Autism Blogger

Marcel has been trying to bite again when he gets mad. Does anybody

else have this problem?

Tomorrow is the last day of summer school.  After that...gulp...I will have no time to myself.  No time to go to the store without Wyatt, no time to run errands without Wyatt, no time to take a leisurely walk with the dog.   Virtually no respite from Wyatt's charming company for three weeks.  Until day camp. 

(Oh, I know, I am so whiny.  There are millions of working  mom's out there who get up and go to work everyday and their personal time during the week is probably about 30 minutes total per week, and that's counting the commute).

Next week a long-time friend is visiting from Oregon and bringing her brand-new baby, so I've arranged to have the babysitter come for three hours during the day.  The sitter only had that weird time slot between lunch and dinner available, but I am grateful.  I've used up all of my free respite hours so I'm going to have to fork out, but it will be worth it, definitely.

Anyway, I am frantically trying to write comforting things onto my calendar, like:  Park, 3 hours.  Pool, 3 hours.  So it doesn't feel as though I am on my own for three weeks.  After Day Camp week, there will still be one more week of nothingness, but at least my mother is coming to help me that week.  I think Wyatt is more tiring than two full-time jobs.  He needs to be kept busy, busy, busy.

If you are employed by one company or another, consider taking advantage of a Flexible Spending Account, if it is offered.  These special account plans are also sometimes called "Cafeteria Plans."  They allow you to put aside $5,000 in pre-tax income to pay for qualifying childcare or healthcare expenses.  This income cannot be taxed (section 125 of the IRS Code) and is not counted as income when applying for SSI (Social Security) benefits.

We use my husband's Flex account to pay for things like Music Therapy for our son, dental woes, and my prescription co-pays.  At the beginning of the calendar year, the company puts aside up to $5,000 (whatever amount we have chosen) in an account.  So theoretically, we could use the whole $5,000 right away.  Over the course of the entire year, the divided amount is deducted from my husband's paychecks.  So, if we have opted for the entire $5,000, my husband's paycheck would be about $200 less per pay period.  But we are still getting that $200, just in another account and tax free as well. 

A Webster family has made a breakthrough in their struggle with autism with the help of dog.

“The dogs sense that this child needs something,” said Beverly Swartz. “It's magic.”

Bentley is giving the Bayer family some peace of mind. The 2-year-old Labra Doodle joined the family last week to be an extra set of eyes and ears for 17-year-old Lyndsy Bayer, who was diagnosed with autism when she was five.

“Lyndsy doesn't have a high functioning level, so she doesn't talk or verbalize her needs. She doesn't have any safety awareness,” said Irene Bayer, Lyndsy’s mom.

A barefoot girl in her nightgown is picked up wandering along a dark Dane County highway. Sheriff deputies have no idea how the little girl got there, who she is, what happened to her, or where to take her.

A young man walks out of a camp for adults with cognitive disabilities and into the woods. It takes thousands of searchers a week to find Keith Kennedy -- naked, weak, covered with scratches and ticks, but alive.

A 7-year-old with blue eyes slips out of the basement of his house in Saratoga. On the fifth day of a massive search, rescue dogs find Benjamin Heil in a nearby pond, drowned.

These recent Wisconsin cases all involved individuals with autism, a devastating brain disorder that impairs judgment and communication. Over the past decade, the number of children diagnosed with this disorder has multiplied tenfold, and the national Centers for Disease Control now considers autism to be a public health crisis. Autism frequently wreaks havoc not just on a child's entire family, but on law and safety enforcement in the streets. The problem is expected to get worse as this population grows up.

Today, the number of children diagnosed with autism has soared to one out of 192 in Wisconsin, and across the state, law enforcement and safety officials report more and more of these confusing situations on the beat. According to a 2001 bulletin from the FBI, individuals with autism have up to seven times more contact with law enforcement than others. And police officers don't always know what to do.

Some parents of children with autism evaluate facial expressions differently than the rest of us--and in a way that is strikingly similar to autistic patients themselves, according to new research by neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs of the California Institute of Technology and psychiatrist Joe Piven at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Adolphs, Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of biology, and his colleague Michael Spezio (now at Scripps College in Claremont, California) collaborated with Piven and autism experts at the University of North Carolina to study 42 parents of children with autism, a complex developmental disability that affects an individual's ability to interact socially and communicate with others. Based on psychological testing, 15 of the parents were classified as being socially aloof.

"This manifests as a tendency not to prefer interactions with others, not to enjoy 'small talk' for the sake of the social experience, and to have few close friendships involving sharing and mutual support. This characteristic is really a variation of the normal range of social behavior and not associated with any functional impairment," says Piven, director of the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities.

