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
Temple Grandin is probably the most famous autistic person living today. Her life will be chronicled on an HBO special starting in February, 2010. Among her many achievements is the development of a “squeeze machine.” Because of her autism, she resists the touch of others and doesn’t like to be hugged. But she craves the...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
International studies conducted by the World Health Organization over the past three decades, have concluded that people with schizophrenia fare better over time in developing countries compared with industrialized nations. In the current issue of The New York Times Magazine, writer Ethan Watters has an article entitled The Americanization of Mental Illness, wherein he provides some interesting...Read More
In response to news reports that it may be possible in the future to “cure” Down syndrome by intervening early in development using psychoactive medication, Jenn Power, the mother of identical twins with Down syndrome, responded on the blog Contrarian: “As you know, I have many years of history supporting people with intellectual disabilities. Through...Read More
Since 2006, Walter Reed Medical Center has been treating soldiers diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) using a healing practice employed in ancient India: yoga. Consisting of a series of physical postures, breathing techniques, and relaxation strategies, yoga is seen as instrumental in helping to calm down the autonomic nervous system, or “fight or flight” brain, that has been...Read More
Researchers at Stanford Medical School have demonstrated that children of bipolar parents score higher on a non-verbal creativity test than children of “healthy” parents. The study compared creativity scores of 40 bipolar parents and 40 offspring (half of whom had bipolar disorder and the other half of whom had ADHD), with 18 healthy adults and 18 healthy...Read More
Katie Apostolides, who has Down Syndrome, graduated in 2009 from Mount Aloysius College in Cresson, Pennsylvania with an associate’s degree in science. This makes her one of the first (if not the first) individuals with Down Syndrome to complete a post-secondary degree. She has had a number of news articles follow her academic progress, including one in...Read More
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