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The diversity of Autism Spectrum Disorder: Who does it affect?  Tt has no class or race barriers, it’s invisible and among us all. Except I am still often kept hidden. I am intellectually disadvantaged, have learning disorders and yes I am on the autism spectrum, you could say I have an invisible disability.At times in […]

Last Friday was a great day. An hour before we set off for the Big Day Out, the mail arrived. It contained our older boy’s first set of NCEA results. He achieved every Level 1 standard he sat, and picked up a couple of merits along the way.
For an Asperger Syndrome child we once thought […]

Saving child cancer services at Wellington Hospital has been a major public health issue lately. However, this situation need not have arisen if some forward planning had been done in the 1990s. It takes about 15 years to train a paediatric oncologist and there is a global shortage of these and other skilled health professionals. […]

You don’t want to go around diagnosing strangers, but it wasn’t hard to think of the A-word when the stories broke this weekend around the police searching the Whitianga home of 18 year-old Owen Walker. Solitary, sensitive, home-schooled after being bullied — and, of course, good with computers.
Now, his mother, Shell Moxham-Whyte, has confirmed to […]

The third annual AWARES international online autism conference begins November 26th and is open to all to visit and participate. Here’s your chance to read the opinion and research findings from a long line of authorities, some very well known names, weighing in on all sides of the subject, including theories about causation, development, intervention, […]

Autism has featured in the mainstream news lately with a flurry of activity after the NZ Medical Journal of 12 October published an article by a New Zealand doctor working in Australia, proposing that Janet Frame had high-functioning autism (HFA). Rehabilitation physician Sarah Abrahamson of the Queen Elizabeth Centre in Ballarat analysed Janet Frame’s autobiographical […]

Autism support as an election issue? Really? Oddly enough, that appears to be what’s happening in Australia.
 
On the same day that Labor leader Kevin Rudd used his campaign site (yes, there’s no election date, but you can bet there’s a campaign) to announce plans to introduce specialised child care and early intervention services for […]

I was born in Lancashire in 1975 to parents who instilled a combination of strict discipline and love in equal measures upon myself and my two sisters. There is often a misconception that children with Aspergers misbehave, that they are just naughty. As a child it never occurred to me that I could answer my […]

A friend just sent me a link to a story about polar bears cavorting with huskies in the wild (thank you), and, more relevantly, in my subsequent meanderings on the website of Speaking of Faith, a programme in the american public radio stable, I stumbled across, and am currently listening to its latest offering: Being […]

“The Government’s objective, broadly expressed, is that every person, whatever his level of academic ability, whether he be rich or poor, whether he live in town or country, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind for which he is best fitted and to the fullest extent of his powers. […]