Autism In The Black Community: Why African Americans Should Hear The Cry For Help

The Defenders Online:

Six years ago Camille Proctor got a surprise. She was pregnant with her second child. At the time, her oldest was almost 20 and the rigors of mothering an infant were pleasant but distant memories. Still, she gave birth to a baby boy nine months later, and a little more than a year after that, Proctor noticed something else surprising about her son. She said she saw, "little nuisances that kind of told me that something may not be right."

Read the whole story: The Defenders Online

Comments

[Achieve Beyond]

11:40 AM on 09/09/2011

The increase in awareness for autism thankfully is growing, but the number of cases is as well. This article hones in on the African American population but autism is being seen amongst all children. This is a disorder that will require much research, early intervention testing, clinical trials and overall public support to overcome. We at Bilinguals Inc. / Achieve Beyond believe that early intervention applied behavior analysis autism services are the most effective at this moment in helping these special needs children. We encourage all articles like this one being written, fund raising walks, events and parent education on this disorder that is affecting 1 in every 110 children. We know this disorder will be difficult to overcome but with enough public support results are much more likely to be seen.

[totellthtruth1949]

08:28 PM on 09/07/2011

Children with autism are difficult, but not impossible to deal with. As a very young day care worker in the 1970's I unknowingly worked with a 4 year old boy who was autistic. He had great parents who loved him dearly. He was dressed well and had developed well physically, a very handsome young man. He did not participate well with the other children. He did not speak a word. To add to the the problem, his parents were Hispanic and did not speak English well. I visited their home. It was meticulously clean. They had a younger child with no apparent problems. At the center, all were afraid to wortk with the autistic 4 year old. He often turned violent, attacked the other children. I was assigned to him, as he was taller for his age and needed the extra attention. This was the "last straw" He had been expelled from other centers. I worked hard with the young man. Very hard. "TEMPLE GRANDIN" is a good film addressing the autistic problem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46ycu3JFRrA
I was able to teach that young man how to say his name and my name. I also taught him how to throw a Spalding ball back and forth to each other. He was quickly progressing. Once I left the center, he was expelled.

[amdachel]

01:15 PM on 09/07/2011

It's good whenever the public hears about the impact autism is having on our children. A once rare disorder now affects one percent of children, including almost two percent of boys. Tarice L.S. Gray wrote: "[N]umbers across the board are on the rise. The Federal Government issued a report in 2009 stating that 1 in 110 children are diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The Center for Disease control also notes the rise in diagnosed children over the past two decades is alarming. At the current rate of diagnosis, more children will be diagnosed with autism than with AIDS, diabetes & cancer combined." At the same time, we were told that autism is a "gene disorder." If autism were a solely genetic problem we wouldn't be seeing the exponential increase in affected children.

In truth, no one has ever shown us a comparable rate of autism among adults and that fact should be scaring us all.

Dr. Thomas Insel, head of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) created by Congress to deal with autism, has said that 80 percent of Americans with autism are under the age of 18 and he warned that we need "to prepare for a million people who may be in need of significant services." Nothing is being done to handle the approaching tsunami of dependent adults that will descend on social services in the coming years. The IACC now calls autism "a national health emergency."

Anne Dachel, Media editor: Age of Autism

[WhiteandNerdy]

07:28 PM on 09/07/2011

Epidemiology of autism spectrum disorders in adults in the community in England.
Arch Gen Psychiatry. 68(5):459-65.

1% of adults in England--consistent across all ages (young adults/middle-aged/elderly)--have autism.

The only issue left is the psychology of why some people continue to believe AoA when it gets pretty much everything wrong...

W&N

[Gatogorra]

09:06 PM on 09/07/2011

There were several problems with the Brugha study and they could very easily have reclassified mental patients as ASD (1 in 76 adults suffers from mental disability, a huge rise which may be mostly attributable to adult onset prescription drug induced dementia). The study also (weirdly) included children.
In order to receive a DSM-IV or ICD-10 diagnosis of autism, an individual must show evidence of restricted or repetitive behaviors and evidence of abnormalities manifesting before 36 months, neither of which can be ascertained from the ADOS-G(ADOS-G Module IV). The ADOS-G is intended to be one source of information used in making a diagnosis of ASD, but not sufficient on its own. Because only a small window of time is considered during an ADOS-G assessment, the ADOS-G does not offer adequate opportunity to measure restricted and repetitive behaviors. Because it consists of codings made from a single observation, the ADOS-G does not include information about history or functioning in other contexts. This means that the ADOS-G alone cannot be used to make complete standard diagnoses.
ADOS module that was used (ADOS-G Module Four) is restricted to a very limited range of presentations – verbally fluent individuals.
ADOS-G classification of ASD is appropriate when the three ASD thresholds are met or exceeded. Brugha et al. (if they are reporting accurately) potentially inflated the base estimate, an error which would have been further exaggerated the more the numbers were processed.