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Mary-Minn's Stim Page (Here are personal stories about autism. If you would like to see your musings on this page, please email Mary-Minn at sirag@mindspring.com.) 1978 was a banner year for me in sheer quantity
of jobs held. That year, I blew through 12 jobs “like
they were Kleenex,” as my older brother put it. I was
living in Manhattan, studying life sculpture during evenings
at the Art Students’ League on West 57th Street, sharing
an apartment on the Upper East Side with my parasitic boyfriend
and making ends meet catch-as-catch-can. "Health and safety standards were quite beside the point at the Chocolate Factory. Being germ phobic, I threw out the dropped chocolate when nobody was looking. "
Mary-Minn Sirag
The first day after being ill is wonderful, indeed. My senses are alert without being too sharp. My brain can follow a logical pattern again. The temperature outside not only is perfect, but feels perfect. Colors are bright, and spring smells sweet again. I am well rested, after 12 or so hours of sleep, and I could eat a house if only a realtor would give me one to chaw on. My body is clear of aches and pains. My illness was a four-month flood of high anxiety, depression and freakouts that crested just last night with a skin-crawling darkness of the soul. It started out insidiously as my customary winter depression. "I lost my ability to anticipate, recognize and ward off my Confusion Triggers. "
A friend of mine had successfully diminished a recent trauma of her own with a five-session course of EMDR rapid-eye movement cognitive therapy treatments, which heartened me. I determined that I too could weaken my own freakout triggers with a course of EMDR, since my triggers are specific: losing things, getting lost, and not knowing what I am supposed to do in any given moment. I had even figured out the specific experiences leading up to my triggers. Thinking that five sessions of EMDR would fix me was my second mistake. In a metaphoric and less than scientifically rigorous nutshell, the rapid eye movement, by stimulating both sides of the brain almost simultaneously, rearranges trauma-induced neural pathways that are activated by stimuli the patient associates with the trauma. The goal is to scramble these pathways sufficiently to disentangle the multitude of triggers from the initial trauma. Later on in the process, reintegration supposedly occurs after the brain has formed new pathways that are squeaky-clean of the trauma and its ramifying surrogates. The therapist provides the patient with a safe
venue to revisit these traumas as the patient’s eyes
track the therapist’s rapid back-and-forth hand movements.
After helping me to come up with comforting images to keep
in mind, my therapist told me to relax and follow my thoughts.
Alas, the therapy was worse for me than merely ineffectual. As promised, my brain felt scrambled for a few weeks, which was initially reassuring, as something seemed to be happening. The awful part, though, was that it never unscrambled completely to reintegrate its moorings, so my triggers became more random and unpredictable than before. Perhaps the requisite five expensive treatments were insufficient for my slow processing of information; however, by then, I was done with throwing good money–and time–after bad. My mental health cascaded from there. My anxiety worsened from mere agitation and nervousness to a pervasive sense of im-pending doom and wrenched anguish. Daily, I awoke in a cold sweat of panic and foreboding, dreading the day’s unfolding. Premoni-tions of death loomed as I got behind the wheel, and my mind perseverated on near-accidents. My skin crawled as though trafficked by tiny vermin. My brain felt ready to pop out of its skull. My innards clenched. Things I had said reverberated back at me days later in a hollow mockery of my voice. My heart raced as though my veins were going to explode. I felt windswept from the inside. I developed a gripping and galloping-stampede social phobia. During the last week of my crisis, my anxiety culminated in a low-grade fever that kept me unpleasantly hot, though the ambient temperature was pleasantly cool. Toward the very end of my long episode, I craved solitude but couldn’t stand to be alone. I lost the ability to keep things properly organized for myself, which fed one of my two worst freakout triggers: losing things. I couldn’t remember where I had–or even should–put things. My visual processing and sense of direction deteriorated, as did my problem-solving and troubleshooting ability. For instance, I often neglected to check the phone book and my various street maps before venturing out into even slightly uncharted reaches, thinking that “everything is going to be alright.” I forgot to eat frequently