Prosecutors have decided against charging a central Illinois mother for failing to report her 8-year-old autistic son missing.Pekin police say Janita Smith's son had been missing from her home for an hour Monday when she called the boy's father to report him gone.
Authorities say she didn't call police herself because she was wanted on an outstanding DUI warrant.
The mother of two autistic boys was punched in the face by a McDonalds manager in Marietta, Georgia. According to WSBTV, on July 12, Jennifer Schwenker had brought her twin boys and their service dog, Barkley, to the McDonalds. A surveillance tape shows one of the boys and Barkley playing in the McDonalds playplace area. It was only as the family was on the verge of leaving that Tiffany Denise Allen, the manager who was off-duty at the time, told Schwenker that the dog was not allowed in the McDonalds.
Schwenker explained that Barkley was a service dog for her two children and offered to show a permit. Under federal law, service dogs are allowed in public places such as restaurants. But after that, as shown by a surveillance tape, Allen followed the family, even to the restroom. When Schenker and her children tried to leave, she lost track of one child and — I can more than relatedto this, recalling how I’ve panicked when I’ve lost sight of my 14-year-old son Charlie — she dropped her drink and splashed Allen. After this, Allen ran “in a rage” after Schwenker to her car and punched her in the face.
Autism rates were rising when my son was diagnosed with autism 12 years ago in July of 1999. Before too long, we heard talk of an “epidemic of autism” and, over the past decade, we have watched the figures change, to 1 in 166, then to 1 in 100 and 1 in 94 in New Jersey where we live and now, according to a recent study of children in South Korea, to 1 in 38. In an editorial, Frances Allen, chair of the DSM-IV Task Force and professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine, says the reason for the increase is that autism has become a “fad diagnosis”:
The most likely cause of the autism epidemic is that autism has become fashionable — a popular fad diagnosis. Once rare and unmistakable, the term is now used loosely to describe people who do not really satisfy the narrow criteria intended for it by DSM IV. Autism now casts a wide net, catching much milder problems that previously went undiagnosed altogether or were given other labels. Autism is no longer seen as an extremely disabling condition, and many creative and normally eccentric people have discovered their inner autistic self.
NIXA, Mo., July 21, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In a meeting of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) held earlier this week, the approval of a new medical diagnosis code for Wandering was announced by Dr. Coleen Boyle of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). When implemented in October, the new code will be listed as V40.31 – Wandering in Diseases Classified Elsewhere.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090918/NAALOGO)
The creation of this medical code was spurred by a request from the National Autism Association (NAA) as part of the organization's ongoing efforts to raise awareness and create resources addressing the dangerous issue of wandering and elopement by individuals suffering from cognitive disabilities including autism.
Wandering incidents appear to be on the rise and the autism community has suffered unimaginable loss over the past several years. "It's rare for even a week to go by without reading a news story of another child with autism who has gone missing," stated NAA Board Chair, Lori McIlwain. "Far too many of these stories end in tragedy."
Because children with autism often have an impaired sense of danger, they are at serious risk of injury, trauma or death. Drowning is the leading external cause of death among individuals diagnosed with autism. Autism-related wandering incidents also present a unique set of challenges to first responders and search personnel, as many children with autism are non-verbal and unable to respond to rescuers. Training for law enforcement personnel is crucial to reduce the number of deaths resulting from wandering.
Preliminary data from a survey conducted by the Interactive Autism Network show that roughly half of children with autism attempt to elope, a rate nearly four times higher than their unaffected siblings. Fifty-seven percent of parents report that wandering is among the most stressful of all behaviors associated with autism; it can have a dramatic effect on quality of life for the entire family.
Caring for a disabled child who is prone to wandering is an around-the-clock job. Parents are often overwhelmed, sleep-deprived and exhausted. "It is our hope that the recognition of wandering as a medical diagnosis will bring opportunities for the development of resources including training for schools and caregivers, emergency search personnel protocols, financial assistance for safety equipment and support and education for families," said Ms. McIlwain.
The National Autism Association began addressing the issue of autism-related wandering in 2007 with the establishment of its FOUND program which provides funding for personal locating systems for those at risk. In 2010, NAA spearheaded the AWAARE Collaboration and developed a web site containing extensive information and resources. Most recently, the organization received a $50,000 grant from the American Legion Child Welfare Foundation to launch its Big Red Safety Box program providing families with safety items, tips and tools to prevent and respond to wandering incidents. The response from the community was overwhelming, completely depleting the resources in only six days. NAA hopes to secure additional funding through sponsors and private donors to continue this program in the near future.
