Discussion was dominated by two stories, that of 13-year-old Adam Race, against whose parents a priest filed a restraining order, and of 5-year-old Alex Barton, who was voted out of his kindergarden class by his classmates, at the suggestion of his teacher, Wendy Portillo. These two incidents sparked some very heated and often acrimonious exchanges and remind me of why there’s a need to think about autistic persons and the community, in faith communities and all others.

Also: It was reported that there had been 72 cases of measles so far in the US, the highest number since 2001—-and the number would only go up, while misinformation about vaccines continued.

Sometimes it seems that everything, if not anything, could be said to cause autism (and that everything, and anything, has been offered as a “potential treatment for autism”). New tests to detect signs of autism in younger and younger children and, indeed, in babies were reported.

A New Yorker article on neurodiversity provided a simple answer to the question of where are the autistic adults?

And in May of the year when I started learning more and more about employment and housing for autistic adults, Charlie celebrated his 11th birthday–and am I always glad to be Charlie’s mother.

An editorial in today’s Palm Beach Post reports that Alex Barton’s mother is hopeful that a request for private schooling will be settled soon. A “bigger problem” is also noted:

The bigger problem, as public schools have to deal with more problems with less money, will be seeing that all children get the testing and help that they need - without wasting a lot of time. If Alex had received help more quickly, the Survivor scandal might never have happened.

If training about autism and special needs kids in the classroom had been provided……… if there’d been more and real understanding of what it’s really like to have Asperger’s Syndrome……. if……………

Back in May, 5-year-old Alex Barton was voted out of his kindergarten class by his classmates. His teacher, Wendy Portillo, had asked the students to vote on whether they wanted Alex to remain. Alex’s mother, Melissa Barton, removed Alex from the school following this incident, which received a great deal of attention in the national media. Portillo has been suspended for a year without pay and is asking that her her case be reviewed by the state Division of Administrative Hearings. Alex is now being taught at home and Melissa Barton is requesting that the St. Lucie County School District pay for private school, psychological testing and counseling for him, as reported in today’s Palm Beach Post:

Barton filed a complaint with the district in late August seeking an administrative hearing. In the complaint, which she released to the media this week, Barton outlined the incident that occurred last May in Wendy Portillo’s kindergarten class.

The complaint also says that school officials failed to evaluate Alex for autism within the time frame specified by law - he was privately diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism, after the incident - and didn’t establish an individual educational program as required by federal law.

Barton is also seeking for the school district to pay legal fees and compensatory and punitive damages for emotional suffering.

Reviewing all this, one can’t help thinking how none of this had to happen if there’d been a little more understanding that day in May.

Florida teacher Wendy Portillo—who allowed her kindergarten class to vote on whether or not their classmate Alex Barton could remain in class—-has been suspended without pay for a year, according to the Naples News.

More commentary at Aspie Web.

As advertisers and networks have been dropping Michael Savage’s show in the wake of his infamous comments (here’s a list of 20 audio clips), here’s an email he sent to The Hook (Virginia):

The drug companies are very powerful and have worked very hard to silence any voice critical of the misdiagnosis of our children and the drugging of vulnerable minds. Sad the station manager is such an ignorant man.

Seems Savage is trying to portray himself as the misunderstood defender of so many poor misdiagnosed, “vulnerable [minded]” children and so offers up this defiant attempt parting shot. Guess a simple apology’s too hard.

Talk Radio Network has announced that it will not be firing Michael Savage in the wake of his incendiary comments about autism. From the press release:

Dr. Savage has clarified that his July 16th statements concerning autism were not directed at those who are in fact challenged by this horrible affliction, but were instead addressing efforts to broaden the concept of autism beyond those who truly are autistic to a broader “autistic spectrum” of behavioral symptoms which are also manifested by persons who do not suffer from autism, and his concern that many children are being misdiagnosed as autistic due to the subjective nature of autism diagnosis (due to the lack of known biomedical indicators, such as blood tests, to definitively confirm or deny the actual existence of autism).

Dr. Savage has also explained his belief that there have been efforts by certain professionals and professional organizations to expand diagnoses of autism more broadly, for various reasons, and his concern that this victimizes and stigmatizes children who are misdiagnosed as autistic. On multiple other occasions Dr. Savage has expressed his concerns that other conditions, such as ADD and ADHD, are overdiagnosed and result in improper medication of young children, which Dr. Savage regards as abusive.

In the context of his broader concerns, it is clear that Dr. Savage’s comments were intended to suggest his opinion that, in the vast majority of cases, most children throwing tantrums, or refusing to communicate, are not autistic. Unfortunately, by condensing his multifaceted concerns into 84 seconds of commentary, the necessary context for his remarks was not apparent, and the few words he used to express his concerns were, in this instance, inartfully phrased.

