Tim Haag, the district’s curriculum/technology resource teacher, helped the Albany district obtain a grant of nearly $10,000 to provide the portable tablet computers. On Jan. 26, he brought them to the classroom for the first time and showed the children how they worked.

“Hey, I found a fraction thing on math!” exclaimed Eric Ames, 10, fingers tracing the screen as he paged through the applications.

“I know! Isn’t that cool?” Redpath told him. “Just about everything you can imagine, we have on there.”

Redpath had been hearing a lot about the effectiveness of tablet computers in working with children with autism. She asked Haag to look into grant possibilities.

Haag found one through the CenturyLink Foundation that paid for the iPads (including a 14th, for Redpath), headphones, cases, stands, a wireless hard drive and several applications Redpath said she hoped will be particularly effective for children with special needs.

Autism is a developmental disability that takes many different forms but typically can make it difficult for children to interact with others. About 50 of the 500-some special needs elementary students in the Greater Albany Public Schools district have been identified with Autism Spectrum Disorder as the primary disability.

Some students with autism struggle with reading; have trouble with fine motor skills, which makes writing a challenge; and may require lots of repetition to master particular skills.

Amost all, however, are highly visual, which makes the colorful graphics and touchpad interface of a tablet computer a perfect match for their learning style, Redpath said. An iPad can hit the challenges in ways that create interest and keep students on task.

Academics are important, but children with autism also have a critical need for direct social skills instruction that affects everything they do, Redpath said.

Children with autism don’t automatically understand social rules about sharing, taking turns and seeing another’s point of view. In Redpath’s classroom, they practice conversational skills, being patient, taking direction, showing respect, receiving constructive criticism, and using calming strategies when angry or out of control.

GazetteTimes

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Prosecutors claim the condition, typified by fixated behaviour and poor social skills, has led some to break into computer systems.

Dylan Wilson was diagnosed with a form of autism – called Asperger Syndrome – when he was 16. Now aged 39 he has spent years in his bedroom in Lincoln working on his computer. Often more comfortable with cyberspace than face-to-face friendships.

Mr Wilson said: “People with Asperger Syndrome think logically, computers think the same. It’s like we think alike. You could say a dog is a man’s best friend: computers are our best friend.”

It is this condition – Asperger Syndrome – that is now under the spotlight. Both in America and the UK, it is increasingly being used as a defence in high profile hacking cases.

Those with the syndrome are often obsessive, may lack empathy, and have difficulty interacting with others. People therefore who are capable of sitting for hours on end in front of a computer looking for ways to break into a system.

Dylan Wilson himself has never been in trouble with the law and is keen that not everybody with autism is tarnished with that hackers’ brush.

He said: “There’s people out there who probably still don’t understand Asperger Syndrome.

“People don’t understand about their social skills, and because their relationship with computers is good, people are worried that they may be tomorrow’s alleged hackers, and that might send alarm bells ringing.”

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(CHICAGO) (WLS) — The transition into adulthood is especially challenging for teens with autism.

Families with autistic children have to spend years finding the right education and therapy programs that best fit their child’s needs.

Many need to figure out what to do when they reach the age of 22 and the school bus stops coming.

The Jorwic’s 22-year-old-son Chris is autistic.

“He was up to the age 2 and everything was going about 100 percent correctly, maybe a little bit slow on walking, but he was always the big kid,” said his mother Therese Jorwic. “He actually had about 100 words, was very interactive, and at about age 2, everything shutdown slowly. He kind of started getting into his own world and everything in terms of talking and everything else just kind of fell away slowly.”

The family knew that when Chris turned 22, they had to start making future plans.

“And the challenges, of course, are what kind of programs do you put together, not just for today but going forward to his adult life,” she said. ” We’ve been very fortunate because the program started in Ray Graham literally the day we needed it and it’s a program for younger adults that has a lot of great activities, community service.”

This is just the beginning. Therese Jorwic knows her son wants to work and has skills, but there are barriers to finding the right job.

