With the permission of my students in the graduate certificate program at Antioch New England Graduate School, I recorded about 14 minutes of our discussion of philosophical dilemmas in treatment. You be the judge, but I thought that these students (mostly educators, school counselors, and parents) were wary of models that pathologized children with AS/HFA and were moderately skeptical about the role of pharmacology. They were concerned about medication side effects and expressed concerns about superficial understanding of the complexity of these individuals.
Click on the MP3 file below to hear this podcast:
Download antiochAdvClass.mp3 (16mins 5secs; 5.5MB)
I am comforted to think of life as bittersweet, held together by tensional opposites. It has taken me many years to get to the place where I can enjoy living in the gray/grey area between white and black.
So this conversation about small separate environments for comfort versus getting out in public to prepare for 'the real world' for 'adulthood' is pertinent. This month I am for the terms majority and different ( ala Phil Schwartz) but I can also look at a high school student in my care and ask - Could medication help eleviate some of this lethargy, obsessiveness, anxiety, ... ?
To be honest, most often my question about the need for medication is to ask for some relief for me. "Can I just get this kid to be more ( fill in the blank) by taking medication so that we can work on / develop the adaptive skill of ( fill in the blank).
But, I do love a field trip. Yesterday, a small group of us took the train to Cambridge and spent the day at MIT. We didn't have labels, we weren't on the fringes, we didn't have crowded high school hallways to deal with, and we were just who we were. One might say we were members of the majority in that place! I believe this is my part in getting them ready for the real world.
Posted by: Terese M | June 03, 2006 at 11:35 PM
Couldn't quite get everything but as a mom of an aspie and nt child, children of any kind will be challenged. It is a challenge how to walk, talk, ride a bike. Because my kid falls doesn't mean I won't encourage them to get up and try again. To separate my aspie from an uncomfortable environment would be to withdraw him from life. I don't want that, he doesn't want that. It KILLS me when he struggles, but if I always protect him from ALL of his struggles is that kindness or control?
We have chosen to medicate our son for his ADD issues. He has an IQ of 130, but zones out so much that he can't access that ability. (No, he is not having seizures, we have seen a Pediatric Neurologist.) We are also working with him behaviorally. So, do we allow him to miss out on basic elementary school, while we try to work with him on the attention issue? We felt that time was of the essence, and we couldn't wait on the behavioral issues to change quickly enough.
My child can talk, but even if he couldn't, would I not treat him medically? What about another medical problem like narcolepsy? Would you not treat that if the child could not talk? I am fortunate that I don't have that problem, but I don't think we can make sweeping generalizations. Each child needs to be looked at on an individual basis.
Again, I am talking about treating co-morbid conditions. And I am sure that some kids are medicated without someone trying to figure out why they are having behavioral problems.
Thanks
Posted by: Debra T. | December 05, 2005 at 07:06 AM
Larry- I think the recording came out nicely. I think the debate will have to continue for now. _ John McC.
Posted by: John McCallum | November 16, 2005 at 10:14 PM