Autism spectrum disorder
For my discussion I chose to read about autism spectrum disorder. I have many family members and dear friends who have this disorder. Therefore, I found it very helpful to choose this case in order to get some insight of what they had and are continually going through. Once reading about Sam and his journey with the disorder, I found my expectations to have been met. During family reunions I am able to get together with my cousins, two whom have autism, and interact with them. One of my cousins, named Mindy, is about 30 years old now. She suffers from massive language impairments and is very socially awkward. When I was about 10 years old, and she was around 20 years of age, we had practically the same mental age. In addition, my younger cousin named Elijah, who is now 5, related heavily to Sam. At age two Elijah showed signs of intellectual impairments, along with temper tantrums. As he grew his vocabulary hardly progressed, and he became violent when he was interrupted during an activity. Also, he would much rather be by himself than be around others or his family. Like Sam, he went through various training programs in order to get his behavior and impairments under control. Due to the massive parallels between Sams case and those in my own life, I do feel as thought the case study fits in with my expectation. Something that stood out to me was just how much work goes into the progression of an ability. A lot of work goes into even the simplest task. I was very shocked to read from our book Case Studies in Abnormal Psychology that “Mutism- complete absence of speech- occurs in a significant subgroup of children with this disorder, as was true with Sam. About 25 percent of all children with autism spectrum disorder are not verbal” (pg, 8). Also the book mentions some interesting peculiarities such as “ In delayed echolalia, the child may not repeat the sentence of phrase until hours or weeks after hearing it. Another common abnormality is pronoun reversal. They refer to themselves as ‘he’, ‘you’, or by their own proper names; they seldom use the pronouns ‘I’ or ‘me’ and then only when referring to others” (pg, 8). I found this information to be new and quite interesting. I did not know that many children with this disorder are mute. I was not fully aware of the severity of language impairments in regards to autism. Also, echolalia and pronoun reversal is something I had never heard before in connection to autism. The last thing that really stood out to me was the price tag. My jaw nearly dropped when I read just how much it costs to put your child through treatment for autism spectrum disorder. It is stated that it costs about 40,000 dollars a year for each child. That is an insane amount of money and can take a huge toll on one’s family life. Parents have to work in order to pay, take care of their own individual responsibilities, work on their marriage, and also be immensely involved with their child whilst going through the training programs and treatments. I give massive props to these parents, and commend them for their dedication to helping their child through this disorder.
Solution preview for the order on autism spectrum disorder
APA
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