Oh yeah, I get it. If only he could explained his views in 84 double-spaced pages in Times Roman 12 point font instead of those 84 seconds—but I somehow I the message would be the same, as I noted here.

An online petition calling for Talk Radio Network’s sponsors to “consider whether or not to associate with the
hateful and offensive comments” by Savage is here.

So I finally got around to reading Michael Savage on the Autism Controversy after grading papers, going swimming with Charlie and explaining to the water aerobics teacher why the boombox was contributing to him looking mighty distressed and since the class was over maybe it could be turned off?, making Charlie’s lunch, overseeing him practice cello, searching for the Leapster (not necessarily in that order). Yes, I know you’ve all read it, blogged it, rolled your eyes over it, read too many websites inveighing over the mean-spiritedness of remarks. Here’s Savage being called the most hated man in America (what better way to get, if not sympathy, attention?). Here’s AFLAC Just Saying No to advertising on Savage’s show. Here’s Salon on protesting parents and Savage self-defending.

Swimming, searching for lost new toys, folding, making, driving: These activities offer ample time (especially when there’s an overturned tractor trailer on the highway) for reflection, and this part of Savage’s original comments was on my mind:

Now, you want me to tell you my opinion on autism, since I’m not talking about autism? A fraud, a racket. For a long while, we were hearing that every minority child had asthma. Why did they sudden — why was there an asthma epidemic amongst minority children? Because I’ll tell you why: The children got extra welfare if they were disabled, and they got extra help in school. It was a money racket. Everyone went in and was told [fake cough], “When the nurse looks at you, you go [fake cough], ‘I don’t know, the dust got me.’ ” See, everyone had asthma from the minority community. That was number one.

Now, the illness du jour is autism. You know what autism is? I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is.

I was once a minority child with asthma, though I don’t think I’m the kind of “minority” Savage is referring to. And while I would have to, at least in part, agree with him that autism has become something like the “illness du jour”—who doesn’t know about it, or know someone with a child with it, these days?—-I don’t think, or rather I know, that my understanding of autism is not the same as Savage’s. (Well, you knew that already.) Reviewing Savage’s The Autism Controversy comments, his main point (remember, I’m grading papers and I’m in looking-for-thesis statement mode) is that autism is being “overdiagnosed,” that some poor kids are being “falsely diagnosed,” are indeed being “victimized” by being “diagnosed with an ‘illness’ which may not exist, in all cases.” Oh, the poor bamboozled parents thinking their kid has the “disease du jour” and, in truth, in order to figure out what their brat of a kid really has, those parents need only look in the mirror, and see the actual cause of said brattiness in their kids. It’s you, buster, it’s you lazy and lousy parents! You’re doing a rotten job and that is why, ipso facto, you have rotten kids.

Well.

It’s either fascinating, or discouraging, or infuriating to find the “bad parents cause autism”—-the refrigerator mother theory of autism, or “Freudian analysis” according to the Executive Director of Autism United—invoked so baldly today. As Emily pointed out, the savagery of Savage’s remarks seems to be, sadly, reflective of the sentiments of more than a few anonymous commenters about Adam Race and Alex Barton.

Savage’s main point seems to be that kids today are being over/falsely/wrongly diagnosed with autism instead of just getting the “this is some rotten kid” label; he thus suggests that the significant increase in the prevalence rate of autism over the past decade (it’s now 1 in 150)—that the so-called autism epidemic—is because of over-diagnosis and that “99 percent” of autistic kids just aren’t. (They’re just bad.)

One hopes that Savage might, at some time or other (especially as he is, as he noted, the “brother of a severely disabled person who suffered and died in a New York ’snake-pit’ of a ‘mental hospital’”), get educated about autism, what it is, and why the prevalence rate is up; about why people feel that there’s an “epidemic of autism,” and why the rising prevalence rate is due to the confluence of a number of factors, including the broadening of the DSM criteria for autism, physicians being better able to identify autistic children, parents knowing more about autism, children receiving an autism diagnosis who might before have been given one of mental retardation or something else, a cultural climate in which it’s less of a stigma (unless you listen to Savage’s show) to be disabled.

These and a number of other factors for the so-called autism epidemic are discussed in a July 21st ABC news interview on autism diagnoses skyrocket with Roy Richard Grinker, the author of Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism. An anthropologist, Professor Grinker also talks about his research on autism in South Korea. When South Korean children are screened for autism using the same diagnostic tools as are now used in the US, the prevalence rate is about the same, 1 in 150.

Professor Grinker  also speaks about his teenage daughter Isabel, and about how important it was for him and his wife to turn from focusing so much on what she could not do (as compared to other children) and focused on her strengths.