“He has some wonderful skills, (but) because he has some significant communication challenges, some of those things become difficult,” Therese Jorwic said. “He lives anything having to do with sports. He has al ot of opinions about politics and that kind of thing, so in terms of how that works in a job, we’re still trying to figure that out. Some of the more typical things we have seen, we felt weren’t really workable for Chris.”

WLS-TV ABC7 News

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Tyree Erik Jones, 18, of Fridley and Bionca Mixon, 22, of St. Paul were charged in Ramsey County District Court with soliciting an underage girl to practice prostitution, promotion of prostitution, and sex trafficking.

According to a criminal complaint filed Thursday, police were called to a room in the Hilton Garden Inn in downtown St. Paul on Tuesday to find the girl, who had just turned 18, crying. The complaint said she has Asperger syndrome and the developmental level of a 13-year-old.

The girl told police she had run away from her home in Des Moines about a week earlier after meeting Jones on a social media website, which the complaint did not identify.

TwinCities

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Nobody in Iowa has a place for Jeff Paprocki.

Since early October, Paprocki has been locked behind two sets of heavy wood and steel doors at a Des Moines hospital’s psychiatric ward. He hasn’t been outside a single time. He receives little therapy for his serious autism. He sees his family only every other Sunday, when they make the two-hour drive from Waterloo.

“It’s like he’s in prison,” says his brother, Jimmy.

Jeff, 23, has committed no crime, and everyone agrees there should be a better place for him.

The U.S. Supreme Court has said that people with mental disabilities have a legal right to live in the least restrictive place possible and that states may not lock them in institutions if they can be served in community facilities.

But Iowa’s patchwork mental health system has few facilities capable of handling someone like Jeff, and he is paying the price. So are other people who need the psychiatric bed Jeff is filling, which is a scarce commodity.

State leaders are working to reform the system, and they express hope that a more rational organization could free up resources to help the toughest cases. But Jeff’s predicament shows how complex and frustrating the system’s shortcomings can be.

His parents talk matter-of-factly about a situation that has worn them down. They’ve spent countless hours appealing for better treatment for their son, only to see him locked away and isolated. They see little chance he will be able to live anywhere near them for years to come, and they fear that no one will fight for him once they’re gone.

“What’s happening to my son is happening to others,” said Jeff’s father, Jim, who used to work as an aide for disabled people. “The people who work in the system have seen this sort of thing going on for years and years. I think they get a little numb to it.”

Every-other-week visits brief, filled with worry
On a recent Sunday, Jeff’s family made the twice-a-month trek to Des Moines to visit him at Iowa Lutheran Hospital. Jeff has been confined in the hospital’s psychiatric unit since shortly after he left a residential facility in Nevada, Ia., for what his family thought would be a brief hospitalization. But the small facility’s staff declined to take him back, saying they couldn’t handle his outbursts of frustration. The only other possibility for him now appears to be a state institution, which has a months-long waiting list.

Autism is a brain disorder that affects people in a range of ways, starting in early childhood. Its prominent features include unusual or repetitive behaviors and an inability to interact normally with others. Some people function fairly well with autism, but those with the most serious cases require constant support. Jeff is at the most serious end of the spectrum. He can speak in simple sentences, and he can read a bit. But he tends to ignore others, and he often moans or grunts instead of talking. When he’s frustrated, he sometimes lashes out, mostly at himself. His forehead shows scars where he’s hit his head, and the hospital staff protects him with a soft foam helmet.

His family has not been allowed to visit the room where he sleeps at Iowa Lutheran, which tries to limit disruptions from visitors to its psychiatric unit. Instead, they meet with him in a cramped conference room, about 10 feet by 15 feet, just inside the unit’s locked doors. They bring his favorite food, pepperoni pizza, and simple craft projects for him to work on.

His mother, Martha, calls Jeff “Mr. Pumpkin.” He calls her “Uncle Johnny’s mom,” because of a recent photo she took with her brother. Chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer had left her nearly bald, so she looked like her brother. Jeff doesn’t understand that she can’t be both the sister and the mother of his uncle. Instead of arguing the point, she smiles and agrees.

