More Services and More Understanding Needed
March 17, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Connecticut may create a new state agency to oversee education and services for autistic individuals. As reported in the March 16th Connecticut Post, the state has 23,000 autistic residents. Autistic individuals were among those who are calling for better training and pay for autism professionals and also a “’seamless’ service path from birth through adulthood”. Parents, union representatives, legislators, and State Rep. Christopher L. Caruso also requested these services.
This is good—but one has to wonder at this description of autism in the first sentence of the article: “Autism, the mysterious affliction that causes people to withdraw in daydream and fantasy…….”
More education about “what is autism” is needed, too.
Journalism, the mysterious affliction that causes people to write in daydreams and fantasies…
And dispense with facts……
A propos the mysteriousness of journalism:
A column-filler from (the old days of) The New Yorker:
(It hinges entirely upon geometric layout of the words in the column space
.)
Headline in [whatever unmemorable newspaper]:
DENG’S CHINESE
PURGE SNOWBALLS
… which the New Yorker sub-captioned “The Inscrutable Orient”.
But No! Not “inscrutable” in the least!
Purging snowballs (from my driveway: great,
frickin’ BIG ones piled up by the street plows, rock-solid from several hours of post-snowfall rain) is EXACTLY what I spent most of Saturday doing…
This is a bit too much free association but…….. that headline made me think of one thing, “snowball soup” that my grandmother used to make for some winter festival. The snowballs were flour dumplings whose consistency (and weight in on’s stomach) was not so much “light as a snowflake,” but more like those ice-snow-rocks you had in your driveway.
Yes we need more money, support from administraters who are educated in Autism and spend time in the Autism classroom, more hours of therapists, and enthusiastic teachers aND PARAPROFESSIONALS.