Giving Thanks

This Thanksgiving, I would like to depart from my typical expression of gratitude to all of you who work with those with autism, and those of you who are parents of children with autism, and thank directly those of you who have an autism spectrum disorder. It has often been said that the best way to judge the level of civilization in a culture is how well they treat those with disabilities (in current parlance, how well we treat those with special needs.) In the mid nineteen-thirties, Adolf Hitler justified his wholesale slaughter of those with disabilities as freeing their tormented souls from their bodies. It was the first step in what eventually became the slaughter of trade unionists, certain Catholics, gypsies, and six million Jews.
Parents of children with autism often describe their eventual awakening to the belief that their children on the spectrum are truly a blessing. They bless their parents’ and siblings’ lives with a deeper understanding of the human condition, and deepen their ability to love. They bring new friends and new meaning to their lives.
Those of us who are blessed to work in this field know well about the souls of those with whom we work, because that is why we do what we do. We know because we feel touched by our children who have "special needs". They touch us with their love, their kindness, their honesty, their humor, and their efforts and strivings. We learn from them daily, how to love, how to appreciate our own blessings, how to take life seriously but not too seriously, how to give and how to let go.
So this Thanksgiving, let’s all pause for a moment, close our eyes and express our appreciation for those on the spectrum, each of whom have touched us in some way or another, each of whom have enrichened us with their precious souls.

PCFA in Mexico

Recently returned from beautiful Queretaro, Mexico, where I was honored to be the keynote speaker at the second international conference on autism held there. I spoke on "Autism and the Family," highlighting the effects of having a child with autism on the family as a whole, as well as on siblings and marriages. I was also honored to be among three other Pacific Child speakers: Arpi Arabian, Marta Marquez, and Stefanie Finney. All gave very well-received speeches on various aspects of their expertise. If you can read Spanish, you can get more info on the conference, as well as view the amazing poster, at http://caadd.com.mx/.

Pacific Child, Children's Learning and Autism Services North Connect!

I am proud to announce that Pacific Child has formally joined forces with two great companies, moves that will help us achieve our goal of becoming the preeminent provider of behavior analytic services in the United States.

The first company to join the family is Children’s Learning Connection, based in Orange County, California. The company was started by Melanie Foshee and Kimberly Eissing, two licensed speech and language therapists with expertise in both autism and in bringing scientifically-validated approaches together in a comprehensive and unified way to maximally benefit those in need. Their company provides speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and ABA therapy, as well as parent training, infant programs and social skills programs.

We believe that the expertise Kim and Melanie bring to the coordination of services will greatly assist us in developing a broader menu of services throughout Pacific Child.

The second company to join us is Autism Services North (ASN). ASN is headquartered in Pennsylvania, but the company, begun by Paul Eschbach, BCBA, contracts with BCBAs across 24 states. ASN provides superior behavioral care to the TriCare community and has an excellent reputation with parents and referral sources alike. ASN will allow Pacific Child to provide quality care to more children along the spectrum, particularly across the United States where we currently do not have a presence.

This marks an exciting time in the history of Pacific Child. We look forward to creating new, dynamic synergies among our companies.

Minority Bias

It has been known for some time that minorities, in most walks of life, often do not receive their fair share of services. We know that autism appears in nearly the same proportions throughout all races, nationalities and cultures. But in order to receive the diagnosis, one must be identified by some sort of professional. That is typically a physician.

Several studies have reported that Hispanics have a lower incidence of autism than non-Hispanic Caucasians. Most studies that report these results suggest that this is likely due to the fact that most Hispanics studied have lower income levels, and thus cannot afford the health care required for the diagnosis to be made. This makes sense to me. One study, however, looked at 1184 schools in 254 Texas counties, and counted the number of children in kindergarten through 12th grade in each district who had been diagnosed with autism. In this study, socioeconomic status was in fact controlled for, and the researchers still found fewer Hispanic schoolchildren were diagnosed with autism.

What was fascinating in this study, however, was that that for every 10 percent increase in Hispanic children in a district, the prevalence of autism decreased by 11 percent, while the prevalence of children with intellectual or learning disabilities increased by about 10 percent. Interestingly, the reverse pattern was seen among non-Hispanic Caucasian kids. As their percentage of autism in a district increased by 9 percent, the prevalence of intellectual and learning disabilities fell by about 13 percent.
It appears from these results that Hispanic children may, regardless of their socioeconomic status, be seen as learning disabled, cognitively or intellectually lacking (instead of autistic), while the non-Hispanic children were seen instead as having autism.

Is that surprising?

Congrats to our new BCBA's!

Just wanting to send congratulations to our newest BCBAs-- Daniella Putnam, Robin Palm, Zsuzsanna Fodor and Danielle Christner. This is a great milestone, and well-deserved!

