Verwandte Artikel zu Asperger Syndrome: The OASIS Guide, Revised Third Edition:...

Asperger Syndrome: The OASIS Guide, Revised Third Edition: Advice, Inspiration, Insight, and Hope, from Early Intervention to Adulthood - Softcover

Bashe, Patricia Romanowski

 
9780385344654: Asperger Syndrome: The OASIS Guide, Revised Third Edition: Advice, Inspiration, Insight, and Hope, from Early Intervention to Adulthood
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385344651 ISBN 13: 9780385344654
Verlag: Harmony, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Since 2001, The OASIS Guide has been the reliable, comprehensive, authoritative guide to Asperger syndrome. This fully revised, updated, and expanded edition captures the latest in research, strategies, and parenting wisdom, and delivers it all in the empathetic, practical, and hope-filled style The OASIS Guide is famous for. Author Patricia Romanowski Bashe has revised this edition of Asperger Syndrome to reflect the latest in:
·Working with Professionals: building a team, negotiating for your child, and keeping everyone’s focus on high expectations for academic, social, and emotional success.
·Special Education: from early intervention through transition, college, and other postsecondary options, including how special education works and steps to take when it does not.
· Health and Safety: sexuality education, health care, and insurance coverage, as well as understanding the real-life health and safety risks children with AS face and learning the steps that only parents can take to protect them.
·Options and Interventions: with an emphasis on established guidelines for evidence-based treatments, including medication, applied behavior analysis, cognitive-behavior therapy, Social Stories, Comic Strip Conversations, and much more.
·Planning for the Future: Teaching today for independence tomorrow.
For anyone else with a life touched by AS, Asperger Syndrome: The OASIS Guide is packed with resources to handle any situation, from understanding a diagnosis, realistically evaluating options and interventions, and nurturing the whole child with an eye to emotional health, happiness, and independence in school, at home, and among friends. Raising young people with AS to grow up successful, safe, independent, and happy is the goal. Asperger Syndrome: The OASIS Guide is your map.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Patricia Romanowski Bashe, MSEd., BCBA, is, first, the mother of a son with Asperger syndrome, and then a certified special education teacher, early intervention provider, and Board Certified Behavior Analyst. Currently senior education specialist at the Cody Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital, at Stony Brook University, she is also author of The Parents’ Guide to Teaching Kids with Asperger Syndrome and Similar ASDs Real-Life Skills for Independence. Visit her website at www.aspergerguide.com.
 
 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

WHAT IS ASPERGER SYNDROME?

Asperger syndrome is an autism spectrum disorder characterized by the symptoms, behaviors, and deficits that constitute one of several sets of diagnostic criteria. But it’s almost impossible to extrapolate from that information what it means to have AS. For that reason, this chapter focuses on what Asperger syndrome is (or, depending on which version of the DSM you’re using, isn’t) from a clinical diagnostic viewpoint and how it often manifests in terms of symptoms and behaviors.

Asperger syndrome was named for Dr. Hans Asperger, a Viennese pediatrician whose paper describing four boys he treated in a hospital during World War II, “‘Autistic Psychopathy’ in Childhood,” was published in 1944 in German.1 By then, Asperger had been working with children whom he described using the word autistic since the early 1930s and, in the opinion of one colleague, had treated perhaps hundreds.2

Asperger’s paper did not become widely known until the British psychologist Dr. Uta Frith translated it into English in 1991, but it would be a mistake to say that Asperger’s work was completely unknown. In fact, Dr. Bernard Rimland referred to “Asperger’s syndrome” in his Infantile Autism, the 1964 book that challenged the then--prevailing notion that autism was caused by poor parenting, a failure in bonding, and so--called refrigerator mothers.



Where It All Started

In 1932, Dr. Asperger began running a department of Vienna University’s children’s clinic. At the time, Asperger’s patients lived at the clinic, or hospital. There treatment consisted of education and a range of therapies, including speech, play, and music. As Dr. Frith points out in the classic Autism and Asperger Syndrome (which contains her translation of Asperger’s 1944 paper), Asperger’s approach was not “special education” as we understand the term today. We need to step back in time, to when many professionals working with children whom we would today recognize as having ASD sought in Freudian psychotherapy both the causes for and the solutions to their patients’ problems. Asperger took a different approach: what Frith terms “a synthesis of medical and educational practice, applied by inspired doctors, nurses, teachers, and therapists in a team effort.”3 The German term that Dr. Asperger used to describe his work--Heilpadagogik--captured the integration of several types of interventions encompassing education, the arts, and daily living skills. The children lived in a specially designed and decorated ward where the daily routine included physical education, music, drama, singing, and speech therapy, in addition to school. A bombing in 1944 destroyed the ward and killed the woman whom Asperger credited with running the program, Sister Viktorine Zak.

