Ethical challenges to autism treatment: Encyclopedia II - Ethical challenges to autism treatment - Institutional damage

Ethical challenges to autism treatment - Institutional damage

Autism rights activists oppose the damage done to autistics in psychiatric hospitals.

Ethical challenges to autism treatment - Historic prognosis for permanently institutionalized autistic children

These facts have been claimed about historical autism institutions:

• It is well known that institutions are not parent substitutes at all; early and/or permanent institutionalisation will harm social and emotional development of any human being. Autistics are not immune to this effect.

• The routine-seeking traits of autism lend themselves to Institutional Damage, as many autistics would find living thousands of completely identical days quite easy.

• Historically, almost all autistics, particularly those severely affected, were permanently institutionalized from an early age because no one knew what was wrong with them or what to do about them. Having such a child was an embarrassment and, in former times, a possible sign of demonic involvement.

• After decades of institutional damage (with or without the treatments of that era, usually without), it is unlikely for an autistic to learn to speak, to become socialized or to engage in useful work. This fact has given rise to some statistics saying autistics in institutions never improve.

• The statistics were used to predict institutionalized autistics were doomed never to learn or grow; however the importance of institutional damage was entirely forgotten and led to the statistics-backed over-mediatized belief autistics never learn speech or socialization at all. Many doctors (including a few older autism experts) firmly believe autistics can't learn these things by themselves, or with just parental assistance (e.g., Jessica Park). These researchers tend to disregard the fact that many autistics can and have done so; they may claim such people were misdiagnosed and were never actually autistic.

It is the opinion of autism rights activists that long-term institutionalisation of autistics denies them the right to potentially lead a normal life on their own. They don't believe there is a way to know who will/won't improve or by how much.

There are now a great many well-documented cases of autistics - living in a family, a group home, or independently - who actually taught themselves the verbal and social skills needed to survive. The argument that such people are rare or misdiagnosed is no longer mainstream in either the scientific literature or the media.

IQ tests are usually performed to predict or confirm permanent institutionalisation of patients who seem to have poor intellect. These IQ tests may gravely underestimate the academic potential of an autistic. For example, if sensory oversensitivity causes distraction during the test (such as the noise of a watch timing the test, the aftershave/perfume of the examiner) or acute neurological discomfort caused by the moment where routine is broken (such as taking the test in the first place, having to walk into an unknown place, etc).

There is no way to know which autistic will not be able to acquire verbal and social skills, regardless of the age of the autistic, so autism rights activists do not recommend permanent institutionalisation because they believe it prevents improvement and more often than not causes regression. Autism rights activists believe prognosis is much better in a family than in an institution even at the "lowest" level of functioning.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Institutional damage", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki