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Autism Spectrum Disorders
The October, 2012 issue of Educational Leadership, the flagship journal of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), in an issue dedicated to “Students Who Challenge Us,” features my article “First, Discover Their Strengths,” which highlights many of the ideas discussed in my forthcoming book Neurodiversity in the Classroom:  Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students with Special Needs...
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Two recent articles highlight the positive dimensions of mental health conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. In the journal Nature, an article by Canadian neuroscientist Laurent Mottron, emphasizes the advantages of autism (Mottron, 2011). Mottron suggests that, in addition to the well-known savant abilities of a small sub-section of autistic individuals, there are...
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Imagine that all of the people in the world have been magically transformed into flowers. Some of us are petunias.  Others are begonias.  Still others are tulips.  Now, let’s say for the sake of argument that the psychiatrists in this culture are the roses. I want you to imagine the rose psychiatrist beginning his work...
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I was just reading an article in The Watertown (NY) Daily Times about a seventeen-year-old named Christopher Durgen who has ADHD and autism.  As a young child, he had trouble getting along with classmates and was frequently suspended from school.  That all changed around the end of his sophomore year in high school when he...
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I’ve been reading a number of blogs that have been critical of the neurodiversity movement.  Generally, they’ve characterized neurodiversity as saying “we don’t want a cure; we don’t want research; we just want to be left alone in our differentness.”  I suspect that only a small minority of neurodiversity activists take this position.  I certainly don’t.  In...
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