Autism

There's an interesting article about autism in today's S.F. Chronicle Magazine. Specifically, it's about a 10- or 11-year-old boy in Marin who is presented as essentially cured of the autism with which he was diagnosed when he was two. The boy began having serious digestive and intestinal problems almost as soon as he was born and he had no language when he was two. (He wouldn't swallow anything and had blood in his output frequently.) Upon receiving the autism diagnosis, his parents, and especially his mother, began the intensive research about how to improve his condition that you hear about a lot of parents doing. They talked to lots of people with lots of theories, converted a room in their room into a therapy room and started with nutritional therapies. They put their son on a gluten-free diet and a wide variety of supplements. Now, he apparently presents as just about autism-free, although he has a helper in class who seems to help very lightly. He reads a lot, which is interesting to me at least. Judging by the quotes in the article, though, the boy retains a little bit of Aspergerian behavior. For example, he is quoted as explaining to the writer how the remote control fan in his room works. That's not something that a lot of non-autistic-spectrum kids would do (although my brother Guitar Guy, who was anti-Aspergerian in his socializing as a child, was known to explain that kind of thing to strangers -- sorry, Guitar Guy, it's just true).

We of course have heard a lot about dietary and vitamin-related therapies over the years as we have listened for ways to help The Mermaid. There are a lot of parents of autistic children who believe that these things can be very helpful and, apparently, they have been very helpful for the boy in the article.

The main thing that I took out of the article, though, is that there seem to be some very distinct patterns in autistic children's case histories. While there is some mention in the article of the boy having a somewhat adverse reaction to his MMR vaccination, his history is not the classic story that you hear, namely that a children was more or less non-autistic unless he or she got the MMR and then, shortly after the MMR, became quite autistic. The boy's history seems to involve some serious digestive issues. The boy did not seem to regress, but rather had significant communicative issues from the start.

None of these histories, however, is anything like The Mermaid's. The Mermaid was a happy little girl who just didn't talk. She didn't have any serious digestive issues (although she doesn't eat any meat -- she has never eaten much meat, although she ate pepperoni for a while). She didn't regress around the time she turned two -- that was just the time that we realized something wasn't quite what we expected. She responded well to language-related interventions almost as soon as they were used with her (she was the star of a video made by the San Luis Obispo County Office of Education for the use of PECS - a picture-based communication system that helps kids learn how to exchange ideas with others).

What all of these histories suggest to me, at least, is that it may be futile to search for a single cause of autism. Given that we now accept that there is a spectrum of autism disorders, it wouldn't seem to me to be much of a surprise if it turned out that there were a spectrum of causes. Because The Mermaid has never had serious digestive problems, I have never really felt that a dietary approach would work for her. Because she responded well to pretty intensive school-based programs as soon as she started them -- she was going to school something five hours every weekday when she was three -- and has always been in some kind of school several hours a day since, it has always seemed to The Muse and I that she needed some time to rest when she gets home. Accordingly, we haven't ever tried intensive at-home programs with her. And she is doing well -- mostly B's and an A in spelling in her mainstream 5th grade class and her teacher told us that, at one point when she was out of her class, the teacher asked the other students who would like to be The Mermaid's buddy and everyone in the class raised their hands.

The article in the Chronicle just sorted deepened the mystery of autism to me. Kids with different histories producing the same basic spectrum of communication problems. Huh? It doesn't make a lot of sense. We are just lucky with The Mermaid. I don't know a lot else to say.