Going Home

Of the original psychoanalytic triumvirate of Freud, Adler, and Jung, perhaps the most forgotten was Alfred Adler. Adler was best known for the creation of the term “inferiority complex”, but perhaps his greatest contributions were his founding of the child guidance movement, community mental health centers, and his humanistic approach to psychopathology in general.
Adler died suddenly and unexpectedly, most likely of a heart attack, while on a speaking tour in Scotland. He was cremated there, but oddly, his ashes disappeared, perhaps in the chaotic runup to the Second World War. The ashes were just recently found on a shelf just a few hundred yards from the crematorium in Edinburgh, and are being returned to Vienna to be buried in an honored place in the central cemetery.
I am writing these words in a hotel in New York, not far from the hospital where I was born almost six decades ago. Yesterday a cab driver took me down Park Avenue, to a writer’s bar in Greenwich Village I wanted to see. As you travel south from midtown, you drive through a tunnel carved not out of a mountain, but under a building—the Metropolitan Life building (now the Helmsley building). It is an interesting way to build something, and the road itself takes a sharp carve just after you go through the building.
I have not lived in New York for more than half a century, so the experience seemed new to me. But tonight, as I let the thick air of Manhattan surround me as I walked, I remembered it. As a child I would often perch myself on the ledge behind the back seat that most cars had then. I could stare straight up at the world through the back window. That odd sensation of driving down a central street in Manhattan, entering the mouth of a big building, the sky disappearing, and then quickly entering a curve, like a horizontal roller coaster, just came back to me. I remember the strangeness of it, the slight dizziness, not unlike I felt last night in the taxi.
I am not terribly nostalgic about coming home. Life was not good when I lived here. In fact, it was mostly horrible. But it is a touchstone, something that makes one remember who one is. Of course, it is a silly cliché that we all end up going home eventually; we start as ashes and dust and end as ashes and dust.
But there is still something compelling about going back to that original nest, the comfort and safety of the womb, or at least the illusion of that safety.
I left New York and moved to California in high school. Neil Diamond, who went to my high school in New York and had the same music teacher, wrote “L.A.’s fine but it ain’t home, New York’s home but it ain’t mine no more.” What then, is it?
“Home” becomes a touchstone, that which we touch to remind us that we are still alive. It is an anchor, of sorts, a mooring whenever the seas get rough.
Pacific Child began as a dream of independence from the mental health clinics where I had worked previously. Yet it has been my home for 23 years now. As my connection to the heartbeat of PCFA moves closer and more distant, it is my touchstone, my home, my illusion of safety, yet still just a stopover somewhere between ashes and ashes.

Welcome to our New Clinical Director

I am thrilled to announce the hiring of our new agency-wide clinical director, Michael Cameron, Ph.D., BCBA-D. Dr. Cameron has been serving in his new post since March 1st, and has already made a great impression on all those with whom he has come in contact. Dr. Cameron's hiring followed an extensive, nationwide search. Prior to joining PCFA, Dr. Cameron was associate professor and founding chair of the Department of Behavior Analysis at Simmons College in Boston. Dr. Cameron brings a breadth of knowledge and experience to PCFA. His fields of expertise include assessing and treating people with autism spectrum disorder, the evaluation of public and private school-based programs for children and adults with ASD, staff traininhg, and direct supervision of evidence-based behavior analytic services. He also has special interests in health and behavioral medicine. He serves on the editorial boards of the Behavior Analyst Today and the Journal of Speech-language Pathology and Applied Behavior Analysis. He has held positions as clinical director, and vice-president of research and development with behavior analysis agencies in Massachusetts, as well as maintaining a private clinical practice. Dr. Cameron chose to join PCFA because he shares our core values: the client always comes first, and our commitment to providing scientifically validated services built on a solid foundation of respect for those we serve. As agency clinical director, Dr. Cameron is responsible for ensuring the quality, viability and expansion of services of PCFA's offices. He also oversees training and the overall clinical direction of the agency. You can reach Dr. Cameron via our toll-free number: 888-805-0759. His direct extension is 204.

Congrats in Order

Congratulations to our newest BCBAs! Holly Park from our Los Angeles office and Kim Altic from the Redwood Coast office successfully crossed the finish line after completing their marathon requirements toward receiving their board certification. Needless to say, I am so proud of their accomplishments. Both are extraordinarily talented people deeply committed to the work they are doing. We are blessed to have them on our team.

Waiting

I don’t read much fiction, a fact of which I am not proud, but a few years ago I read a book that haunts me. The book was a best-seller by the Chinese author Ha Jin, called “Waiting,” in which a Chinese physician was caught in an arranged marriage and, because divorce was not legal, spent 18 years of his life waiting to marry a nurse with whom he fell in love.

In these modern times and in this western world, we are used to things happening quickly. It is difficult to wait for anything. We want our fast food, our fast cars, and, well…. And as I recognize the person staring back at me in the mirror less and less, waiting seems even more difficult. Time is a limited commodity, and there is simply less of it left in the bottle to drink.

But time is only experience; it is nothing more. And “waiting” is nothing more than wishing or imagining we were somewhere other than where we are now. So, we suffer from our imagination. We suffer from wishing our hands were doing something else, our eyes were feasting on a different sight.

So let us breathe in patience, and appreciate each moment to the extent our neuroses allow. In the Midwest there is a saying: if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. So, let’s let wishes be horses, and let’s let them ride off into the sunset with empty saddles.