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Autism: Are Social Skills Groups and Social Communication Therapy Worthwhile?
vortex2.71 (802986) writes I imagine that enough of us on Slashdot are on the Autism Spectrum or were once diagnosed as having Aspergers that this might be the right venue for this question. My son is on the spectrum, but is in a mainstream classroom at a private school. We have spent thousands of dollars on a bunch of different social skills groups, speech communication therapy, occupational therapy, and physical therapy. We've found that the specific skills and intuition that the therapists possess is much more important than their credentials and are frequently disappointed by the overwhelming mediocrity of special education teachers, speech therapists, and OT/PT therapists. We are at the point where we wonder if our time is better spent with playdates with peers that are facilitated by us than continuing with the groups. I'm curious if there are adult Slashdoters who are on the spectrum who participated in these therapies as children who can weigh in on this? What was your experience with social skills groups and social communication therapy? Did they help?
I'm not autistic or have any syndrome.
I'm just a nerd.
As someone who remembers childhood. (And I am not Diagnosed being on the autism spectrum) kids (even little ones) can be very cliquey. If your child has social problems, the other kids may try to push him out of their games, as games in general about playing by social rules of play, kids with autism may not get the differences in the rules that the version the kids play and make it no fun for them. For a child with special needs play time needs to be monitored, otherwise the other kids will just end up doing their thing and he will be playing by himself, with kids around him.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You're an idiot. No matter what your mother told you Asperger's is not the next step in human evolution. A dash of it is probably useful, but people don't usually have a dash of it, I'm not sure it would even be diagnosable at that stage. I've worked with folks that had this and it's debilitating.
Psycho-social education is probably the only thing that's likely to help. The question though is which program and which professionals. There's an array of possibilities, some might work and some won't. And to an extent it depends upon the individual, this isn't a one-size fits all treatment situation.
I don't even think that's necessarily the issue, there are private schools where the kids are not allowed to slack off and where they have to do physical work (I'm thinking the Verde Valley School in Sedona, Arizona), but the biggest problem with both small schools and small school districts, public or private, is that unless they're specifically catering to the needs of students with different needs, they probably don't fulfill those needs terribly well.
For a student with some form of Autism, a either a large school district (that has a sufficient number of Autistic students to have specific programs for Autism) or a specialty school for the condition itself would probably be the best options. But for this, especially the latter, one has to be very careful that the school isn't simply a dumping-ground for difficult conditions where pallative care or babysitting, rather than actual instruction, is the norm.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
My experience with my moderately Asperger son is a bit different. He can definitely handle the deep end of schoolwork, intellectually. He's a sharp kid.
But there are some areas where treating him like a normal kid would be disastrous. In particular, many kids with Aspeberger Syndrome can become overwhelmed by sensory input and/or frustration. And when they do, they get emotionally "stuck" in a way other kids generally don't. Normal persuasive / coercive methods of dealing with those states are far less ineffective that on other kids, and so using them can be pointlessly cruel.
Long-story short, maybe throw them in the deep end academically, but perhaps not socially.
Oh, you can know so much about whether strangers have a neurological disorder or not without actually meeting them.
Yes, I can. Especially in light of Asperger's not even being considered a disorder anymore. Sorry, bro, but you don't have Asperger's.
Very few of the people I actually know who claim to be autistic are assholes.
I never said anything about autism. I was clearly referring to the large group of people, especially on Slashdot, who self-diagnosed themselves with the now removed disorder "Asperger's". Maybe you need to re-read my post?
Maybe you need to actually get a clue about what aspergers actually is. It's not being a jerk. It IS specific social and communication difficulties combined with specific unusual behaviours or interests. It does not no longer exist, it just has a different term in the DSM-5 which is actually more broad (due to the inclusion of sensory differences). Aspergers is still used as a descriptive term in north america and a diagnostic classification in countries that use the ICD-10.
That isn't the only reason they do that.There are lots of reasons. People like that often like consistency. It isn't even the practice. They know that sandwich. They know what it tastes like. That isn't just people. That's everything.
If you left someone like that in an abandoned city with shopping malls full of clothing, they'd probably stock up on the same clothing rather then wearing any old random thing. Keep in mind... the city would be abandoned. No one would see them. They wouldn't care.
Anything different can be stressful. Suggesting that autism begins and ends at social interactions is wrong. And beyond that, it is important to keep in mind that autism spectrum is such a broad category that there is really nearly infinite variation within it.
For one thing, neurologically there is no autism brain pattern. To the contrary, people with such disorders have an almost random brain pattern where as people without have a much more consistent and predictable pattern. And that randomness means how things line up and actually work is basically unpredictable. People with autism spectrum have practically random wiring. And sometimes that means good things happen and more often it means either bad things or nothing at all.
My wiring... ME... My wiring is pretty random. I function just fine, thanks. But then maybe I got lucky with having wiring that wasn't terrible. I can tell you that I do have trouble with interactions but personally it is not in the way you think I'd have trouble.
See. I do understand people. I understand because I have studied them. And at will I can pass for normal. No trouble at all. It gets a little tiring if I have to keep it up for hours and hours. But you'd never know. Why is my issue? I don't feel what you feel. I have feelings. They're just not human normal. I don't respond instinctively the way that other people respond. And that means if I want to interact with the monkeys that I have to listen to their hoots and chest thumps to understand what they're trying to say. And then with great skill and practice I return the chest thumps and hoots to the monkeys and all is well.
That is how I am different. Just me. I can't speak for any of my neurological cousins. But that is what it is like to be me. Now would a class that teaches human interaction be helpful for me? Nope. Because the people teaching the class are just going to be another set of fucking monkeys and they don't know how to tell someone how to be a monkey anymore then a fish can tell you how to be a fish. People just are what they are. They don't know why they do what they do are very rarely aware of why they're doing the things they're doing. The thousand unconscious signals they send each other go entirely unnoticed by their conscious minds.
I notice however. I notice and interpret them all in real time and then give the counter signals fluently.
Do you know what it is like? Imagine being stranded on a planet with people that aren't quite human. I don't mean sub human... I just mean a different breed of ape if you will. Different smell... different body language... different sexual habits... Just different. Imagine being a chimpanzee in a world full of baboons. If you've lived with them all your life then you know how they are and what they mean when they do that thing. But you'll never feel the way they do about things. All that excitement about the bright blue asses... you'll never quite get it and more importantly you'll never care.
I don't believe the classes help. I think people with these conditions need to help themselves because they are by definition too different to be fit into some cookie cutter class that just assumes they're all on some sliding linear scale. People on the "spectrum" are not on a spectrum at all. It is only a spectrum from the perspective of normals that evaluate such people from the selfish perspective of how well such people interact with normals. Yes, it helps if you can interact with normal people. But it is vastly more complicated then that... basically infinitely more complicated.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.