DesMoinesRegister

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Ben Perrick, a resident of the psychiatric institution for most of his life, displayed what the University of Pennsylvania researchers considered classic symptoms of autism. His chart, however, said he was schizophrenic and mentally retarded.

Delving into the file, the researchers learned that as a 10-year-old, Perrick had seen Dr. Leo Kanner, the psychiatrist who discovered autism. In his notes from 1954, Kanner described Perrick as “a child who is self centered, withdrawn, and unable to relate to other people,” and recommended that he be committed.

Later, other doctors relabelled Perrick. The autism diagnosis was forgotten.

The researchers found 13 other patients with unrecognized autism in the Norristown hospital — about 10 per cent of the residents they evaluated. It was a sign of how medical standards and social attitudes toward the disorder have shifted.

Over the last two decades, estimates of the autism rate in children in the U.S. and Canada have climbed twentyfold. Many scientists believe the increase has been driven largely by an expanded definition of the disorder and more vigorous efforts to identify it.

Scientists are just beginning to find cases that were overlooked or called something else in an earlier era. If their research shows that autism has always been present at roughly the same rate as today, it could ease worries that an epidemic is on the loose.

By looking into the past, scientists also hope to deepen their understanding of how autism unfolds over a lifetime.

What happened to all the people who never got diagnosed? Where are they?

Like Perrick, who died in 2009, some spent their lives in institutions. Mental hospitals have largely been emptied over the last four decades, but the remaining population in the U.S. probably includes about 5,000 people with undiagnosed autism, said David Mandell, a psychiatric epidemiologist who led the Norristown study.

Many more are thought to be in prisons, homeless shelters and wherever else social misfits are clustered.

But evidence suggests the vast majority are not segregated from society — they are hiding in plain sight. Most probably never will be identified, but a picture of their lives is starting to emerge from those who have been.

They live in households, sometimes alone, sometimes with the support of their parents, sometimes even with spouses. Many were bullied as children and still struggle to connect with others. Some were able to find jobs that fit their strengths and partners who understand them.

If modern estimates of autism rates apply to past generations, about two million U.S. adults and more than 220,000 adult Canadians have various forms of it — and society has long absorbed the emotional and financial toll, mostly without realizing it.

Stats the same for adultsThe search for the missing millions is just beginning.

The only study to look for autistic adults in a national population was conducted in Britain and published in 2009. Investigators interviewed 7,461 adults selected as a representative sample of the country and conducted 618 intensive evaluations.

The conclusion: one per cent of people living in British households had some form of autism, roughly the same rate the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates for children in America today.

The British study found it didn’t matter whether the adults were in their 20s or their 80s. The rate of autism was the same for both groups.

“That would seem to imply the incidence has not changed very much,” said Dr. Terry Brugha, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Leicester who led the study. He added the findings were not conclusive and more research is needed.

None of the adults included in the study had an existing diagnosis of autism, though in a few instances relatives told researchers they had suspected it.

In one case, a man said he had asked his doctor about the possibility but was told that a diagnosis in middle age would be useless. After all, he had got this far without it.

Still, as more children are being diagnosed with autism, more adults are wondering if they have it, too.

Karl Wittig, a retired engineer from New York, had always questioned why so few social skills came naturally to him.

A diary his mother kept in the 1950s suggests he was not an ordinary child. “This last few weeks, he doesn’t pile the blocks any more,” she wrote when he was two. “He likes to put one next to the other, making a big row of 48.”

Two years later, he talked non-stop about wires, switches, light bulbs and Thomas Edison.

Wittig went on to earn undergraduate and master’s degrees from Cornell University and New York University in physics, electrical engineering and computer science. In the research laboratories where he worked, he felt he fit in.

“I went into a field full of eccentric people,” Witting recalled. “I was just another eccentric person.”

Wittig said he eventually figured out how to behave in social situations — to refrain from correcting other people’s mistakes, flaunting his math abilities or rambling on about his own interests. He married a former nun 18 years his senior. She died of cancer after two decades together. Wittig described the marriage as happy.

Still, he wanted to understand what made him different. So at age 44, he brought his mother’s diary to a psychiatrist, who evaluated him and concluded he had Asperger’s disorder, a mild form of autism.

