Last Week’s Top Posts

Now that it is the first of June, my son is down to his last two weeks of being at the school he’s been at for the past two years. He starts Extended School Year in the middle of June; it’ll be at the middle school and with the teacher who’ll be Charlie’s teacher in the fall. Moving up and on.

Here’s what got talked about here last week:

• Neurodiversity in New York Magazine
  New York Magazine has a long article by writer Andrew Solomon about, indeed, neurodiversity, the view that autism is not an illness, but a difference and a different way of being.
• An Invasion of MMR/Vaccine Misinformation
  To read an article about the MMR vaccine and autism in the May 26th Telegraph, you’d think there was plenty of reason for the “debate” to be “reignited.”
• Sometimes It Just Seems You Can’t Be Too Safe
  On May 25th, a 10 year old autistic boy wandered from his home in Graham, NC, and was struck by a train.
• Judge Praises Woman Who Killed Disabled Son
  Last December, Cynthia Standifer killed her adopted son, Rasheed Michael Standifer, who had intellectual disabilities. On May 21st, Standifer was given the minimum sentence of three years by a judge who “praised her for adopting a disabled child and caring for him for two decades.”
• Adam Race, Alex Barton, Nate Tseglin
  Three autistic boys and the question of autism rights.
• Rocking, Flapping, Lining Up Objects
  Dr. Keith Shafritz, an assistant professor of psychology at Hofstra University, is using a form of functional magnetic imaging to study why autistic children engage in repetitive behavior such as hand-flapping, rocking, and lining up objects.
• A Pill for the Placebo Effect
  Jennifer Buettner, who has three young children, has created a new company called Efficacy Brands which makes placebos for children—am not so sure about such a product.
• Rebranding Autism and David Kirby’s Rhetoric
  Journalist David Kirby is again rebranding autism in his latest post about fever, vaccines, and mitochondrial autism—-Action for Autism has some questions for him.
• Update on Alex Barton: From the Police Report
  More details about what happened last Wednesday at Morningside Elementary School in Port St. Lucie, Florida.
• The Great Autism Rip-off?
  Have the numerous alternative medicine/biomedical treatments that parents of autistic children turn to become a “huge industry” that “feeds on parents desperate to cure their children”?