EBD Blog

In an e-mail message, my colleague and friend Joel Mittler of Long Island University (NY, US) reminded me

[Today] is the 30th anniversary of IDEA. Most of us are probably too young to recall life before IDEA (or perhaps too old to remember). With all its flaws and problems, perhaps we should take a moment and in our own way remind out colleagues, students, and others of what it means to have a law that guarantees an education to all children, no matter what their disability. I like to note that we had compulsory education laws in this country in the 1850s but it took another 100+ years to include children with disabilities. While we continue to fight among ourselves as well as with those in power, it’s also not a bad time to thank those that made it all possible. I’ll start with Fred Weintraub and Ed Martin. Thanks, guys. Who else deserves a good hug?

Joel

People with depression who spent an hour a day for two weeks in water with dolphins reported lower levels of depression than others who have spent comparable time in water without dolphins, according to a report by Christian Antonioli and Michael A. Reveley published in the British Mental Journal. The study, which was conducted in Honduras primarily with 40-year-old women, employed a single-blind design with random assignment to conditions.

Although this report will provide great encouragement to advocates of so-called holistic approaches to therapy, it will also provide multiple opportunities to discuss the potential for research to overlook the obvious. I’ll leave the detailed analysis for another day, but note in passing that factors such as (a) recruiting people for a given experience and then redirecting those in the control group to a different treatment, (b) using self-report data as the dependent variable when reporters know what therapy they are getting and even sought it, and (c) capitalizing on the temporary benefits of just about any therapy call these results into question. Furthermore, as the wonderful folks at Annals of Improbable Research have noted, this study illustrates the Gillinov Effect: Commenting on a different study, Marc Gillinov said, “I’m not surprised at all that something that makes people feel good also makes them feel less anxious, has measurable physiological effects.”

Link to an HTML version of the BMJ article by Mr. Antonioli and Mr. Reveley.

Elizabeth Horn, a filmmaker who’s daughter was diagnosed as having autism in 1997, is preparing a film that she hopes will improve people’s views of autism, according to Carolyne Zinko writing in the San Fransisco Chronicle (CA, US). In collaboration with a public broadcasting station, she is examining the stories of nine families where children with autism appeared to improve after chelation therapy. In a related story, Katerine Seligman provides a case study of one child—he received much more than chelation—featured in the film. From Ms. Zinko’s article:

Based partly on personal experience and partly on the experiences of families whose autistic children appear to be recovering with a controversial treatment, Horn created a 60-minute film, “Finding the Words.” The film’s financial sponsor is KTEH San Jose. American Public Television has agreed to submit the film to PBS for a national broadcast in April, which is national Autism Awareness Month.

I have to hope that this film does not promote more widespread use of chelation. I find it a frightening therapy. It is supported by no clear scientific findings, only by subjective case descriptions. It is predicated on an idea that has far greater currency in a conspiracy-theory circles than in scientific circles. And, it is probably dangerous, as the death of a boy during chelation therapy suggests.

Link to Ms. Zinko’s story and link to Ms. Seligman’s story

Extreme differences in early care of children appears to be associated with differences in neuropeptides (amino acids present in neural tissues) released by children when they interact with their mothers versus unfamiliar women, according to a report by Alison B. Wismer Fries and colleages in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As a part of Seth Pollock’s on-going research at the University of Wisconsin (Madison, WI, US) about how children’s emotional experiences alter their vulnerability to various forms of psychopathology, Fries and colleagues measured vasopressin and oxytocin neuropeptide systems under the two different conditions and found that children who were raised in typical family environments had different levels of the neuropeptide oxytocin after sessions with the strangers than sessions with their mothers, but children who began their lives in institutionalized settings did not have different levels of it. Here is Fries et al.’s abstract:

The formation of social attachments is a critical component of human relationships. Infants begin to bond to their caregivers from the moment of birth, and these social bonds continue to provide regulatory emotional functions throughout adulthood. It is difficult to examine the interactions between social experience and the biological origins of these complex behaviors because children undergo both brain development and accumulate social experience at the same time. We had a rare opportunity to examine children who were reared in extremely aberrant social environments where they were deprived of the kind of care-giving typical for our species. The present experiment in nature provides insight into the role of early experience on the brain systems underlying the development of emotional behavior. These data indicate that the vasopressin and oxytocin neuropeptide systems, which are critical in the establishment of social bonds and the regulation of emotional behaviors, are affected by early social experience. The results of this experiment suggest a potential mechanism whose atypical function may explain the pervasive social and emotional difficulties observed in many children who have experienced aberrant care-giving. The present findings are consistent with the view that there is a critical role for early experience in the development of the brain systems underlying basic aspects of human social behavior.

The study hinges on new techniques Fries and colleages used to measure oxytocin and vasopressin levels in urine. If they are borne out, the results will give a boost to attachment researchers, developmental psychologists who consider early development of secure relationships with adults as a critical element in subsequent psychological development.