For more information on autism-related wandering prevention and response, visit http://www.awaare.org. To learn more about the National Autism Association or to make a donation supporting NAA's safety programs, visit, http://nationalautismassociation.org.
Contacts:
Lori McIlwain (919) 741-1646
Wendy Fournier (401) 835-5828
SOURCE National Autism Association
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It seems that depression and anxiety are part of the package of raising a child with complex disabilities. One study of moms of youth with autism likened their stress level to that of combat soldiers.
If my calculations are right, this is just about the time of the summer that parents of school aged children are feeling a teensy bit desperate. If you are looking for things to do to build fun and structure into your summer, read on.
Shannon des Roches Rosa, who is, among other things, the iPad for autism queen, has also mastered the art of taking her three children, including her son Leo, who has autism, on excursions.
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I am adamant about taking my ten-year-old son Leo on as many excursions as possible: to stores, movies, restaurants, parks, and other destinations.
Leo may have intense autism, but he is an able-bodied and energetic boy who craves adventure. And we want Leo to be a boy-about-town so he gets used to being part of our community, and our community gets used to him.
Outings aren't always easy. But I have no intention of leaving Leelo home if there's a chance of success. I do not care if other people think he behaves strangely or makes funny noises; as long as he is not harming or interrupting anyone, we carry on with heads raised, meeting stranger's stares with confident and unapologetic smiles that I will admit to having practiced in the bathroom mirror. Here are some of the tactics that make excursions with Leo, and hopefully some of his friends, a bit easier:
So, I started out today by reading this piece on the Hot Blog about Roger Ebert writing about this Jack Kervorkian movie on HBO, and how that pissed off this guy Steven Drake from Not Dead Yet, an activist group in the disabled community. For the record, I am generally in favor of assisted suicide, so I started to write a piece about that. But then I went down a couple rabbit holes that explored some other ideas that I found equally intriguing to think about and write about, so here you go.
One of the issues Not Dead Yet seeks to highlight is cases where disabled kids who are not terminally ill or in chronic pain have been murdered by a parent, as in the case of thee-year-old Katie McCarron, whose mother, Dr. Karen McCarron, was convicted in 2008 of smothering her to death with a plastic bag and then trying to conceal the homicide.
In this piece on Not Dead Yet, Drake expresses his dismay that much of the coverage of Katie McCarron’s death was “dominated by discussions of autism, poor support services, and an alarming parade of parents seemingly eager to tell the public they’ve felt like killing their own kids with disabilities.”
To which I would say, well, it seems reasonable to me that, especially in a case where a parent has killed their autistic child, there would be a good deal of discussion about the “why,” and that such a discussion would open the door for other autism parents to express their own feelings of frustration in being unsupported and overwhelmed. Perhaps if Karen McCarron had felt able to express her own emotions around all this, she would have gotten help rather than killing her daughter.
It’s not “blaming the victim” to acknowledge that caring for a child with autism is hard, that it’s different from caring for a “normal” child, that support services are underfunded and always under threat of funding cuts, and that when parents of an autistic child are not supported, tragedies like this can and will happen. That’s not validating the idea that it’s okay to murder your disabled child, it’s making it okay for parents of disabled kids to say, “This is really hard, some days I feel like I’m drowning, please help me.”
More http://moviecitynews.com/2011/07/judge-not/
A new study is finally shifting the official discussion of the cause of autism from mainly heredity to a combination of genetic and environmental influences.
Researchers examined 192 pairs of identical and fraternal twins whose cases were drawn from California databases. At least one twin in each pair had classic autism and in many cases, the other twin also had classic autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. Since identical twins share 100 percent of their genes and fraternal twins share 50 percent of their genes, comparing autism rates in both types of twins enabled researchers to measure the importance of genes versus shared environment.
Tampa, Florida brings us an appalling case of a single mother jailed because her child with autism missed too much school. Non-verbal and prone to disrupting class, the son attended half-days at his elementary school. His mother would often sit in the hall during that time waiting to have to take him home after his next meltdown. While her son is a very smart boy and achieves in class, she argued that she needed the flexibility to be able to keep him at home when his behavior precluded him attending school. In court, she produced a note from a doctor to that effect. The judge in the case chided her for not sending it to him earlier in order to avoid arrest. She was already on probation for prior truancies.
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