I was a special education teacher for several years, and during my time teaching, I became aware that not enough emphasis was being placed on the strengths of children who had been sent to my special classes. This made me resolve to do some research, and I had the opportunity to do this when I did...Read More
As one participant in a 2010 cyberconference put it: ” Nobody experiences disability 100% of the time, in every situation; nor is someone ALWAYS “gifted and talented”. Consequently, from a lived perspective, from a contextually rich perspective, labels don’t really have a place. There are just unique students with their unique strengths and weaknesses, which change...Read More
Over the past sixty years, we’ve witnessed a phenomenal growth in the number of new psychiatric illnesses. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, first published in 1952, originally listed about 100 categories of illness. By the year 2000, that number had tripled. We’ve become accustomed to hearing in the news about “learning disabilities,”...Read More
A recent interview on the blog Technoccult with neurodiversity advocate Kassiane (she didn’t wish to give her last name), highlighted some key points about neurodiversity. In defining neurodiversity, she made an important distinction between the word and the movement, explaining: “Neurodiversity, the word, simply means the whole variety of different brain wirings people have…from the different kinds of normal...Read More
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
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