“I had been waiting for an explanation for these issues my entire life,” recalled Wittig, now 55, who lives alone in the apartment he once shared with his wife. “Finally, here it was.”

Passing for ‘normal’On the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, it is possible to pass for “normal,” or some semblance of it. Over time, experts say, many people with the disorder adapt to their surroundings. It helps to find a niche, a constructive interest or a job.

For some, the key is finding a guardian angel.

Mark Teufel said he could barely survive without Loraine Girard, a divorcee from Texas with whom he has lived for the last 17 years.

They met at the Magic Castle, a Hollywood club for magicians. Teufel, 57, who has a wispy beard and grey ponytail, makes contraptions used in tricks — polished works of art crafted from wood and metal.

He and Girard live in a rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica. Tools, spare parts and papers are spread over every surface, with towers of boxes and plastic bins rising out of the rubble to create an indoor metropolis. It has reduced the hallway to a crawl space, cut off access to one bedroom and rendered the oven unusable.

The Vancouver Sun

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Un projet de refonte des critères définissant l’autisme lancé par la Société américaine de psychiatrie (APA) fait craindre aux psychiatres et fondations privées que cette nouvelle nomenclature exclut nombre d’enfants atteints de variantes du syndrome.

Une telle exclusion risque de les priver de l’accès aux services d’aide sociale, médicale et scolaire puisque les assurances maladies et les programmes publics se basent sur la définition des maladies établies par l’APA (American Psychiatric Association), selon ces critiques.

Pour la cinquième édition de son manuel de référence de diagnostic des maladies mentales (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – DSM-5), le groupe de travail de l’APA recommande de regrouper toutes les formes d’autisme dans une seule catégorie appelée «trouble du spectre autistique».

Les autres pathologies diagnostiquées jusqu’à présent séparément, comme le syndrome d’Asperger, le trouble envahissant du développement non spécifié et le trouble de désintégration de l’enfance, ne seront plus considérés comme des pathologies spécifiques mais des variantes de l’autisme.

Les critères de diagnostic proposés pour l’autisme établissent des degrés de gravité pour un syndrome qui est fondamentalement le même, explique l’APA.

«Les critères proposés conduiront à des diagnostics plus exacts et aideront les médecins à prodiguer de meilleurs traitements», insiste le Dr James Scully, directeur médical de l’APA.

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La bataille judiciaire n’est pas finie. Sophie Robert, réalisatrice du documentaire Le Mur (voir encadré) compte faire appel aujourd’hui de sa condamnation à 28 000 €, prononcée il y a dix jours. Le tribunal de Lille avait estimé que son film, consacré au traitement controversé de l’autisme en France, portait atteinte à l’image et à la réputation de trois psychanalystes. De fait, leurs propos devaient être retirés du film. Dans son jugement, la présidente constate au vu des interviews intégrales que la réalisatrice n’a pas « respecté le sens des propos » et a « sorti plusieurs extraits d’interview de leur contexte ». La cour d’appel de Douai devra trancher.

En revanche, sur le terrain politique, les tenants de la psychanalyse viennent d’être désavoués par deux fois. Le mois dernier, la sénatrice (NC) Valérie Létard a rendu un rapport sur le plan autisme qui dénonce clairement le retard pris par la France sur les traitements de l’autisme. Or, l’approche française reste essentiellement psychanalytique. Plus radical, le député (UMP) Daniel Fasquelle a déposé à l’Assemblée une proposition de loi visant à interdire l’accompagnement psychanalytique des autistes au profit de méthodes comportementales, en vogue en Belgique et dans les pays anglo-saxons. « Il faut tirer bénéfice de leur expérience », souligne Valérie Létard, dans son rapport.

