I had to be able to stop the stimulation when it became too intense. When people hugged me, I stiffened and pulled away to avoid the all- engulfing tidal wave of stimulation. The stiffening up and flinching was like a wild animal pulling away. As a child, I used to like to get under the sofa cushions and have my sister sit on them.
At various autism conferences, I have had 30 or 40 parents tell me that their autistic child seeks deep pressure stimuli. Research by Schopler indicated that autistic children prefer proximal sensory stimulation such as touching, tasting, and smelling to distal sensory stimulation such as hearing or seeing.
At age 18 I built a squeezing machine. This device is completely lined with foam rubber, and the user has complete control over the duration and amount of pressure applied. A complete description of the machine is in Grandin , , and Grandin and Scariano The machine pro- vides comforting pressure to large areas of the body.
It took me a long time to learn to accept the feeling of being held and not try to pull away from it. I feel that the lack of empathy may be partially due to a lack of comforting tactual input.
This cat used to run from me, but after using the machine, I learned to pet the cat more gently and he decided to stay with me. I had to be comforted myself before I could give comfort to the cat Grandin, I have found from my own experiences with the squeeze machine that I almost never feel aggressive after using it. In order to learn to relate to people better, I first had to learn how to receive comfort from the soothing pressure of the squeeze machine.
During my work with livestock, I find that touching the animals increases my empathy for them. Touching and stroking the cattle makes me feel gentle towards them.
The squeeze machine also had a calming effect on my nervous system. Squeeze machines have been in use in clinics working with autistic and hyperactive children Figures and Lorna King, an occupational therapist in Phoenix, Arizona, reports that it has a calming effect on hyperactive behavior. Therapists have found that deep pressure stimulation has a calming effect Ayres,, At puberty, my behavior took a bad turn for the worse.
Gillberg and Schaumann describe behavior deterioration at puberty in many autistics. Shortly after my first menstrual period, the anxiety attacks started. The feeling was like a constant feeling of stage fright all the time. Now just imagine if you felt that way most of the time for no reason.
It was like my brain was running at miles an hour, instead of 60 miles an hour. Librium and Valium provided no relief. They subsided late at night and early in the morning. The constant nervousness would go in cycles, with a tendency to be worse in the spring and fall.
For weeks I had horrible bouts of colitis. I was desperate for relief. At a carnival I discovered that riding on the Rotor ride provided temporary relief. Intense pressure and vestibular stimulation calmed my nerves.
Bhatara, Clark, Arnold, Gunsett, and Smeltzer have found that spinning in a chair twice each week reduces hyperactivity in young children.
A few days later I tried the cattle squeeze chute, and it provided relief for several hours. The squeeze machine was modeled after a squeeze chute used on cattle. Prior to building the squeeze machine, the only other way I could get relief was strenuous exercise or manual labor.
There are two other ways to fight the nerves: fixate on an intense activity, or withdraw and try to minimize outside stimulation. Fixating on one thing had a calming effect. When I was livestock editor for the Arizona Farmer Ranchman, I used to write three articles in one night. While I was typing furiously I felt calmer. I was the most nervous when I had nothing to do. With age, the nerves got worse. I started waking up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding and obsessive thoughts about going blind.
In the next section, I am going to describe my experiences with medication. There are many autism subtypes, and a medication that works for me may be useless for another case. Parents of autistic children should obtain medical advice from professionals who are knowledgeable of the latest medical research.
The symptoms described in this paper sounded like my symptoms, so I decided to try Tofranil. Fifty mg of Tofranil at bedtime worked like magic. Within a week, the feelings of nervousness started to go away. After being on Tofranil for four years I switched to 50 mg Norpramin desipramine , which has fewer side effects.
These pills have changed my life. Colitis and other stress-related health problems were cured. Paul Hardy in Boston has found that Tofranil and Prozac fluoxetine are both effective for treating certain high-functioning autistic adolescents and adults. Both Dr. Hardy and Dr. John Ratey personal communication, have learned that very small doses of these drugs must be used.
These doses are usually much lower than the dose prescribed for depression. Too high a dose can cause agitation, aggression, or excitement, and too low a dose will have no effect. It took will power to stick with the 50 mg dose and let the relapse subside on its own.
Before taking the drug, the engine was racing all the time. Now it runs at normal speed. The effective doses for Prozac have ranged from two 20 mg capsules per week to 40 mg per day. Too high a dose will cause agitation and excitement. If an autistic person becomes agitated the dose should be lowered.
Other promising drugs for aggressive autistic adolescents and adults are beta blockers. Beta blockers greatly reduce aggressive behavior Ratey et al. During the eight years I have been taking antidepressants, there has been a steady improvement in my speech, sociability, and posture.
The change was so gradual that I did not notice it. Within the last year, I had an opportunity to visit an old friend who had known me before I started taking antidepressants.
My friend, Billie Hart, told me I was a completely different person. She said I used to walk and sit in a hunched-over position and now my posture is straight. Eye contact had improved and I no longer shifted around in my chair.
I was also surprised to learn that I no longer seemed to be out of breath all the time, and I had stopped constantly swallowing. Various people I have met at autism meetings have seen steady improvement in my speech and mannerisms throughout the eight-year period I have taken the medicines. My old friend, Lorna King, also noticed many changes. I had a odd lack of awareness of my oddities of speech and mannerisms until I looked at videotapes.
