Autism Awareness News Coverage
April 15, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
It’s April 15th, halfway through Autism Awareness Month, and just reading the headlines for autism articles in newspapers across the US gives a good sense of how people are “talking about autism”:
The Autism Disconnect (Hardin County, Kentucky)
Mother Looks For Understanding (Poughkeepsie, New York)
Vaccines Do More Good Than Harm (Poughkeepsie, New York)
Reading Is Milestone to Cheer About (Poughkeepsie, New York)
Autism: Searching For Answers (Poughkeepsie, New York)
Mysterious Disorder on the Rise? (Charleston, South Carolina)
Autism’s Long, Hard Path, with the subtitle of “For families, diagnosis starts treadmill of therapy and worry” (Charleston, South Carolina)
2 moms sought own answers (Charleston, South Carolina
Battling and Embracing Their Son’s Autism (Council Bluffs, Iowa)
There’s a sense of feeling disconnected—-of hoping for fewer stares when in public—of looking for answers for something “mysterious”—of being on a different schedule of milestones—-of a lot of work and worry. I think this is what parents feel; I am myself wary of fighting metaphors when talking about autism. I’ll rather quote what a mother said in the last article:
[Nataliejean] Ahrens said living in the land of autism has its challenges, but she wouldn’t trade her [12-year-old son] Mark for a Mark without the disease.
“I would want some things to be easier for him. But, he is my child and I love him.”
That says it very well, for me.
I fully agree! I’ve always said that my son, Adrian wouldn’t be the Adrian I know and love without the autism. It’s part of who he is.
This underscores that the mom has more clues than the journalist
. It’s not a “disease”. It’s a complex set of developmental differences with wide variance among individuals. And it’s not just handicap or disability, though that’s all that may currently be in the field of vision of individuals and families struggling with severe handicap. As their outcomes improve, they will discover otherwise.
We need to teach everyone — the journalists, especially, apparently — to learn to think in parts when it comes to autism, and not lump all the handicaps, strengths, and atypicalities together as some sort of monolithic “enemy” to battle and defeat.
For one thing, we need to get people focused on addressing — mitigating and circumventing — the handicaps, and dealing with the CMPs (concomitant medical problems) as such. If the child has GI distress, treat it as a GI problem, autism or no autism.
For another thing, we need to get people focused on optimizing educational approaches. If the child has learning disabilities, set them up with educational approaches that work for them. And don’t confuse education with attempts to “normalize”. The goal of any educational approach should be to enable skill acquisition, not “to make a child indistinguishable from non-autistic peers”.
And finally, we need to get people focused on the differences that are handicapping only because they are not granted validity and equity by the majority. The definitions of autism in the diagnostic manuals, all too many researchers, clinicians, educators, parents, and the general public dismiss atypical behaviors and atypical allocations of attention as “meaningless”, and that needs to change. It should be as unacceptable to denigrate autistic aesthetic, sensory, affective, and social preferences as it is to denigrate those of Deaf people, blind people, gay people, or people belonging to ethnic, racial, or religious minorities.
And one day it will be so — over the dead bodies of those who say it can’t be done, or who stand in its way.
And talking about autism as a disease can lead to trying treatments like this.
Some autism awareness news coverage from my area
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/111-04152007-1330719.html
Now if only the principal would realize what Teddy seems to realize, that autism is not something to be ashamed of. They’ll all know who he is now that he got his name in the paper, and if I am right about 11 year olds, they’ll think that’s really cool.
I think it’s really cool!
Very cool. That 11-year-old and his family have just taken lemons and made lemonade for the whole village.
Every so often we need to hear stories like this to remind us that a sometimes-necessary key strategic element in the playing of the game called life is to assert and exercise the option to change the rules of the game from the middle of the playing field with the clock running and the ball in play.
A couple hundred people in the Spokane/Cour D’Alene area got some posAutive awareness yesterday, there was a gymnastics meet yesterday at my gym. After I finished my best event (floor, 9.1…later that day same routine done a bit better got a 9.7 under the “adult” rules) my coach said that they just watched a ‘young lady who had been diagnosed with autism at a very young age & was supposed to never do anything in a setting like this’ or something to that effect.
I must confess I haven’t been able to read any of the stories or watch the news blurbs because April tends to make me sick, and I’ve not been able to do anything about it (like write my own piece…I’m trying). So I avoid. But hey, being Spokane’s Flying Autistic is a start. Or something…