[donaldscrankshaw] Donald: Autism

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Posted by Donald:
Autism
http://www.donaldscrankshaw.com/posts/1204169516.shtml


   This is interesting. From a [1]Wired article on autism:

     The YouTube clip opens with a woman facing away from the camera,
     rocking back and forth, flapping her hands awkwardly, and emitting
     an eerie hum. She then performs strange repetitive behaviors:
     slapping a piece of paper against a window, running a hand
     lengthwise over a computer keyboard, twisting the knob of a drawer.
     She bats a necklace with her hand and nuzzles her face against the
     pages of a book. And you find yourself thinking: Who's shooting
     this footage of the handicapped lady, and why do I always get
     sucked into watching the latest viral video?
     But then the words "A Translation" appear on a black screen, and
     for the next five minutes, 27-year-old Amanda Baggs â who is
     autistic and doesn't speak â describes in vivid and articulate
     terms what's going on inside her head as she carries out these
     seemingly bizarre actions. In a synthesized voice generated by a
     software application, she explains that touching, tasting, and
     smelling allow her to have a "constant conversation" with her
     surroundings. These forms of nonverbal stimuli constitute her
     "native language," Baggs explains, and are no better or worse than
     spoken language. Yet her failure to speak is seen as a deficit, she
     says, while other people's failure to learn her language is seen as
     natural and acceptable.
     And you find yourself thinking: She might have a point.
     Baggs lives in a public housing project for the elderly and
     handicapped near downtown Burlington, Vermont. She has short black
     hair, a pointy nose, and round glasses. She usually wears a T-shirt
     and baggy pants, and she spends a scary amount of time â day and
     night â on the Internet: blogging, hanging out in Second Life, and
     corresponding with her autie and aspie friends. (For the
     uninitiated, that's autistic and Asperger's.)
     ...
     Like many people with autism, Baggs doesn't like to look you in the
     eye and needs help with tasks like preparing a meal and taking a
     shower. In conversation she'll occasionally grunt or sigh, but she
     stopped speaking altogether in her early twenties. Instead, she
     types 120 words a minute, which the DynaVox then translates into a
     synthesized female voice that sounds like a deadpan British
     schoolteacher.
     ...
     I tell her that I asked one of the world's leading authorities on
     autism to check out the video. The expert's opinion: Baggs must
     have had outside help creating it, perhaps from one of her
     caregivers. Her inability to talk, coupled with repetitive
     behaviors, lack of eye contact, and the need for assistance with
     everyday tasks are telltale signs of severe autism. Among all
     autistics, 75 percent are expected to score in the mentally
     retarded range on standard intelligence tests â that's an IQ of 70
     or less.
     People like Baggs fall at one end of an array of developmental
     syndromes known as autism spectrum disorders. The spectrum ranges
     from someone with severe disability and cognitive impairment to the
     socially awkward eccentric with Asperger's syndrome.
     After I explain the scientist's doubts, Baggs grunts, and her mouth
     forms just a hint of a smirk as she lets loose a salvo on the
     keyboard. No one helped her shoot the video, edit it, and upload it
     to YouTube. She used a Sony Cybershot DSC-T1, a digital camera that
     can record up to 90 seconds of video (she has since upgraded). She
     then patched the footage together using the editing programs RAD
     Video Tools, VirtualDub, and DivXLand Media Subtitler. "My care
     provider wouldn't even know how to work the software," she says.

   It's a long quote, but it's a long article: that's just the beginning.
   There are, I think, two dangers here, and I think psychiatrists are
   guilty of both. The first is to define every eccentricity, every
   deviation from a mythical norm, as a mental illness. Psychiatrists
   have long since taken homosexuality off the books as a mental illness,
   but there are still plenty of them who want to put conservatism and
   religious belief on. The second is to define nothing as a mental
   illness--people are just different, that's all.
   I think that if you no longer call autism a mental illness, then
   mental illness doesn't mean anything at all. Amanda Baggs clearly has
   a high level of functionality, but she is still incapable of the basic
   tasks needed to survive in today's society. This isn't an alternative
   lifestyle she has chosen to live--she's simply chosen to embrace the
   limitations she can't overcome. Perhaps it is the most healthy thing
   for her at this point, but it doesn't make the disability any less
   real.
   On the other hand, I do think there's a lot of truth in this:

     Mike Merzenich, a professor of neuroscience at UC San Francisco,
     says the notion that 75 percent of autistic people are mentally
     retarded is "incredibly wrong and destructive." He has worked with
     a number of autistic children, many of whom are nonverbal and would
     have been plunked into the low-functioning category. "We label them
     as retarded because they can't express what they know," and then,
     as they grow older, we accept that they "can't do much beyond sit
     in the back of a warehouse somewhere and stuff letters in
     envelopes."

   It quite possible that autistics are, by and large, no less
   intelligent than other people. A lot depends on how you define
   intelligence. Is it just what goes on in the brain? Or is how well you
   communicate with other people also a part of it?

References

   1. http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-03/ff_autism