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Los niños con Trastornos del Espectro Autista o TEA necesitan de entornos adecuados para el aprendizaje y formación para actividades de la vida diaria como el aseo o la alimentación. Los profesionales dedicados a esta tarea saben por experiencia que estos pequeños presentan muy buena tolerancia a la tecnología, los ordenadores, PDA, etc. El proyecto Savia (Sistema de Aprendizaje Virtual Interactivo para personas con autismo y dificultades de Aprendizaje), liderado por Indra, ha unido estas dos ideas con el fin de desarrollar para 2013 una única herramienta de realidad virtual que simplifique el aprendizaje del trabajo en grupo, conceptos espaciales como cerca-lejos, grande-pequeño, el reconocimiento de emociones o potenciar la imaginación y el juego. «El uso de realidad virtual y aumentada nos aporta un sistema de interacción natural, esto significa que interactúas con movimientos naturales del cuerpo, por ejemplo extendiendo una mano para coger un objeto, a diferencia de cómo lo haríamos con un ratón o teclado», explica Eva Vázquez de Prada, responsable del proyecto en Indra.

VIDEOJUEGO
El resultado de este proyecto, que ya se encuentra al 60 por ciento, será visible con una aplicación sencilla, de fácil manejo tanto para padres como profesores y personas con TEA. Desde la perspectiva del niño será un videojuego divertido, como una consola. Mientras que padres y profesionales necesitarán exclusivamente de un ordenador y Kinect, un dispositivo de Microsoft que permite reconocer movimientos, objetos, comandos de voz y profundidades «para detectar los movimientos del niño con gran exactitud», continúa Vázquez de Prada.

Uno de los factores de influencia más importantes que encontraron al inicio de este proyecto fue la variabilidad de perfiles de personas con trastorno de autismo, además de que había que tener en cuenta las necesidades formativas de los profesionales y el diseño de contenidos adecuados. Para desarrollar una única herramienta adaptable han unido sus esfuerzos la red de Software Labs de Indra, la empresa Secuoyas como experta en animación 3D y el grupo de Autismo y Dificultades de Aprendizaje de la Universidad de Valencia.

A través de mundos virtuales, comprensibles y adaptables y un interfaz avanzado de configuración, serán primero los niños con autismo los que probarán en un programa piloto diversas actividades destinadas a mejorar la comprensión del entorno, conceptos espaciales, cuantitativos, de generalización, imaginación, comprensión de emociones, habilidades sociales y organización del tiempo.

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La Fundación Ángeles de Cristal de Trelew, dedicada al diagnóstico y tratamiento de niños con autismo y trastornos generalizados del desarrollo, recomienda a los padres que realicen estudios de diagnóstico ante cambios de conductas repentinas en sus hijos, ya que el diagnóstico entre los 2 y 5 años ayuda a que realicen avances importantes con respecto a la incorporación de saberes y un mejor desarrollo cognitivo. Organismos internacionales aseguran que la detección de casos de autismo se ha incrementado en porcentajes alarmantes.
En este sentido, El Diario dialogó con Cristina Cecco, de Ángeles de Cristal, quien manifestó: “La recomendación es hacer las consultas lo más temprano posible con respecto a la edad de los chicos porque hay una plasticidad neuronal muy importante en los chicos entre 2 y 5 años, es importante que si los papás notan cambios de conducta que hagan la consulta con su pediatra, para ir haciendo los estudios que correspondan. Es muy importante la detección temprana porque tiene más posibilidades de aprender, a veces los padres no terminan de reaccionar con relación al diagnóstico y demoran en aceptar, el duelo a veces es muy largo y estamos mucho tiempo sumidos en el dolor y es el tiempo de los niños; el inicio temprano en el tratamiento permite que los niños aprendan más cosas y avanzar de acuerdo a la edad cronológica.”

Derechos de los padres

En referencia a la Ley de Autismo, reglamentada por la provincia de Chubut a fines del año pasado, Cecco aseguró que otorga las herramientas legales a los padres para exigir la cobertura y la atención completa de sus hijos, razón por la cual significó un importante avance para las familias que tienen un integrante con dicha patología.
“Con respecto a la ley de autismo, creo que se va a poner más en juego a partir de que los papás tomen la decisión de hacer el tratamiento que le convenga a su hijo y si no se lo cubre la obra social, sea cual fuere la que tiene, hacer los reclamos correspondientes porque las herramientas legales las tienen.”

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