Postwar anti-German sentiment in many Western countries might explain why Asperger’s ideas and his work remained so little known in the United States. Another possibility is that, even if his work had been translated and made accessible to English-speaking professionals, the prevalence of Freudian thinking about psychological and psychiatric issues might have made it difficult for Asperger’s ideas to take hold. Asperger’s work coincided with the Nazi occupation of Austria, and though the occupiers targeted his clinic because he housed and treated “abnormal” children--a population Hitler targeted for extermination, due to their “inferiority”--some might have presumed Asperger a Nazi sympathizer. In fact, he was not, and on several occasions, he took great risks to protect his charges.4

Reading Dr. Asperger’s work makes it clear that he cared about these children. He recognized their strengths and talents as well as their struggles. It was Asperger who coined the term “little professor” to describe children with precocious knowledge and willingness to share it. It was also Asperger who first pointed out their vulnerability to being bullied and their need for special, explicit instruction in social and adaptive skills. Asperger’s observation that parents and other family members might share traits has been supported by recent discoveries in genetics. His tone is compassionate, and his quest to understand these children and to help them is evident. Though many disorders bear their discoverer’s name, knowing something about Asperger the man and how he understood these children sets a fine starting point for anyone who cares about these children today.



ASPERGER SYNDROME “ON THE SPECTRUM”

People have been referring to an autism “spectrum” for about twenty years now, and in 2013 DSM‑5 made it “official” by herding all autism diagnoses under autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. When Asperger syndrome first appeared in DSM‑IV in 1994, the diagnostic criteria were neatly captured by what British psychiatrist Dr. Lorna Wing terms a “triad of impairments affecting: social interaction, communication, and imagination, accompanied by a narrow, rigid, repetitive pattern of activities.”5 Among the characteristics that are thought to distinguish Asperger syndrome from other forms of ASD are the presence of normal to above-average intelligence (although even by DSM‑IV criteria, mild mental retardation could occur); apparently normal language development; and one or more special interests that may dominate attention, conversation, and social interactions.

Originally, the word spectrum nicely captured the sense that the presence or absence or degree of impairment resulting from specific symptoms could range from nonexistent to mild to severe, and that in each individual, every symptom or behavior could conceivably fall on a different point. So, for example, one could be brilliant at calculus yet unable to organize the backpack for school, or have prodigious skills in spelling and grammar and yet be unable to write a simple three-paragraph essay about summer vacation.

You may hear of AS described as a “high-functioning” form of autism. While that is an easily understood description, we agree with Dr. Ivar Lovaas and find the terms high functioning and low functioning discriminatory. This is not simply a matter of semantics or a desire to be politically correct. The fact is, individuals with ASDs each have within themselves a spectrum of abilities and challenges. We have seen young children with serious deficits in language and speech who are more independent in self-care than some older adolescents with AS who have IQs over 130. The term high functioning is often applied to AS because people with this diagnosis typically have a normal or above-normal IQ and many, though not all, exhibit exceptional skill or talent in a particular area, often their area of special interest. (This should not be confused with the autistic savant phenomenon, depicted in the film Rain Man, where a person with autism demonstrates incredible feats of calculation or memory, or a creative talent.6)

Another distinguishing feature of Asperger syndrome is the absence of a “clinically significant delay in language.” In other words, young children with AS typically have early (before age three) language development that ranges from normal to precocious, but not always. This is typically not the case with children on other points of the autism spectrum. While early language development might appear to be normal in children with AS, there is growing evidence that the deeper language deficits are always present. This becomes most apparent when the curriculum shifts focus in upper elementary grades from a concrete to a more abstract, conceptual understanding of material. Further, some...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Harmony
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385344651
ISBN 13 
9780385344654
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
592
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar