EBD Blog

Over on Whitterer on Autism, one can find Madeline’s musings about life and living with children with autism. If either of the readers or EBD Blog happens to be a parent, the notes there could be comforting. If one’s a professional, it’s a good idea to have a look at the world from parents’ perspectives.

Madeline led me to the nifty site, PosAutive, where one can see a selection of YouTube video from around the world about Autism. Check it!

Teen Screen, an effort to screen for suicide among adolescents, got a good push from Charles Q. Choi. Writing in Scientific American, Mr. Choi (or, his headline writer) asked the eminently sensible question, “If mental illness is epidemic among teenagers, why isn’t screening for it routine?” He runs through the facts and figures, drawing on the case of Laurie Flynn and Ms. Flynn’s 17-year-old daughter Shannon’s attempted suicide, to make the case for screening, especially among adolescents with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders.

Teens with mental disorders are at even greater risk—roughly 90 percent of teens who died by suicide had a psychiatric illness at the time of their deaths, according to research by child psychologist David Shaffer at Columbia University. Nearly two thirds of youth who die by suicide exhibit psychiatric symptoms for more than a year beforehand, which makes this time a significant window for potential intervention.

Although it has strong supporters such as National Alliance on Mental Illness, Teen Screen has detractors such as Psych Search (an organization that opposes psychiatry and pharmcological treatment of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders). One detractor, Teen Screen Truth whose express purpose “is to provide the truth on mental health screening programs by presenting information gathered from various sources on the Internet,” decries the effort, claiming “that the intended treatment for those so labeled is psychiatric drugging, using antidepressants and mood-altering drugs such as Ritalin, Xanax, Celexa, Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Thorazine, Luvox and other similar drugs which are known by the FDA (and the pharmaceutical companies) to cause depression, violence, suicide and homicide.” Without providing a thorough review of the arguments posed on Teen Screen Truth, let me say that I think a careful reading of the objections by someone who is passingly familiar with the literature on Emotional and Behavioral Disoders and assessment would reveal that the arguments are exaggerated and predicated on mistaken (perhaps even misrepresentative) analyses of the evidence.

Link to Mr. Choi’s Scientific American article. Link to TeenScreen. Here is a link to NAMI’s page about Teen Screen. For those who want to examine the details of the counter case (check the out-of-context quote from Professor Shaffer!), here’s a link to TeenScreenTruth. And, here’s a link to the apparently Scientology-associated Psych Search critique of Teen Screen.

In December of 2005 EBD Blog covered some developments in research about neuro-pscyhological aspects of Autism indicating growing evidence of the influence of mirror neurons on imitation and emotion. In November 2006 Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Lindsay M. Oberman at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD; CA, US) provided an excellent summary of their research on this topic. In their paper for Scientific American that is accessible to non-scientists, they recount their work.

In the late 1990s our group at U.C.S.D. noted that mirror neurons appear to be performing precisely the same functions that seem to be disrupted in autism. If the mirror neuron system is indeed involved in the interpretation of complex intentions, then a breakdown of this neural circuitry could explain the most striking defi cit in people with autism, their lack of social skills. The other cardinal signs of the disorder—absence of empathy, language defi cits, poor imitation, and so on—are also the kinds of things you would expect to see if mirror neurons were dysfunctional.

This is a rapidly developing and very compelling area of research. The theory that dysfunctions in the mirror neuron system has and will continue to receive a lot of research attention, I bet; had I the right collaborators, I’d be interested in getting into it, at least. And, in conjunction with another theory (what Professors Ramachandran and Oberman call the “distorted salience landscape theory”: disrupted connections between the sensory areas of the brain and the amygdala, where sensory data are matched to stored knowledge, cause extreme responses to minor events), dysfunctions in mirror neuron systems may point toward a broad explanation of the seemingly diverse symptoms of Autism.

Link to the free preview of the article or to a page where one can buy a PDF of the full article in Scientific American by Professors Ramachandran and Oberman. Flash of the electrons to Professor Henry Schlinger of California State University at Los Angeles (US) for reminding me about this article.

This post is a little off point for EBD Blog, but it will probably be interesting to folks who work with or study children and youths who have Emotional and Behavioral Disorders. Over on a site called Luminous Lint, which is devoted to phtotography, there is a series of photos taken by Jean-Philippe Charbonnierin in the 1950s. The photos show adults in or on their way to French psychiatric hospitals.
Continue reading ’50s French hospital’

To be sure, the number of children identified as having Autism in US schools has risen dramatically and estimates of prevalence have been revised upwards, but there are good reasons to doubt the oft-repeated assertion that the number of cases of Autism is increasing. Writing in Time magazine for 12 January 2007, Claudia Wallis reported that changes in diagnostic criteria, school policies, public perceptions, and other factors Autism are probably the source of the misperception that Autism is increasing at epidemic proportions.
Continue reading ‘Autism not epidemic’

Hope Brickey, the mother of a 10-year old child with autism, believes that the actions of Salem (VA, US) Glenvar Elementary School Principal Danny Guard caused her son to regress. Mr. Guard traumatized Josh Brickey by making him clean feces as a punishment for an act that Ms. Brickey says her son did not commit.
Continue reading ‘Regression by restitution’

Behavior Analysis Association of Michigan (BAAM) has opened registration for it’s 21st Annual BAAM Convention, which is to be held 22-23 March 2007 at Eastern Michigan (US) University. Here are relevant links:

Convention Information
Full Convention Schedule
Regular Registration
Student Registration
BAAM home

Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and other Emotional and Behavioral Disorders often have difficulty with social relationships. Their peers may reject them, they may lash out at others, or they may not understand how to modulate their language and behavior to fit into a group. Amori Yee Mikami, a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia, is addressing the friendship problems of children with ADHD directly.

Continue reading ‘ADHD peer relations’

Stephen Wiltshire, an artist with a gallery in London (UK), can draw phenomenally from memory. Here’s a clip from the “about” page of his Website:

Continue reading ‘Wiltshire videos’

Writing in School me, a blog sponsored by the Los Angeles (CA, US) Times, Bob Sipchen documented the difficulties that parents too often face in seeking help for their children with disabilities. Mr. Sipchen described the trials and tribulations of working with sometimes recalcitrant local education agencies to secure identification and appropriate services. Although the bulk of his entry focuses on the parent of a preschool child just entering the eligibility maze, he captures the difficulty clearly when recounting the situation for parents of an older child.
Continue reading ‘Parents’ perspective’

Writing in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, David Goldston and colleagues reported about their study that examine questions about comorbid Emotional and Behavioral Disorders and reading problems among adolecents. Continue reading ‘Comorbidity in adolescence’

This is national de-lurking week, a time when bloggers encourage their readers to participate in the aggregation of related content by commenting on entries at blogs. The idea was initially promoted by Sheryl over on PaperNapkin (who isn’t participating this year, because she’s taking a break), and I want to take this opportunity to encourage interaction right here on EBD Blog.