enough, rendering me woozy, irrational and irascible. Though I continued to print out my checklists for leaving the house in the morning, I glossed over important checkpoints and neglected to close important loops I had opened, such as strapping my keys to my right-hand pocket in order to keep myself safely attached to them. During this four-month period, my freakouts increased in frequency and intensity as I lost my ability to anticipate, recognize and ward off my confusion triggers. Each freakout left me raw and vulnerable to even worse subsequent ones. They evolved from fits of obscene ranting and high-decibel shrieking at my frozen-up computer; to stapling my wrist, cross-hatching one arm with a serrated knife and bruising the other with the clenched fist of the first hand; to a stomping and shrieking rage of frustration and confusion-panic at a dear friend and her family due to an unreasoned assumption I had made in a state of hypoglycemic exhaustion. My friend and her family accepted my abject apology. I then dissected and analyzed my recent hell with her, other friends and family. In place, yet again, are my protocols of prevention: When my brain is slower than the world around it, I am to request a smokeless break to sort and map things out in my mind, to look up the address in the phone book and the exact coordinates on a map. Whenever I leave the house, I am to pack plenty of nourishing protein to fuel my brain. Whenever I feel that hazard bubble ascending from my gut to my brain, I am to stop and figure out what my spider sense is trying to tell me. As the egg man at the Marin County farmers’ market told my sister, “Don’t be too hard on yourself.” Mary-Minn Sirag
Mary-Minn's Stim Page March, 2006 (Here are personal stories about autism. If you would like to see your musings on this page, please email Mary-Minn at sirag@mindspring.com.)
Before I “came out”
with my autism by joining the autism community in late summer,
2000, I wanted nothing more than to be given a chance to be
a Leader. I wanted to spearhead everything from activities
to movements, though I had no specific mission at that point.
All I needed was the authority to lead–or so I thought.
After all, I argued with no one in particular, I was good
at giving feed-back without being judgmental or critical.
The school of hard knocks had taught me not to be a micro-manager.
I had chutzpah. I was fearless about taking responsibility
for my mistakes and learning from them. What more did a good
leader need? "My
frequent brushes with failure in group activities had been
due almost invariably to others’ unenlightened leadership,
Mary-Minn Sirag Mary-Minn's Stim Page September, 2005 (Here are personal stories about autism. If you would like to see your musings on this page, please email Mary-Minn at sirag@mindspring.com.) The
nonverbal “language” of obsessions "My compulsions slowly evolved into strange mental obsessions."
Mary-Minn Sirag
Mary-Minn's Stim Page June, 2005 (Here are personal stories about autism. If you would like to see your musings on this page, please email Mary-Minn at sirag@mindspring.com.) I write this on June 18, 2005, which is none other than Autistic Pride Day, a glorious day redolent with thunder, lightning, dou-ble rainbows with intercalaries, cloud formations and shadow play. Mark this day on your calendars next year, if you haven’t already. I’d be attending a choir party tonight or discussing philosophy in some dank church basement if my life were the same as it was before coming out with my autism almost five years ago. Contrary to the DSM stereotype, I, like so many autists I know, am extremely social. Being a social autist forces more personal growth than staying true to the asocial stereotype–so untrue to my very nature.
“I doubted my ability to contribute anything useful.”
Until five years ago, I earned my financial keep in conventional corporate settings, with all the competitive stress. Again, my bad employment choices reflected my lack of executive function to fashion a more suitable career, without pre-existing organizational un-derpinnings. Lacking the concept of executive function exemplified by this deficiency of mine, I was ashamed of the spectacularly au-tistic dichotomy between certain “splinter skills” of mine and my inability to cobble them together into anything useful. I wondered if I might be living down my “retarded” diagnosis from 1957, after all. Being labeled “retarded” at any age leaves its psychological resi-due. Group dynamics were torture
for me. Much of this was due to my faulty joint attention,
my inability to walk the conversational tightrope between
listening and talking that comprises turn taking. (Until this
winter, I was mistaking “joint attention” for
a knuckle cracking obsession, which fits me equally well.)
