Current project Those of you who follow my blog know that my older brother is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. On his 40th birthday I started a long-term photography project to try to figure out my relationship with him. It may be hard to believe, but I was never sure if my brother knew who […]
Different children have different reactions. My younger brother doesn’t remember much about our older brother, Michael. Michael is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. Mom and Dad both said that they tried shielding us kids from the brunt of Mike’s influence. I suppose it worked, for one of us. Maybe there was a little magic thrown […]
Sidra’s birthday Yesterday was my granddaughter’s 9th birthday, her last year of single digits, as I like to say to all 9-year olds. We ‘face-timed’ and her aunties, Nanna and I all crowded around the iPhone to see her show off her ‘adorable’ birthday presents. Siddy is always excited about her birthday. For months before, […]
I came across this term while I was writing my post about Socrates’s ‘An Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living’ quotation. I identified with the term radical self-understanding since it seems that it is an activity in which I am engaged. My activity could also be described with other terms: radical narcissism, obsessive self-reflection, pissing […]
My Dad was a theoretical physicist, and was always open to answering any questions that I had. I owe my father a great debt of gratitude for his voracious appetite for life. Some of that rubbed off. I am reminded of him because I just found something interesting in one of my journals from 1993. […]
Michael is my older brother who has never spoken and is autistic and low functioning. He was a patient at Willowbrook, a state mental institution, which used to be on Staten Island, New York, and was home to 6,000 patients. After Willowbrook was shut down for widespread abuse, my brother was placed in a group […]
Diagnosis of autism I discussed the history of autism diagnosis a previous post. As the science matured, the psychogenic origin (blame for autism on the ‘refrigerator mother’) was replaced by consideration of the premise that autism could arise from biological origins. Both versions of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) use behavior as […]
There is a huge gulf between the unrecognizable pictures of my brother in Mike Portrait to his portrait in ‘I Really Have to Dig Out My Journals’. Michael is crying in the latter post. This is such a human thing to do. I really shocked me at the time. I was rummaging through my Project […]
Autism, The Invisible Cord A Sibling’s Diary, by Barbara Cain Published by the American Psychological Association http://www.apa.org/pubs/magination I came across the author of this book while browsing through Twitter profiles. I compulsively look for tweeters with ‘autism’ in their profile description and hit the jackpot when I came upon Barbara Cain’s. Not only did she […]
Post as I go I am trying to sift through information available about biomedical interventions used in treating symptoms of autism. I realize that my approach is not scholarly or academic, but I would like to write a series of posts that chronicle my efforts to discover what biomedical intervention options are and how I […]
