Autism

Autism

“We start with an image—a tiny, golden child on hands and knees, circling round and round a spot on the floor in mysterious, self-absorbed delight. She does not look up, though she is smiling and laughing; she does not call our attention to the mysterious object of her pleasure. She does not see us at all. She and the spot are all there is, and though she is eighteen months old, an age for touching, tasting, pointing, pushing, exploring, she is doing none of these. She does not walk, or crawl up stairs, or pull herself to her feet to reach for objects. She doesn’t want any objects. Instead, she circles her spot. Or she sits, a long chain in her hand, snaking it up and down, up and down, watching it coil and uncoil, for twenty minutes, half an hour--- until someone comes, moves her or feeds her or gives her another toy, or perhaps a book.”

Excerpted from “The Seige”

Autism—“a mysterious world where the unknowns still outnumber the knowns. A syndrome whose manifestations are many and whose etiology is suspected of being multi-causal”.

“The word autism still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most people—they visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, rarely of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society. Or else we think of an autistic “savant” a strange being with bizarre mannerisms and stereotypies, still cut off from normal life, but with uncanny powers of calculation, memory, drawing, whatever—like the savant portrayed in Rain Man. These pictures are not wholly false, but they fail to indicate that there are forms of autism which do not incapacitate in the same way, but may allow lives that are full of event and achievement, and a special sort of insight and courage too” (Grandin, 12).

Autism was first identified as a disorder in 1943 by Dr. Leo Kanner. It was widely accepted that a child’s autistic condition was the result of extremely, cold distant, rejecting and overly intellectual parenting. The child’s extreme withdrawal was viewed as a refusal to engage in social or physical contact, rather than inability. The assumption therefore was that the familial environment being hostile was the cause of the child’s refusal to become enga...

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...sm- perhaps even before a child is born. That day remains but doctors have recently made great strides in the field of brain research, both using psychology and through highly sophisticated technology. It’s anyone’s guess, though how long it will take them to unlock the secret of this fascinating syndrome”.

“We start with an image—a tiny, golden child on hands and knees, circling round and round a spot on the floor in mysterious, self-absorbed delight. She does not look up, though she is smiling and laughing; she does not call our attention to the mysterious object of her pleasure. She does not see us at all. She and the spot are all there is, and though she is eighteen months old, an age for touching, tasting, pointing, pushing, exploring, she is doing none of these. She does not walk, or crawl up stairs, or pull herself to her feet to reach for objects. She doesn’t want any objects. Instead, she circles her spot. Or she sits, a long chain in her hand, snaking it up and down, up and down, watching it coil and uncoil, for twenty minutes, half an hour--- until someone comes, moves her or feeds her or gives her another toy, or perhaps a book.”