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After their now-7-year-old son Ryan was diagnosed with autism 5 years ago, Lorri and Dan Unumb “they sold their house, downsized and sacrificed to cover costs,” an April 1st CNN story reports. Intensive behavior therapy for Ryan costs between $70,000 and $80,000 a year which is lawyer and law professor Lorri Unumb’s “entire salary.” The […]
Back in December, the New York University Child Study Center launched a public awareness advertisement campaign called “Ransom Notes,” in which. The campaign was pulled a few weeks later, in no small part due to the work of disability rights advocacy groups, parents, and many concerned individuals, who questioned the negative portrayal of autism […]
I have one older sister: When I found out, some 11 years ago, that I was going to have a boy, I panicked to Jim. What am I going to do with a boy!
Jim was easily reassuring—”Don’t worry, you’re going to love him!”—and he parked the car and we went into Schnuck’s to shop for […]
Rescue me: That is the essence of the message of the “Ransom Notes” “public awareness campaign” that the New York University Child Study Center is launching. I’ve noted the use of shocking and alarmist language in the ads, which feature fictional “ransom notes,” with the captors being “untreated psychiatric disorders,” including autism, Asperger Syndrome, bulimia, […]
“Le packing” is a treatment for autistic children used in France where, the August 25th Lancet notes, it is causing an “outcry.”
“Outcry” strikes me as a bit of an understatement, personally speaking: When I hear the word “packing,” the associations that come to mind are about sending some not welcome person “packing,” or about a […]
“Is anorexia the female Asperger’s?” asks Janet Treasure, Professor of Psychiatry at King’s College, London, and head of the Eating Disorders Unit at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, in the August 17th Times Online. Noting that “we now realise is that we need to be looking at underlying neural networks in the brain […]
A 6-year-old boy in the UK is the youngest person to be treated for anorexia. MetroDad at Babble writes:
According to an article from the UK’s Evening Standard, a study released today reveals that a six-year-old is the youngest boy to be treated for anorexia. The NHS study shows that in 2003, UK hospitals made […]
Being a parent whose child takes psychatric medications—-Risperdal and Zoloft—-my sense of righteous indignation came quickly to the fore on reading an article in today’s New York Times about how “financial relationships between doctors and drug makers correspond to the growing use of atypicals [antipsychotics] in children.” Noting that Risperdal, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Abilify and Geodon […]
What does the 2002 movie Maid in Manhattan have to do with a theory about a rising number of children with autism?
If Christopher Marshall, the Senate candidate played by Ralph Fiennes, and Marisa Ventura, the hotel maid played by Jennifer Lopez, were to have a child, chances are that child would not have autism. This […]
Von Economo neurons (VENs) are unusually shaped cells—”large, cigar-shaped and tapered at each end, with only a few dendritic processes extending away from them,” and located in the two frontal lobes of the brain. Scientists at the University of California at San Francisco have identified VENs as the “primary target of the degenerative brain disease […]
Autism mother gets on her soapbox.
Written by Kristina Chew, PhD [email] for b5media.
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