Focusing on strengths.

Maybe what most infuriates me about Savage’s remarks on autism is that he speaks only of deficits and “kids being bad,” of kids who have problems and who are problems. And, in doing so, he is not able to see where the real problems are, namely, in limited perspectives like his own that see only “the problems” and not the great kids who learn to make their way in a world that, so often, does not want them. That likes to make fun of them.

And if you go to ABC, it’s not this (Savage) video to watch, but this one, about truly understanding autism.

It seems no wonder that right wing talker Michael Savage’s last name is, well, “Savage” after reading what he said about autism on his radio show. I’ll list the words he uses to refer to autism:

moron, putz, idiot, fool, dummy, a girl, losers, beaten men

More of Savage’s savagery is quoted on Left Brain/Right Brain.

If Savage’s intent was to shock, using such words about autistic children is a no-brainer way to do it and perhaps ratings will spike as rightfully indignant autistic self-advocates and parents of autistic children respond. What troubles me in particular is Savage’s contention that autistic children are just brats behaving badly, and brats parented by laissez-faire “let it be” types of parents, especially in the wake of more than a few stories of autistic children who have been removed from a church, a kindergarten classroom, an airplane, and a restaurant. In each case, the children’s behavior was cited as “dangerous” to “public safety” and just downright “unacceptable.”

Funny but behavior like Savage’s–his unacceptable pronouncements about autism—gets air-time. Perhaps we have found the actual parasite……

Being different; being disruptive; looking different; smelling funny (according to those who think they don’t); yowling………

What do these apply to?

Are these perhaps a few reasons why a 2 year old and his mother were kicked off an American Eagle plane, or a 13-year-old’s parents had a restraining order filed against them, or a 5 year old was voted out of his class?

Well yes, but actually, nope.

The different-looking-and-being, disruptive-behaving, smelling-funny, yowly individual I am referring to is……………..Po aka Kung Fu Panda.

Charlie and I saw the movie Kung Fu Panda Tuesday evening. We haven’t seen a movie in a while and we had some free time on Tuesday and Charlie said “yes, movie!” when I asked him. I knew the movie’d been out for awhile so it wouldn’t be crowded (it wasn’t); we came about 15 minutes after the actual movie start time (in the past, Charlie has watched all the trailers and declared it time to go). We sat in the back row, with popcorn and a soda.

We had the funnest time.

Charlie’s eyes were (honest!) riveted to the screen, and even after he’d handed me the empty popcorn and soda containers. He wasn’t 100% quiet (a couple times, he imitated the animal characters, especially when Tay Long, the bad guy snow leopard (?), grunted some things and roly-poly Po responded cheerily and cheekily). He asked twice for the bathroom—the first time, he couldn’t get up because he was too engrossed in the movie; second time was right near the big fight finale, and we made it back just in time…….. There were a couple of much younger kids and mothers in front of us and some standing up, passing around of popcorn, eyes closed at the scary parts (that mountain prison, yikes!, and the rope bridge…….).

We left the theater in a thoroughly happy mood, with Charlie talking about eating noodles, which Po the panda’s father (a goose) doles out in a restaurant. As you know, we did not get noodles and I spent Tuesday night and Wednesday morning (when there was sunshine) scrubbing out the back and part of the front of the black car, whose windows had been left open overnight. Charlie took the day off from school—-maybe the popcorn (which he’s eaten before), or a stomach thing making its way ’round his classroom, or the pool water added up to Major Stomach Distress. He talked about “noodles” throughout the day and “PoPo” (that’s what he calls my mom; it’s Cantonese for “maternal grandmother”). And did he catch those occasional references to “all of China” and note the chopsticks and the dumplings the kung fu master Shi Fu uses to train (motivate) Po?

Charlie was really listening and something about that panda, with a touch of ADD and trying so hard to learn kung fu like the other animals and blundering and breaking holes in the paper walls….. I couldn’t help but think of Charlie’s whole-hearted attempts to learn and do his best, and how so often it just seems he’s been prejudged as Not Right, Too Different, and Just Can’t Do It. Po prevails beyond anyone’s (including his own) wildest expectations in the end; at one moment, he’s to gain a certain knowledge about the secret ingredient to more or less everything and he discovers that it’s……..

………………

………………

………………….a lot more and a lot less than you might think, but just right.

How is it that we can be so accepting of “difference” on the silver screen with DreamWorks animation, but when it comes to real life and real kids with real disabilities, it’s not easy? Though that doesn’t mean we can’t have a happy ending, or something close to it.

And some homemade won ton on the side.

(We know what the secret ingredient is.)

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”?