Autistic Disorder Dana Keith Beth

Autistic Disorder

Dana Keith

Beth Hopkins Instructor

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke autism is characterized by "impaired social interaction," problems associated with communication (both nonverbal and verbal), and with "unusual, repetitive, or severely limited activities and interests" (www.ninds.nih.gov). Technically, autism is from a family of developmental disorders called "autism spectrum disorders" (ASDs), and autism is sometimes confused with other disorders including Asperger syndrome.

The autistic child has difficulty interacting with other children, which is the "hallmark feature" (NINDS); also, the autistic child may behave obsessively, doing the same thing repetitively, and moreover that child may not respond when his or her name is called. There is a tendency among autistic children to rock back and forth or even bang their heads against the wall, and the behavior patters of an autistic child often include being unresponsive to others in their classroom or peer group. In other words, it is not easy for an autistic child to make new friends and hence the child is not only seemingly antisocial, but lonely as a result of that lack of socialization.

The NINDS fact sheet points out that working with an autistic child requires patience and professionalism; a "multidisciplinary team" is often required when it comes to therapy, and that may include a psychologist, neurologist, psychiatrist, speech therapist and other highly trained professional healthcare individuals, according to the NINDS.

Therapy for Autism: A study that was published in the journal Autism (Chaing, 2009) involved the close observation of 17 Australian and 15 Taiwanese children who have autism. These children were either "mute" or spoke very little during their two-hour school sessions, which they attended on a regular basis. The intent of the study was to see if certain instructions given by the teacher could help the autistic child to respond better. The article asserts that some children with autism have "severe expressive communication impairment" and for those children healthcare professionals have instituted "augmentative and alternative" communication strategies (Chaing 166). What the therapist hoped to accomplish in this study is to collect "naturalistic data on elicited expressive communications" that are generated by teacher instructions.

The results showed that of 709 teacher instructions there were 653 responses through "elicited expressive communicative behaviors" (Chaing 170). Those instructions from the teachers resulted in some interesting data. For example, the autistic children who had "limited spoken language" produced (on average) just "one incidence of elicited expressive communication" every six minutes (Chaing 173). The appropriate rate of prompts from a fully trained teacher for an autistic child is 3.5 per minute, but the research that was conducted (and resulted in so few expressive communication responses) shows that "teachers of students with autism do not actively promote their students' expressive communication" (Chaing 173). Also, it is possible that the dearth of responses is due to the fact that teachers have "difficulty in using prompts" to facilitate responses from their autistic students. The moral of the article's story is that teachers of autistic children with limited spoken languages may indeed need more training to get the most out of their students.

Still on the subject of therapy for autistic children, another article in the journal Autism (Vismara, et al. 2009) reports that professionally led training sessions with the parents of autistic children were helpful in getting the children to respond and communicate. The study was a 12-week research investigation, one hour per week; and what took place was the parents of eight "toddlers" (who had been diagnosed with autism) were brought together with their children and therapists. These parents were taught how to implement "naturalistic therapeutic techniques" based on the "Early Start Denver Model" (ESDM) (Vismara 93). The ESDM model focuses on "creating an affectively warm and rich environment to foster positive relationships between children and adults" (Vismara 99). The training with parents also embraced the Pivotal Response Training (PRT) model, using strategies associated with "motivation" as a teaching approach (communication, language and play skills). The parents were given a printed manual with 10 strategies for therapy that are "essential" to the ESDM model.

The results were very positive, and they illustrate that by training parents to become therapists in a sense, working with their autistic children in the home, life can be made better for the children. By the fifth to sixth hour the parents had "acquired the strategies" needed to work with their children's autism. And as for the children with autism, they "demonstrated sustained change and growth in social communication behaviors" (Vismara 93).