Newsweek on Autism: Legislation, Adulthood, Awareness

The cover story of the November 27th issue of Newsweek is entitled Growing Up With Autism. Topics covered include:

1. The Combating Autism Act. Texas Republican Joe Barton, who blocked the passage of the Combating Autism Act, will lose his chairmanship of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in January; Newsweek has learned that he is attempting to pass a compromise version of the bill, which would include a “new push” for early diagnosis; the committee that will oversee the $945 million in research funds proposed by the bill is to include an autistic person and an autism parent.
2. The passage from adolescent into adulthood for autistic persons who will still need a lot of services such as Dannt Boronat, who reads at a second-grade level and “can spend hours playing with water,” to AS adolescents who will attend college such as 14-year-old Christine Motokane who still “loves Barbie” and Taylor Cross who will “just blurt out what he’s thinking without any internal censorship” and who made the film Normal People Scare Me.
3. Parents’ worries about not only how to pay for lifelong services for an autistic child but also how to find them, as such programs are not widely available.
4. The result of the past years of families’ efforts to raise awareness of autism, “the gift of a meaningful identity”: “‘If this was 10 years ago, my daughter’s classmates might say she’s the one who talks to herself all the time and flaps her hands. But if you ask these kids in 2006 about Isabel, they say she’s the one who plays the cello and who’s smart about animals,’” says Roy Richard Grinker, author of the forthcoming book Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism.

The Newsweek article especially highlights how the advocacy efforts of families and of parents have contributed to all of the increased awareness, understanding, and legislation. As autistic children get older, it seems to me we will be seeing more self-advocacy by autistic persons for themselves, too. One such organization is ASAN, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network.

The Newsweek article also contains an article entitled A Terrible Mystery, on research into the cause—causes—of autism, and Challenging Autism, a Live Talk on the challenges of reaching adulthood with autism that will be held on Wednesday, Nov. 22, at noon, ET.