Oxytocin is associated with the way NTs "group up". It makes you want to bond with someone and trust them, while rejecting anyone outside your group ( Read more... )

Support for aversives as "treatment" for autism seems to be driven very much by reasoning along the lines of, "If it's risky, painful, or expensive, it must work better." Certainly we're willing to accept more drawbacks the worse the problem is, but that only makes sense if the solution with more drawbacks is also more effective. In the case of ( Read more... )

Re-posted from Wrong Planet, in answer to the question: "What helped you most in terms of autism therapy ( Read more... )

Families of autistic kids sue over therapy's elimination

I just read this article this morning. Apparently, some parents have been denied funding for Floortime for their kids. Budget cuts are hitting everyone hard, and autistic kids are no exception.

Their reasoning? Floortime hasn't yet been subjected to a large-scale controlled study.

Hello, Autism ( Read more... )

The "abusive" tendency of ABA isn't solely in the physical punishment that some programs use; or anyway, it mightn't need those things going on to be abusive.

It might be worse, for many kids, to be so often told "No. Wrong. You're doing it wrong. That's wrong. Stop doing that. Sit down. Be quiet." Over and over again.

It's not really failing that's ( Read more... )

I've had a few mental-health problems over the years. I have also had several psychologists, psychiatrists, and counselors; and it seems like every time I had a new one, it was like playing Russian roulette with my sanity ( Read more... )

OK, so basically I grew up in a household that didn't believe in psychologists. My mom knew I had Asperger's type autism, and she knew I was hyperactive and scattered, but she didn't do anything about it because she thought there was no such thing as either one. It only got called "bad behavior ( Read more... )

Just being a human being in the Western world, you have about a fifty-percent chance of ending up with some kind of mental problem sooner or later. It could be when you're very old and you get a stroke; it could be complicated grief; it could be social anxiety disorder; it could be something less common. And being autistic, of course your risk is ( Read more... )

It's your right to want a cure... just like it's your right to want to win the lottery. But unlike lotteries, there aren't millions of tickets out there; just a few hundred scientists, most of whom are working towards a genetic test and not a cure. Just like me and the many others who wouldn't want a cure for autism if it could be invented, you're ( Read more... )

Many of you will have experience with "No Child Left Behind", and with standardized testing as a measure of how well a school serves its students. The argument is that if you test schoolchildren and reward schools that do the best, schools will increase the quality of their teaching. The problem is that there's an increasing tendency to focus on ( Read more... )