This inability became all the more poignant in conversation.
My enthusiastic me toos with their verbose rejoinders would
alienate all too many of my interlocutors. Many of those who
chose to overlook these faux pas were put off by my astringent
defensiveness toward any patronizing or trite replies to my.
Being silent turned out to be my smartest option. Being one
to prefer private silence required me to quit these groups.
That was way before I gave myself permission to rein in my
energy and ground myself by drawing, but that is a whole other
longwinded story. On my Census rounds, I happened
on a massage therapist, who told me about KindTree, and promptly
foisted me on them. I was afraid of being rejected from yet
another group, this time for being insufficiently autistic.
Furthermore, I had lost all confidence in my group skills,
so I doubted my ability to contribute anything useful. I was clinically phobic of public speaking. By “clinical,” I am referring to out-of-body, profuse sweating and flushing, dizzy, nauseated and near-death panic. At the various philosophical discussion groups I had attended with my husband, I would dispatch my turns unceremoniously with speedily terse statements while other people would wax grandiloquent in their august profundities, or, like my husband, utter a few insightful, cogent and eagerly awaited gems. I also had gone to a couple of support groups for my various afflictions and problems, only to worry myself even sicker after-wards about my bad performance. My first talk at that retreat was atrociously bad, but mitigated for me by the indulgent kindness of my hosts and the other autists. My poignant embarrassment about my bad talk was palliated by my spiritual experience of that first retreat, where I met my first au-tists, also kindred spirits. I cried all the way home, from a joy born of liberation to come. Those who know me would probably agree that I’m averagely sentimental, not particularly lugubrious or weepy. When I do cry, it’s generally out of despair rather than tender emotions. From then on, I could not wrest myself from KindTree. I was hooked. There was no getting rid of me, by tactful or other means. And nobody even tried! The magic was everywhere; KindTree was atwitter with romance and friendship, starting with Michelle and Steve’s romance that had birthed KindTree’s first retreat, in 1996; out of this retreat, the rest of KindTree has flowed. Michelle and Melissa, who were to marry four years later, had met at the retreat the previous year. Tim and Nel, who married the same year as Mi-chelle and Melissa, had met at the Developmental Disability (DD) in-service, conceiving KindTree’s monthly autism support group, in response to an Aspy in the audience. Nel’s support group
has bred many autistic friendships, including many of my own.
Two of my friends met at a retreat planning committee last
year, and have been “peas in a pod” (their expression,
not mine) ever since. Our little nonprofit’s
breeding proclivities compensate handsomely for my own lack
of breeding or human progeny. It has helped spawn activities
and organizations, as well as individual relationships. Bridgeway
House was born in October of 2002, five months after the parent
panel at KindTree’s first Autism Forum. We also caught
up with Nan Lester’s Asperger Advocacy Coalition, which
not only has cracked open Eugene’s 4J School District
to Aspies, but, in the process, has catalyzed many friendships
among autists across generations, family members and professionals.
Nan Lester has started a monthly Asperger issues discussion
group for Aspies. Mary-Minn Sirag
Mary-Minn's Stim Page March, 2005 (Here are personal stories about autism. If you would like to see your musings on this page, please email Mary-Minn at sirag@mindspring.com.) Autism has become
a pervasive topic lately, leading to increased public
awareness, both informative and misleading. The very topic
has evolved into a veritable “special interest”
in the media.
“I
held my Dirty Little Secret of being autistic At the time, I had met no
other autists, let alone autistic adults. I had heard of my
mother’s autistic nephew, who died in an institution
shortly thereafter. My mother told me about a younger second-cousin
(a nonverbal woman) from the same branch of my family tree.