Links:

Gleb Shumyatsky (Rutgers University) and colleagues have determined that the gene stathmin is especially important in the lateral amygdala region of the brain, the area that is important for learned (conditioned) and innate (unconditioned) fear responses. They found that mice lacking the gene displayed fewer fear responses and did not recognize some dangerous situations. According to Greg Miller writing for the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s ScienceNow,

The stathmin knockout mice are relatively fearless. Not only do the mutant mice spend more time than do normal mice in exposed spaces, indicating a lack of innate fear, they’re also less prone to freeze up in fear when they hear a tone that previously signaled an impending electric shock, indicating an impairment of fear learning. The deficit seems specific to fear, however: the mutants performed normally on a task that requires swimming mice to learn and remember the location of a submerged platform

Although we must be cautious about generalizing from analog studies, this appears to be a promising result. Mr. Miller includes an interview with another scientist, Joseph LeDoux (New York University), who suggests that the finding may eventually lead to treatments for anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders affect many children and youths with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders, so such developments would be valuable.

Link to Mr. Miller’s story (he has several humorous bits in it) and to the PubMed abstract of the study.

California’s recent election included a 1% income tax on incomes greater than $1 million, and these funds are to be used for mental health services, according to an article by Troy Anderson in the Pasadena (CA; US) Star News. To my way of thinking, this is an opportunity for those concerned with the mental health of children and youth to do something good. For example, it would be wise to invest sensibly in creating top-notch coordination among the many agencies that provide services for children—effective wrap-around services!

Link for Mr. Anderson’s story.

We have learned a lot about autism in the time since I first began working with children whom most would call clear cases of early infantile autism in the 1960s and 70s. For one good thing, we are no longer dogged by B. Bettlehiem’s theory that autism is caused by cold, distant (“refrigerator”) mothering. But we have much to learn, still.

Although we know much more about the language and social problems that autistic children have, scientists been not yet constructed a compelling theory of possible genetic causes and neurological deficits that likely underlie this disorder. However, a group of neuroscience researchers at the Massachusetts Intitute of Technology (MIT) is hoping to unravel the sources of the disorder, according to Emily Singer of the MIT Technology Review.

Based on their view that autism is a multple-allele problem and aided by a large grant, the scientists plan to investigage many fundamental connections.

“We will look for a relationship between gene variation and variation in the brain,” says John Gabrieli, an MIT neuroscientist. Gabrieli will use fMRI, a type of MRI that shows which areas of the brain are active when people think about specific problems, to compare brain activity in normal individuals and in those with different forms of the suspected autism genes. Specifically, his group will look at how people deal with social functions, by imaging brain activity in response to faces and facial expressions.

Link to Drawing Out Autism by Ms. Singer

The U.S. Congress is preparing to acknowlege the 30th anniversary of the passage of Public Law 91-142, the Education of Handicapped Children Act which is the predecessor to the contemporary Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The draft resolution is available as a PDF.

Download a copy (Windows users, right-click the link; Mac users, control click).

In popular views of disability, identifying children as having disorders—labeling them—causes problems. This idea is especially popular with critics of services for children with emotional or behavioral disorders, but it is inaccurate.

As Jim Kauffman has pointed out repeatedly, it is logically impossible to provide services to individuals without deciding to whom we are going to provide those services. This point, along with others, is reiterated in an article by John Ruscio in which he reports a review of the literature on negative effect of labels from The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice. Here’s the abstract:

The stigma of mental illness is a profound social problem with a long history, and it is widely believed that diagnostic labels cause or contribute to such stigmatization. In an evaluation of labeling theory and the research that it prompted, special attention is devoted to a close examination of 3 widely cited studies (Langer & Abelson, 1974; Rosenhan, 1973a; Temerlin, 1968). Despite a pervasive confounding of diagnostic labels with the behaviors they denote, which increases the apparent influence of “mere labels,” the empirical literature does not support the putative negative effect. To more productively combat the stigma of mental illness, it is suggested that psychologists pursue community-based educational and contact-oriented programs, recognize the unavoidability and value of diagnoses, improve diagnostic reliability and validity, and compassionately convey diagnoses in the context of humane and effective treatments.

Link to Mr. Ruscio’s article in the The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice article.

Steve Forness, talking at the Division for Learning Disabilities conference in Charleston (SC, US), reminded people about how long it takes for children who have emotional or behavioral disorders to receive services. Drawing from Duncan and Forness (1995; Behavioral Disorders), he noted that children’s parents reported first suspecting that something was amiss about their child when the child was 3.5 years old. However, the first recognition of the problem by people outside the family (e.g., notes in MD’s records) didn’t come until a couple of years later, first school recognition didn’t come until about age 6, and actual identification as a child needing special education services didn’t come until when the child was going on 8 years of age. Most often, the special education category used to identify these children, however, was Learning Disabilities rather than Emotional and Behavioral Disorders.