I was recently doing a little leisure reading and ran across this headline. It says, “Fixing autism research: we need to come to grips with what autism really is.” This is an opinion piece written by John Elder Robison who is a professor at the College of William and Mary, and he wrote a book called look me in the eye. He basically is talking about the fact that a lot of research is being done around autism and is focusing on a cure. His recommendation is that we accept people who have autism is just being neurologically different rather than thinking of them as sick. The research goals shouldn’t be about find a cure but about achieving the best quality of life. Some of the things that he suggests in his article is remediating the conditions that accompany autism like anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, internal distress or those sorts of things. He also talks about helping people with autism learn to organize and manage the lives and the schedules and regulate themselves when sensory overload is an issue. He talks about technology quite a bit and engineering solutions that might be useful for folks with autism. And he talks about the fact that people who have autism and have challenges with cognitive and functional challenges, it’s our duty to help make their lives better through applied technology. It’s an opinion based article but I think it’s an interesting one and I’m going to pop a link in the show notes where you can read his article inform your opinion about whether or not we are doing autism research wrong.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 14:00:00 +0000
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