(Here are personal stories about autism. If you would like to see your musings on this page, please email Mary-Minn at sirag@mindspring.com.) Developing a cultural understanding of autism. June 6, 2004 In August of 2000 I met my first fellow autists, at KindTree’s autism retreat. My memory flashed on friends who probably had been struggling with autism their entire lives but didn’t know it. I say “struggling” because living with autism without an autism community is like living undercover in an alien culture. My first autism retreat, where I was invited to speak about my autism, was a spiritual awakening for me. I was phobic of public speaking. Being an exhibitionist and show-off did not make me a public speaker. Though I had acted and sung solos from second grade through college, I could not speak coherently in a group situation. My first talk is veiled by a merciful amnesia. I think I rambled and derailed a lot. Keeping on track while keeping going--and in real-time, no less--was next to impossible for me back then. Steve Brown, who was KindTree’s president back then, had the sagacity to facilitate it the following year, which made for a better talk. Even more profound than my debut into public speaking was meeting those first autists. I felt a telepathic kinship with all the autists there, except one little boy who was having difficulties. Like many “new” autists, I was nervous about being around “low functioning” autists. Though, unlike many “higher functioning” autists, I don’t remember being afraid of being lumped in with the “lower functioning” ones, I wondered if I’d know what to do with or say to them. I feared most being excluded for not being autistic enough! I was to learn later that I was not the only “new” autist to see myself as uniquely “higher-functioning” and to hold inordinate stock in my level of “functioning.” What struck me during that retreat was not how “high-functioning” I am in my hyper-verbosity, but how variously functioned each of us is, in our human complexity. (And that goes for normies as well as auties.) What matters more than such measurables as IQ and “skill set” are self-awareness and ability--and willingness--to advocate for oneself. I have become friends with other autists in KindTree’s autism support group, which I have been attending for the past four years. This support group is the first one I have ever been able to stand, let alone derive any nourishment from, both during and between meetings. It is crucial to have a good facilitator, to keep discussion flowing. I find the camaraderie of a good support group crucial to coming to terms with any predicament or condition. Before KindTree, I had always craved community but become too disgusted and disillusioned with group dynamics (“politics” I called it) to swing it. KindTree not only tolerated my tweakiness but embraced me through my freakouts and shut downs. This was the first group of people who could work through conflict in a spirit of kind-hearted adventurousness. Through my involvement with KindTree, I landed various human-service joblets -- teaching beading to adults with developmental disabilities, conducting workshops for Voc. Rehab. clients, and working with kids and adults on the spectrum. Through helping these folks learn to accommodate their disabilities and to advocate for themselves, I started to learn to adminster to myself, as well. I started to see some of my indelible “character flaws” as faulty solutions to my cognitive and sensory scrambling. I am learning to apply my logic to these difficulties of mine. I had always wanted to be useful without being exploited and taken for granted, but got precious few strokes for my efforts until I got involved with KindTree and then the autism community. Part of this is that prior to KindTree, much of my time was focused on things that were next to impossible for me--my disabilities, as it were--not on my talents. My self-esteem was so eclipsed by these seemingly insurmountable shortcomings that I was hard-pressed to see any talent in myself. Since becoming involved in KindTree and in other reaches of the autism community, I have been learning how to work around my limitations and better exploit what abilities I do have. I am developing a cultural understanding of autism. (Personal stories about autism. If you would like to see your musings on this page, please email Mary-Minn at sirag@mindspring.com.) coming to terms with autism When I was five, I vowed no longer to be autistic. My momentous decision took place in kindergarten, during the Christmas pageant. Though I was nonverbal at age 3, when the pediatrician advised my mother to institutionalize me and cut her losses, I must have fully understood what he was telling her well enough to be ashamed of the dreaded "a" word two years later. For the next forty years, my autism was a dirty secret I divulged, almost as a passing afterthought, to only my closest friends and, much later, to parents of newly diagnosed