a focused evaluation.
Also, to deal with the question about dyslexia,
can he write, other than on exams? If you ask him just to write a story or something, can he write it out? Also, can he type? My brother had dyslexia and had HORRIBLE handwriting, and a really hard time writing homework and such, but get him on a computer and for some reason he was fine. Might it be possible to let this kid do exams on the computer instead of writing out by hand?