THE REBECCA SCHOOL for autistic children occupies all five floors of a building in midtown Manhattan. Its rooftop playground has a fine view of the Empire State Building. It features colourful classrooms and lots of places for children to lie down and recover from the sensory overload often suffered by autistic people. “My body doesn’t feel safe,” says one boy curled up in a corridor, asking to be left alone.
Sufferers from autism focus inward, sometimes so much so that they are unable to speak. Some children at the Rebecca School point to pictures to express anything from emotion to the need to go to the toilet. In about half of all cases autism is associated with learning difficulties; in the other half sufferers’ IQs are average or higher. Autism is much more common in boys than in girls; four-fifths of the pupils at the school are male.
To an autistic child, the world seems “relentlessly unpredictable and chaotic, perpetually turned up too loud, and full of people who have little respect for personal space”, writes Steve Silberman in “NeuroTribes”, a forthcoming book about the syndrome. Autism has been around in various guises...
from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/1KXAQd4
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