kids. People they told either said I was making it up, since I am not only verbal, but loquacious; or they felt vindicated in their suspicions that I really am a little off. Whenever I alluded to my autism, it was always in the past tense. That is not to say that I didn’t secretly devour what little I could dig up about my "former" condition, as a part of me must have known that autism doesn’t just evaporate. My third grade teacher must have known I was autistic, though. She tried to control my disruptive behavior by having her teacher’s pet reward my rare instances of "good" behavior with gifts of pom-pom birds. I resented her condescending special treatment, though I liked the birds. Horrid though my "bad" behavior must have been, I was not being rebellious; I couldn’t help it. I preferred my parents’ approach of punishing me. At least, they weren’t singling me out as defective. I did not know how most of my problems were due to the insidious pervasiveness of my autism. I erected work-arounds, which enabled me to snow my way through secondary school and college. Even though I crashed on jobs when forced to multi-task or shift attention too much, I somehow managed to keep enough people fooled to stay afloat until my mid 40s, when health problems tipped the precarious balance. It was about then that a local massage therapist, to whom I had confided my condition, told me about KindTree, and foisted me upon them. My involvement with KindTree forced me to come to terms with being chronically autistic. The following years have been a dialectic of coming to terms with this condition. In my own personal development I see parallels to the civil rights movements that have been unfolding in my lifetime. I see my long period of denial as my "Uncle Tom phase." When I started to "come out," I was afraid I’d have as little in common with other autists as with every other group. Having researched what I had seen as my "former" condition, I had an intelligent lay person’s grasp of it. However, actually meeting other autists for the first time, at KindTree’s 2000 Retreat, inspired and taught me way more. It was a spiritual experience. After a period of personally identifying with my condition, I segued into an even more obnoxious period of wanting to prove how relatively "high-functioning" I was for having conned the world into taking me for no more than an eccentric neurotic person. During high-functioning interludes, I would wonder whether my autism was "serious" enough even to count, and felt guilty for making such a big deal out of such a trivial condition. As I met more fellow autists and found out more about "my" condition, I then went into a blessedly brief "Black Power" phase of identifying almost exclusively with other autists--and nobody else. It took an unpleasant interaction with one or two of my "own kind" to realize that I am no more a product of this "group" as any other one. Meantime, as I became more involved in the autism community , my autistic shortcomings started to re-emerge with a vengeance: my freakouts; difficulty with planning, organizing and changing focus; face-blindness. I then knew I am not an inadvertently fraudulent autist. I am starting to grieve my autistic limitations--the painful dichotomy between my intelligence and talents and my functional limitations. I sometimes find myself desperately seeking some ancillary mental illness to blame my problems on. In more positive moments, I try to figure out ways to outsmart it. Mary-Minn Sirag
(Written by autists about living with autism. If you would like to see your musings on this page, please email Mary-Minn at sirag@mindspring.com.) A weird autistic sensorium by Mary-Minn Sirag - September, 2003 Every so often, I find myself whiffing the underside of my elbow and the back of my hand, checking in with my nose to make sure I don’t smell too off. Sometimes, I exhale heavily onto my hand, to make sure my breath isn’t too rank. I try to have at least some sweet smelling lotion on hand. At age 24, I got fired from a Baskin Robbins for subtly (I thought) rubbing my fingers against my under arm and sniffing them on a steamy summer day to make sure my deodorant was still working. I don’t remember my conclusion, just that I was fired shortly thereafter, for that plus a medley of other autistic faux-pas. I am presently marooned "between" protective scents. Like the glamour girl who cannot leave home without a full mask of makeup, I¹m feeling mighty naked. Today, I spent a good hour squeezing and pouring testers at a local health food in a vain and desperate quest for a hand lotion I had recently discovered but whose name I can’t remember. My holy grail is the security blanket of the perfect scent. This almost Platonic olfactory ideal has always been a moving target for me, especially after a recent illness, when my sense of smell skewed nastily into the greener reaches of the color wheel, which, unlike its painterly counterpart, turns out to have its complement