Autism-World

What is it like to live with a half-grown child who can’t speak, who frequently erupts in violent tantrums, and spends hours making hand shadows or stripping shrubs? How do his parents try to bring him out of his private world? How do they keep their sanity and preserve their love for him and for each other? One of Us answers these questions by tracing the first twelve years in the life of my son, Cameron, who has severe autism.
Autism is a developmental disorder affecting language acquisition and use, behavior, and social interaction. Over the last ten years, autism diagnoses have increased alarmingly, from an estimated 1 out of 3,000 births to the currently accepted rate of 1 in 166 births. Discussions of this apparent epidemic and its possible causes (particularly thimerosal, a mercury compound found in childhood vaccines) now appear daily in newspapers, popular magazines, and on television.
Autism has also become a hot literary topic: Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, narrated by a high-functioning autistic teenager, recently rode the best-seller list for over a year; memoirs of recovery by autistic people or their family members have swelled the autism library. But as well-meaning and moving as many of these books are, they don’t tell the whole truth about autism. Stories of recovery-a rare outcome in real life-not only ignore the vast majority of autistic people and their families, but may even do harm: desperate parents whose autistic children haven’t recovered resort to untried, spurious or downright dangerous “cures”; the general public perceives autism merely as a set of charming eccentricities not worthy of special intervention or support.
The story of the severely autistic child-the child with entrenched, destructive behaviors, impaired cognition and little or no language-has not been told. One of Us is that story. Unlike many autism memoirs, it offers a clear and compelling narrative depicting my wife’s and my struggle to diagnose, treat and accept Cameron’s autism, following him from birth to age twelve, when we made the emotionally devastating decision to send him to a full-time residential school. With unflinching honesty leavened by humor, I record our family’s sometimes harrowing, sometimes poignant journey, as we strove to teach Cam basic skills and deal with his destructive behaviors. Cam’s disorder caused him great pain, but also revealed an extraordinary courage that challenged us to be worthy of him. Hence, even though Cam didn’t recover, the book is not a chronicle of failure. Rather, it portrays a rarer sort of victory: the triumph of love over terrible adversity.
In a straightforward style laced with poetry, One of Us shows that autism is not just an individual disability, but a family disorder that permanently changes everyone involved. Therefore, One of Us is not only Cam’s story; it’s also the story of his mother’s and especially his father’s progress from denial to anger to acceptance, as we tried both to teach Cam and to learn from him. For only when we finally had to let Cam go did we understand how much he and his autism and become a part of us.

http://www.loyola.edu/fas/mosteen/proposal.html

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Autism Stories.