Autism
CANNABIS and by Tatiana Melendez
Autism has been on the books for more than seventy years, and our thinking about the condition has changed dramatically. During college, I had a professor who looked after her autistic son. She shared stories, struggles, and daily hardships, such as taking her child to get a haircut. One of the big projects we had to complete to pass the class was a minimum of a fifteen-page research paper on autism. It could be anything I wanted it to be as long as it was about autism, and I learned a lot, such as how intelligent autistic. In the early 1900s, the word autism was first used to describe a subset of schizophrenic patients who were especially withdrawn and selfabsorbed. Then came psychiatrist Kanner who studied autistic children, published a paper describing eleven children who were highly intelligent but displayed a powerful desire for aloneness and an obsessive insistence on persistent sameness and labeled their condition "early infantile autism." By 1944, a German scientist Hans Asperger described a milder form of autism known as Asperger's Syndrome. The cases he reported were all highly intelligent boys but had trouble with social interactions and specific obsessive interests. In 1980 "Infantile autism" was listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) for the first time; the condition is also officially separated from childhood schizophrenia. Several years later, the DSM replaced "infantile autism" with a more expansive definition of "autism disorder" and included a diagnostic criteria checklist. UCLA psychologist Ivar Lovaas, Ph.D., publishes the first study showing how intensive behavior therapy can help children with autism.
27
FEBRUARY 2022
thechronicmagazine.com