in the innocent periwinkle reaches. My predilections have shifted from Chinese red (amber paste, Guerlain’s Mitsuko and Jicky, an elusive Italian perfume called Cobra) back to the innocent periwinkles of my early childhood (Elizabeth Arden¹s Blue Grass, Nina Ricci¹s l¹Air du Temps, Fleurs du Rocaille, a dime-store Muguet des Bois). My synesthesia envelopes every sense of mine. I even thank it for my orthographic and alphabetic knack. I wonder how many other autists are synesthetes. I can identify scores of classic perfumes by smell, even recall them in my imagination, decades after having smelled them. The coloristic and instrumental accompaniment supplied by my synesthetic imagination no doubt helps. I just wish I could extend these synesthesiae to procedures and other sequential information, faces, locations in space and other visual things, for which I am downright aphasic. Though we autists tend to share a concrete processing style, the foci of our apocryphally Rainman-ian eidetic memories differs from autist to autist as radically as from one "neuro-typical" person to the next. Though I cannot recognize a face until I have met or--even better--seen a picture of someone six or so times, there are entire symphonies and piano concertos that I can whistle from start to finish; likewise with scents and flavors, which I not only can recognize but conjure up in my head decades later. I process a perfume much as I do a symphony. Much as I love a good rose, not all comes up roses for this persnickety Nose of mine. For one, the smell of franchise fast-food not only nauseates me, but hangs around in my olfactory bulb for a good 24 hours, often perseverating into a crescendo of caustic migraines. Probably the most phobic smell--besides a plague-infested battlefield, perhaps--is the acrid stench of "buttered" popcorn at chain cinemas. I know a young girl with autism who is phobic of ketchup breath! The Japanese describe Americans as "butakusai", which means "stinking of butter". When I first learned this word, while working at a Japanese trading company in San Francisco, I felt validated that I’m not the only olfactory paranoiac out there! I have found ketchup breath, among other things quintessentially American, to be very "butakusai". All my senses are at least somewhat tweaky. It took me until the age of 12 or 13 years, for instance, to know when I was sick. I usually had to collapse in a faint or throw up in the middle of class--or freak out or melt down for no apparent reason. I don¹t think that this was entirely because I was sick so much of the time, though that might have been a contributing factor. I think there was no little sensory processing confusion going on in whatever part of the brain is supposed to alert the rest of the body of such an event. I remember several instances of somebody’s finally having figured out that I was sick, and what an "aha" experience this imparted to my fever enfeebled intellect, in retrospect. My passion for playing "the sleeping game" and my uncharacteristic indifference to chocolate, my all-time drug of choice, suddenly made sense to me. My mother tells me that I rarely cried as an infant, even when I was hungry. I spent my early infancy staring at the ceiling, whimpering softly when, as one of my mother’s friends ascertained, my stomach was hurting. (Lest you mothers wax too envious of mine’s good fortune at having begotten such a little angel, rest assured that my 18th month of such enviable babyhood ushered in a new apocalypse of either shrieking and throwing things, and rocking back and forth in a catatonic stupor.) My early indifference to food evolved into exquisite pickiness. I gagged on cereal and rice. I abhorred all spices besides salt and pepper. I was forced to overcome my pickiness about food by embracing an ever widening variety of foods, simply because I grew up in the Middle East, where mashed potatoes and homemade dumplings were hard to come by, and grains, which I have never liked, were even more central than they are in the States. (I still haven’t embraced grains wholeheartedly, partly, it turns out, because I can digest so few of them.) I was 12 years old before I’d touch rice--and then only the Basmati variety--or garlic. I remember being so phobic of garlic that my mother threatened to rub it on my fingers to deter me from devouring my nails and some of my fingertips, for added zest. I remember being particularly phobic of cilantro and coriander, and of cinnamon in any non-sweets’ context. Since proudly overcoming these phobias, I made all these ingredients into cornerstones of subsequent cooking obsessions. The same love-hate thing applies to other kinds of fear I have managed to conquer, such as swimming. I wonder whether the same holds true for neuro-typical folks. Onto music: A teenage friend of mine, who has Aspergers, shrieks, winces and plugs his ears desperately whenever he hears any female voice singing. I doubt very much this is a sexist