While autistic individuals are known to suffer from deficits in social communication, it is less often recognized that they possess specific strengths in other areas.  One strength relates to their ability to see details.  In fact, they can pick out details in a more complex visual design better than so-called “neuro-typical (e.g. “normal”) people (see examples...Read More

The Economist had an article in its September 28, 2006 issue that featured a California psychiatry professor who used the Internet to demonstrate the inner experience of schizophrenia: “Peter Yellowlees, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, has been teaching about schizophrenia for 20 years, but says that he was never really...Read More

I just read an interesting editorial in the current issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry on schizophrenia.  In particular this paragraph intrigued me: “What causes schizophrenia? The short answer may be “nothing” or more precisely “no one thing.” In most cases, schizophrenia is an end result of a complex interaction between thousands of genes...Read More

This essay of mine originally appeared in the New Horizons in Education online journal in 2009. The history of special education in the United States is a dramatic one. Without going into the whole legislative history, suffice it to say that during the 1970’s, due in large part to increasing scientific involvement in special needs...Read More

Despite public fears to the contrary, a new report published in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin reveals that schizophrenics are the least likely of any group to commit homicide. According to the report, people have only a one in 14 million risk of being killed by a stranger who has been diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. ‘What...Read More