Please send an email to this reporter

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Here is a link to a horrible newspaper article on autism: http://www.kentucky.com/589/story/292137.html Please email the reporter -- the email address is at the bottom of the article. Maybe if she gets enough emails from disgruntled autistics, she'll think twice before writing another negative article on autism.

The article is not all negative. Yes, there are some glaringly obviously STUPID statements made, because she is ill informed about how autistic people actually experience their condition, but her observation of an autistic family is pretty typical of NT's. I think a nice note asking her to perhaps do more research and get more insights from the autistic perspective may be more productive than an angry note.

The positive thing about the article is how a family did help their kid to have a start in life. I lately had to spend some time with the parents of an autistic kid and I tell you: we are a handful as kids. We are hard to understand, we are almost impossible to teach when it comes to learning the rules (don't throw the cat in the pool... again...) and, phew, we can make a noise. And when we are young, we don't give back. That only comes much later.

Try to get both sides. A lesson to the reporter, but perhaps also to us. We should be able to look into that article and realise, we are not always observed to be the way we think we are.

That story is sort of good and bad. Copyed and pasted fair use 2008

Fast-spreading autism steals children away
By Shirley Caudill
CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST

The first time I heard the word "autism," I had no idea what the word meant and had never met anyone with the disease.

I had seen a movie during the 1980s about a little boy who hid under a table in a fetal position and could not communicate, but it did not touch my life. In later years I saw Rain Man and thought, "How sad!"

It was not until it touched my own family that I began to read everything about it that I could find in bookstores and libraries. Then the subject came up on several talk shows such as Oprah and Larry King, with parents relating their ways of coping with the condition.

Autism or ASD or (autism spectrum disorder) is a neuro-biological condition that significantly impacts the way a person perceives the world, interacts with people and communicates.

The Centers for Disease Control has found that one in every 150 children born in the United States today will have some form of autism, affecting 1.5 million Americans and their families. The disease surpasses all kinds of cancer in children. It is a national health-care crisis costing more than $35 billion annually.

Researchers around the world have been scrambling to come up with some answers and define the cause of autism, but so far the answers elude them. To date, autism remains a mystery.

Parents and grandparents like myself are at a loss for words to describe the sinister scenario that is occurring in our homes and others across the land.

One day your toddler is acting like a "normal" child, and the next day he will not make eye contact and is oddly spinning his toys or lining them up instead of playing with them in the usual manner, with a distant look on his face.

The child begins to violently resist the everyday routine and runs up and down the hallway as if someone is chasing him, looking over his shoulder. He bites his arm and hits himself in the head.

As a parent or grandparent, you feel confused and wounded that your darling little one no longer accepts your affection and his eyes rarely, if ever, meet yours any longer.

The child is still with you physically, but the child you so adore seems to have disappeared emotionally. But where did he go? And why?

Early diagnosis and intervention is the key to this child's successful development and can help reduce the cost of lifelong care over the person's life span. Are we grasping at straws? We think that remains to be seen.

Some very famous people such as scientist Albert Einstein and artist Pablo Picasso, as well as Wolfgang Mozart, are believed to have had a mild form of autism called "Asperger's," yet they were successful in life.

My grandson, Benjamin, was diagnosed with the most severe form of autism at an early age. His mother and father, out of necessity, designed their own program for their son because professional intervention is very costly.

They mimicked to a certain extent the teaching program recognized by the American Autism Society and kept their son in intense, structured, homemade therapy sessions seven days a week.

He is now six years old, and has responded to his parents' home schooling program they choose to call behavior modification. We believe early intervention was the key that opened the door.

Their principles have worked for them, patiently taking one baby step at a time, "building skills upon one another like a pyramid," according to his mother.

Our family has had so much success with the homemade program that others are knocking on the door asking for the secret. Our heartache has been eased with time as we see progress day by day. Doctors at Vanderbilt University Medical Center agree that the program has been successful for Benjamin, who has a high IQ.

At six years old, he can read the encyclopedia; he does 9th-grade math and his art works hangs in the Kennedy Art Center in Nashville. He is a blossoming musician.

I relate this story to encourage parents and grandparents of other autistic children; it takes grit and determination, as well as ingenuity.
Shirley Caudill of London is a former newspaper publisher and a free-lance writer. Reach her at gunnstar65@adelphia.net.

The good the kid is better. The not so good the way autism is talked about. I tryed emailing a local newpaper web site that had a misinfomed reporter. 3 days later no reply not even a auto-reply i think their spamtrap stopped it.

