Humans.org.nz Home

The Herald on Sunday features an interview with Nigel Latta by Deborah Coddington, weirdly condensed into this brief about Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
In the full print story, Latta dishes out jumbo servings of his usual faux common-sense parenting advice, lurching into this bizarre statement:
“But I’ve been around the family area more than 20 years, long enough [...]

 
 The act requiring the new educational standards regime was passed through all its stages in Parliament in 24 hours just before Christmas 2008. It did not go to a select committee where the public, autism advocates, and those with lived experience, could make submissions. This was unfortunate as some of us could have pointed out the negative implications [...]

I was angered that a significant change to the Education Act was passed by Parliament through all its stages under urgency before Christmas. It increased fines for parents of students who were not attending school, and it made way for publicly notified standardised testing of primary school students (as in the No Child Left Behind policy of the United States). [...]

The Herald on Sunday has a story about the death of Finn Higgins, noting that “an independent review of his situation shows that the mental health crisis team failed Higgins at every turn.”
Che Tibby is justifiably angry in response, and there are some useful comments under his blog post, including one from Finn’s mother, Diane [...]

Finn Higgins was known to users of the Public Address System discussion forums as a keen-minded, literate, witty and sensitive debater, and an asset to the community. What we could not know was the extent to which he was struggling with depression and anxiety in his personal life. These problems were related to an undiagnosed [...]

When a news organisation reports on a “new” treatment for autism, you should hear the alarm bells go off in your head — and that’s certainly the case with the Australian Nine Network’s report this week on the work of Matthew Israel, who runs the Judge Rotenberg Centre in Massachusetts.
Israel is a behaviourist who fits [...]