prejudice, as this young man harbors no other aversion toward girls and women. Furthermore, I remember the sound of any female vocalist having the same effect on me through my teens, until I trained myself consciously to appreciate a wider variety of music. My prejudice was especially galling, since I had been inflicting my female singing voice since age one. My early music taste was overly refined. I would positively shrivel whenever I heard any note sung or played off-key, or the wrong note or rhythm sung or played. It affected me much as sirens, jackhammers and motorcycles do, bypassing my ear and going right into my pain center. It mattered naught that I probably was missing my vocal and harmonica aim more than occasionally! Just like my young friend, I would plug my ears forcefully and wince whenever anybody else messed up. In elementary school, I liked only the Beatles and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, the latter probably only because I got to sing Yum Yum, Little Buttercup and Josephine. My only salvation from my claustrophobic narrowness was that I would periodically "burn out" "my" composers by over bingeing, which left me utterly devoid of salve for my music-parched spirit. These burn-outs forced me to venture forth into new territory. My middle-aged taste is much more varied, which provides insurance against finding myself marooned between musical binges. I
still have singers and composers I cannot stand, though,
as does any autist worth his or her salt. Barbra Streisand,
Benjamin Britten and Gregorian chants come to mind, though
I am confident that I am suppressing my awareness of whole
other genres that propel my finger to the "off" button of
my many radios. The closest I have come to liking Barbra
is my deep appreciation for Patti Smith, which though no
ceegar is a start. When I can tolerate a whole side of Funny
Girl, I’ll know the time has come for me to start
imparting my sensory integra tion wisdom to other music-fussy
autists.
Autism Forum Summary June, 2003 Our second Autism Forum took up where our last year’s first Autism Forum left off. (Please see Autism Community resource list here) The first panel, entitled "Post-Measure-28 Budget
Cuts and Revenue Projects: Affects on the Autism Community"
was a rally cry to Margaret Theisen, the director of Full
Access Brokerage, explained how FAB was created to provide
services to adult clients whose wait- Lynn Greenwood, the director of Lane Developmental
Disability Services, said that the budget cuts have
increased case manager’s case Of the General Fund, 9.5 percent goes to Lane
County government, which hasn’t grown in the past 20
years, despite large population increas- Kitty Piercy, a former state representative,
serves on the Lane County Commission of Children and Families,
and chairs the Oregon Commis- She urged her audience to pressure Rep. Pat
Farr, who is part of the Lane County delegation. He needs
more than just to "feel deeply," she County Commissioner Peter Sorenson worked as
a state senator with Kitty Piercy. In July, he said, 97 Lane
County government workers will The second panel, entitled “New Developments
in Brain Research, Interventions and Behavioral Management
for Autism Spectrum Dr. Bove is a Eugene naturopath who practices
the DAN! protocol, allergy testing and chelation. He has been
practicing naturopathic medi- Dr. Leslie Carter is a Tigard-based therapist
who has done a lot of work in rehabilitation and neuropsychology.
She started out in pain man- Carter is on the diagnostic team for the O.H.S.U.‘s
secretin project. Her approach supplements biomedical techniques.
She finds bio-feed- She sees emotional dysregulation as a root of
the phobias and horror of surprises afflicting autists.
She cited Steve Gutstein as a new pioneer Benjamin Bell, L.M.T., performs cranial sacral
therapy, which aligns the skull plates in order to help regulate
the flow of cerebral-spinal flu- Rhonda Way teaches a weekly sign language
(modified American Sign Language) class at Bridgeway
House to kids in the autism spectrum The third panel, on “Dignity, Self-Determination
and Independence: How to Maintain During These Uncertain Times”,
was a rally for Cheryl Nel Applegate, a case worker at Lane
DDS, facilitates KindTree’s monthly autism support group.
She talked about the friendships Nan Lester, who started the Asperger Advocacy
Coalition, talked about how the Coalition has returned
to being a support group for parents Pat Wigney, the director of Bridgeway House,
talked about Bridgeway’s mission to house a "trauma
team" for parents whose kids have just Tim Mueller of KindTree offered to begin a discussion
on how to create an autism network organization here in Lane
County. People were It was a great Forum. Look for it again next year! Mary-Minn
This is part of an ongoing series of articles written by people with autism spectrum disorder about our condition. Please submit your articles to me at sirag@mindspring.com | |||||||||||||||||
