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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. [...]

For some reason I’ve been thinking alot recently of a book that was published last year and that I enjoyed greatly. It is Voices from the Spectrum: Parents, Grandparents, Siblings, People with Autism, and Professionals Share Their Wisdom. It’s the kind of book I would like to see a whole lot more of, a symphony [...]

Working from estimates that one in every 150 of us resides on the autistic spectrum, I have just discovered, with the Statistics NZ population clock as my guide, the possibility that 27,910 people in New Zealand currently experience life from this perspective.
Added to this group are those who are trying to understand what a position [...]

Anyone who was at the launch of A Perfect World on Monday night will tell you that “Billy Glish” — David Cohen’s old school friend Bill English — gave a soulful and eloquent speech about the challenges faced by families for whom autism is a daily reality. His observation that the book gave lie to [...]

Welcome to humans*.
I first heard of Asperger Syndrome in 1995. The last line in an educational psychologist’s report on our older son, Jimmy — who, according to his kindergarten teachers, seemed to have “trouble processing information” — read “ADD or AS”.
I knew what ADD was, and I knew that wasn’t Jimmy. But “AS”?
“Asperger Syndrome,” said [...]