In many cases, people aren't even trying to help the nonverbal people communicate. They assume it's got to be speech or nothing; or the insurance won't spring for a communication device; or the speech therapist can only come in a half hour a week, or they're older than five, or ten, or (pick age here) so it's "obviously impossible"; or they assume that speech is a pre-requisite for teaching literacy and ignore the open visual channel when the auditory channel is completely confused... They spend hours and hours on behavior, and ignore communication altogether, as though the child had to be able to sit like a lump on demand in order to learn to communicate.
Additionally: The vast majority of the autism spectrum above the age of ten can speak, verbally. 90% of Kanner's and PDDNOS learn by then, and Asperger's by definition learned on time. So the "non-verbal" people are actually a rather small number compared to the rest of us.
(This does not make them unimportant; I'm just trying to counter the idea that autistics who can speak are just a "small, vocal minority" trying to make the majority of the autism spectrum who "can't speak for themselves" do things our way...)
There's another thing we need research on: How can we help people communicate when they are not good at using words? The number of people with intermittent ability to speak is probably larger than the completely non-verbal group; and put together those two groups make up a pretty large number; even if the non-verbal are a minority, autism is still so common that this is by no means a rare situation. And yet there are a lot more people peering at DNA and counting proteins and tracing hormones or neurotransmitters than are trying to figure out how autistic people communicate best. Talk about your scrambled priorities.
24 Jun 2009, 9:44 am