My email to Shirley:

Dear Shirley

I just read your article at http://www.kentucky.com/589/story/292137.html. I was pointed there by a discussion on WrongPlanet, a forum for people with Asperger's and Autism. I myself have Asperger's. As you may see, there is a sense among our community that your article did not incorporate the autistic perspective, only the NT one. NT means "neurotypical" or non-autistic. You have allowed your personal NT view on autism, which include words like "disease", "sinister", "oddly", "distant", "violently", "disappear emotionally", "no longer accepts affection" etc, to influence the mood of the article. These are probably some of the key words I'd line up to summarise gross misunderstanding of autism.

I find the story about your grandson, Benjamin, most uplifting and positive - the unconditional sacrifices made by parents pay back many, many times later when that kid grows up to be a self-sufficient, happy and confident adult one day. No less autistic, do note but knowing that he is ok and loved, just the way he is. So, kudus for getting that right. I hope one day, he will speak to you and tell you that he is not diseased, sinister, odd, distant, violent or emotionally deficient and that he appreciates your affection, perhaps just showing his appreciation in a different way that other kids would do.

I hope you will make time to perhaps learn more on how autistic people perceive themselves. The Oprah and Larry King shows on autism are famous in the autistic community to be sorely lacking of insight and depth. I would not use them as a basis. I suggest communicating directly with autistic people - yes,we communicate! - either via the countless blogs or perhaps by reading and participating in forums out there.

Thank you for your time.

I agree that the underlying story is positive, but the rhetoric that she used is extremely destructive. Fast-spreading autism steals children away? The title doesn't lead people to believe that there could be any hope in the article, and, by extension, a child with a diagnosis of autism. She referred to it as a disease, which has always bothered me, and, of course, she pulled out the statistics. She even referred to it as sinister, which I've never heard before, and also bothered me. What bothered me the most was when she mentioned how much it cost the country to take care of autistic people. I saw a movie recently about the T4 program and the propaganda surrounding it, and in one poster they showed, it mentioned how many marks it cost to take care of disabled people. I immediately noticed the parallel and it disturbed me. I know we're all used to reading the articles Autism Speaks and other organizations put out with similar rhetoric, but there are a lot of NTs who have already been lead to believe that they should be scared about the "autism epidemic" by MSNBC and CNN who haven't, and this will only scare them more.

I am going to hurl feces at the next reporter who references 'rain man' in a story about autism.

Reporters of America, Ye have been warned.

I cannot believe that the CDC presumes to report on a PDD. It is NOT a disease that can spread!

I've never thought of myself as part of a "national health-care crisis". If it's costing $35 billion a year, that's probably because it's being handled incorrectly.

Also, I find it funny that everybody is getting so upset because the CDC did a study on this. It's not technically a disease, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be studied and understood. And the CDC most of all need to be the ones to understand the status of ASD so that it isn't treated as a disease by them. It's very important that they study it.

I take particular offense at the headline for that story... how exactly does autism 'spread'? Its as if i'm contagious or something and i'm coming to take your kid away...

I got a reply back. She wrote, "Thanks for your comments." Someone else who emailed her also got a response, so I'm sure that, at least for now, if you email her, she'll reply.

Yeah, I got exactly the same response. I wonder if it's NT for Up Yours.

Heh. I figured she would at least be so dignified to give you a response. I mean, at least you wrote a nice email. Mine, I'll admit, was scathing. But I take it as an admittance that she couldn't refute or counter any point that I made. Here is my email:

I read this article and, to be honest, it disgusted me. I am autistic, and I know quite a few people who are autistic, as well. The things you said in this article are very destructive; that autism "steals children away", that it is a "disease", and that the people who "suffer" from autism should be pitied. I beg to differ. People do not suffer from autism. They suffer from the stereotypes and devastation rhetoric that you and, now, quite possibly, the people who read your article, spew. The way you compared autism to cancer and said that it is a "national health care crisis costing more than $35 billion annually" is equivalent to the propaganda the Nazis used to justify the morality of their T4 program. I implore you, on behalf of autistic people everywhere, to write a retraction, or, at the very least, to stop writing articles like this one. There's enough hate speech coming from organizations that pretend to speak for autistics. We really don't need any more.

Someone else sent an email and got a response. Her issue, supposedly, is with the real epidemic of insufficient services in schools for spectrum kids.