The parents participated in an experiment that measured how they make use of the face to judge emotions. The subjects were shown images depicting facial expressions of emotion that were digitally filtered so that only certain regions of the face were discernible--the left eye, for example, or the mouth. The subjects were then asked to decide as quickly as possible if the emotion depicted was "happy" or "fear." The part of the face shown, and the size of the revealed area, randomly varied from trial to trial.

My friend Mr. John Wooler has worked with the practice and facilitation of relaxation using visualization techniques for years. When he met my Autistic son, Nicholas Miller, Mr. Wooler simply asked Nick; “Would you like to learn to relax more?” My son Nick answered “yes!” without any hesitation.  Nick followed a request to go into a quiet room in our house without distraction, and followed Mr. Woolers? additional instructions which were to sit down in a comfortable position and to close his eyes. In a short amount of time I saw my son Nick begin breathing more slowly, & remaining in a calm sitting position with no fidgeting and squirming. Nick?s body language and facial expressions demonstrated to me that Nick was indeed in a very relaxed state . He was also responding to questions and was talking with Mr. Wooler about how relaxed he was feeling. Some of the conversation during this relaxation session between my son and Mr. Wooler was about how Nick my son could help himself to feel relaxed by returning to his “quiet place” that Mr.Wooler was prompting Nick to describe in detail by asking Nick “What did this quiet place have in it?” The visualization activity seemed to motivate Nick to stay involved in the personalized relaxation activity.

So, I have been researching treatment methods for autism and found some very disturbing information relating to biomedical interventions such as medications, chelation therapy and the Gluten-Free Casein-Free diet. I think people are being mislead and misinformed about these different treatment methods to believe that their child/children can be "cured" of his/her autism. Is there a reason people feel that autistic children need to be cured? Why not focus on embracing and accepting these children and helping them rather than hurting them? Here are the main points I thought I would list about the different methods:

Medications

The only medication I could find out about that has been approved as a treatment specifically for autism by the FDA is Risperidone (Risperdal). There are several other drugs that have been used to try and address problems associated with hyperactivity, impulsivity, attention difficulties and anxiety. These drugs includeclomipramine (Anafranil), fluvoxamine (Luvox), fluoxetine (Prozac),Elavil, Wellbutrin, Valium, Ativan, Xanax, Clozapine (Clozaril), Olanzapine (Zyprexa), Quetiapine (Seroquel), Ritalin, Adderall, and Dexedrine. A good quote I found states that"Increased use of medications to treat autism spectrum disorders has highlighted the need for more studies of these drugs in children. The National Institute of Mental Health has established a network of Research Units on Pediatric Psychopharmacology (RUPPs) that combines expertise in psychopharmacology and psychiatry."  read more »

The children return from school confused, scared and sometimes with bruises on their wrists, arms or face. Many won’t talk about what happened, or simply can’t, because they are unable to communicate easily, if at all.

Brian Stauffer

 

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Doug Benz for The New York Times

Tim Miller was restrained by teachers at his middle school.

“What Tim eventually said,” said John Miller, a podiatrist in Allegany, N.Y., about his son, then 12, “was that he didn’t want to go to school because he thought the school was trying to kill him.”  read more »

http://www.pai-ca.org/news/CBS-5_2008-07-14.htm

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5) ? It sounds like cruel and unusual punishment: locking a school kid away for hours all alone, or taking them down to the ground and pinning them there, just for misbehaving in class. Investigative reporter Anna Werner first exposed the practices here in California. Now we're learning it's a growing problem nationwide.

"I am a boy whose life is a wreck," writes 5th grader Nick Valles in a letter to his school principal. "I feel like my teacher hates me."

Nick is yet another child who says his school left him in seclusion, day after day in the small room behind this door in his classroom. "I was completely alone. I just felt like really weird and angry and sad."

Why? His mother says that was the method chosen by the teacher at St. Cyprian School in Sunnyvale for handling Nick's ADHD.

"He had panic attacks, he couldn't sleep. He had night terrors where he would wake up screaming in the night," said his mother Carmen Valles.

But his mother says for months, it was kept a secret from her. "I am a very involved parent and I didn't know. I was just so disappointed and so upset that they would humiliate and treat such a nice child in this way."

She contacted CBS5 Investigates after we reported on problems with seclusion and physical restraint of children in schools. Children kept in closets like this one in a school in Livermore. Or restrained with duct-tape like this child in Southern California.  read more »