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GUARDIAN Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:01:27 GMT
A new diagnostic test was announced in the clinical language of the lab. As someone who works with autistic children, it grates
In the 12 years since I started teaching one-to-one I've been lucky enough to work with a number of very talented, challenging kids. Some of them frustrated me by not playing those games that I learned early on were how you bargained your way through the world. Many of them brought me to tears and made me trampoline with joy. All of them had been diagnosed somewhere on the autistic spectrum.
To anyone who doesn't parent, care for or know someone on the autistic spectrum, familiarity with autism can be a shadowy netherworld, where the flash of a savage talent for illustration or numbers illuminates an otherwise lonely corner of rocking and head-banging. To many, a diagnosis of autism can seem the most hope-sapping piece of medical information to receive, next to terminal cancer.
Working from such a premise, a new study, published in Current Biology, suggests that it might be possible to detect autism at a much earlier age than where it currently rests, between a child's first and second birthdays. Alongside the cautious sense of optimism, that hurrying the diagnosis will help families prepare for a new life lived with autism – so that troubling, familiar association recurs to confirm distant prejudice – comes the attendant language of sickness and correction. So autism is spoken of as a "disorder" that could be identified at an early stage so as to help with "treatment", reminding us that there is no chance of a cure, but hoping to alleviate full symptoms.
The sterile language of the laboratory always startles, and never so much as when dealing with the living. I have never thought of any of the young people I've worked and played with to be disordered or needing treatment. What Izzy wanted was to get outside and climb trees, or be chased by me, lumbering around with a duvet over my head, as the tickle monster. Tommy didn't need a cure so much as a pool or a sea and people to splash around with. Even at the age of 28, Joe needed the kind of help that surely isn't the preserve of people on the autistic spectrum: he needed company and friendship, he needed a lot of hugs.
Scientific discourse jars because it seems so removed from the worlds that these people actually inhabit and so estranged from what their needs, and those of their primary carers, actually are. Working for so long with young people on the spectrum brought me into close relationship with their parents, who would no more want their children "cured" than they would want them convulsed with electric shock therapy, or exorcised. At no point did these parents ever look at their kids and see them as wrong. They were individuals, they were different and they were instinctively and utterly loved.
What the families needed was support, both financial and social. What the mother of Simon, a sparkly eyed storyteller with a fondness for blown-glass clowns, wanted, was for the council to statement her son so they could receive the appropriate funding. Even more important to these parents than financial assistance were people giving their time and energy, playing with their kids because they wanted to. Because they understood what it felt like to grow up as an odd-shaped peg in a society that had exact ideas about the dimension of available holes. Because they cared.
The benefits of early recognition of autism for improved access to services will only bear fruit if those services continue to exist. In the current political climate of market-demanded cuts, where mandatory taxation is transforming into transient fad-fed charity, it is exactly those more vulnerable young people, like Tommy and Izzy, who not only need their funding ringfenced, but need a shift away from the current standoff that equates social benefits with work-shy parasites.
It is often said that people with autism have more needs than the rest of us, whereas in my experience..
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PSYCHCENTRAL Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:24:47 GMT
Between three and six percent of all teens struggle with some type of eating disorder, be it bulimia, binge eating, or anorexia. Because these illnesses involve eating, they seem to take a blow at family traditions, celebrations, and expressions of togetherness. Thus, parents, siblings, and even relatives all suffer, as Harriet Brown so adroitly shows [...]
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