I think videotapes could be used to help many high-functioning autistics with speech and social skills. There is much that can be learned from family history. During my travels to autism conferences, I have found many families with affective disorder in the family history. Family histories of high-functioning autistics often contain giftedness, anxiety or panic disorder, depression, food allergies, and learning disorders.
In many of the families I have interviewed the disorders were never formally diagnosed, but careful questioning revealed them. My own family history contains nervousness and anxiety on both sides.
My grandmother has mild depression, and Tofranil has also worked wonders for her. She is also very sensitive to loud noise. She told me that when she was a little girl, the sound of coal going down the chute was torture. My sister is bothered by confusing noise from several sources.
Both sides of my family contain artists. There are also signs of immune system abnormalities in myself and my siblings. I had shingles in my thirties, and my brother had them at age 4. My sister had serious ear infections similar to the ear infections in many young autistics. My dad, brother , and myself all have eczema. Animals placed in an environment that severely restricts sensory input develop many autistic symptoms such as stereotyped behavior, hyperactivity, and self-mutilation Grandin, Why would an autistic and a lion in a barren concrete zoo cage have some of the same symptoms?
From my own experience I would like to suggest a possible answer. Since incoming auditory and tactile stimulation often overwhelmed me, I may have created a self-imposed sensory restriction by withdrawing from input that was too intense. Mother told me that when I was a baby I stiffened and pulled away.
By pulling away, I did not receive the comforting tactile input that is required for normal development. Animal studies show that sensory restriction in puppies and baby rats has a very detrimental effect on brain development.
The abnormality is relatively permanent; the brain areas are still abnormal after the whiskers grow back. Some autistics also have overactive brain metabolism Rumsey et al. Tactile stimulation is extremely important for babies and aids their development Casler, Therapists have found that children who withdraw from comforting tactile stimulation can learn to enjoy it if their skin is carefully desensitized. Rubbing the skin with different cloth textures often helps.
Deep pressure stimulation also reduces the urge to pull away. I was born with sensory problems due to cerebellar abnormalities , but perhaps secondary neurological damage is caused by withdrawal from touching. Autopsies of five autistic brains indicated that cerebellar abnormalities occur during fetal development, and many areas of the limbic systems were immature and abnormal Bauman, The limbic system does not fully mature until two years after birth.
Maybe withdrawal from touching made some behavior problems worse. An interesting paper by McCray shows a link between a lack of tactual stimulation and excessive masturbation. Masturbation stopped when the children received more affection and hugging. Lately there has been a lot of publicity about holding therapy, where an autistic child is forcibly held and hugged until he stops resisting.
If this had been done to me I would have found it highly aversive and stressful. Several parents of autistic children have told me that a gentler form of holding therapy is effective and it improved eye contact, language, and sociability.
Powers and Thorworth report a similar result. Perhaps it would be beneficial if autistic babies were gently stroked when they pulled away. My reaction was like a wild animal. At first touching was aversive, and then it became pleasant. In my opinion, tactual defensiveness should be broken down slowly, like taming an animal.
If a baby could be desensitized and learn to enjoy comforting tactile input, possible future behavior problems could be reduced. Today I have a successful career designing livestock equipment because my high school science teacher, Mr. Carlock, used my fixation on cattle chutes to motivate me to study psychology and science. He also taught me how to use the scientific indexes. This knowledge enabled me to find out about Tofranil.
While the school psychologist wanted to take my squeeze machine away, Mr. Carlock encouraged me to read scientific journals so I could learn why the machine had a relaxing effect. When I moved out to Arizona to go to graduate school, I went out to the feedlots to study the reactions of the cattle in squeeze chutes. This was the beginning of my career.
Today I travel all over the world designing stockyards and chutes for major meat-packing firms. I am a recognized leader in my field and have written over technical and scientific papers on livestock handling Grandin, If the psychologists had been successful in taking away my squeeze machine, maybe I would be sitting somewhere rotting in front of a TV instead of writing this chapter. When Kanner followed up his original 11 cases, there were two major successes. The farmer who reared him found goals for his number fixation; he told him he could count the corn rows if he plowed the field.
Many of my fixations initially had a sensory basis. In the fourth grade, I was attracted to election posters because I liked the feeling of wearing the posters like a sandwich man. Occupational therapists have found that a weighted vest will often reduce hyperactivity. Even though the poster fixation started out with a sensory basis, I became interested in the election.
My teachers should have taken advantage of my poster fixation to stimulate and interest in social studies.
Calculating electoral college points would have motivated me to study math. Reading could have been motivated by having me read newspaper articles about the people on the posters. If a child is interested in vacuum cleaners, then use a vacuum-cleaner instruction book as a text.
Another one of my fixations was automatic glass sliding doors. Initially I was attracted to the doors because I liked the sensation of watching them move back and forth. Then gradually the doors took on other meanings, which I will talk about in the next section. In a high-functioning adolescent, and interest in sliding doors could be used to stimulate science interests.
Fixations can be tremendous motivators. Teachers need to use fixations to motivate instead of trying to stamp them out. A narrow, fixated interest needs to be broadened into constructive activities. The principle can also be used with lower- functioning children; Simons and Sabine list many good examples. Fixations need to be differentiated from stereotypies, such as hand flapping or rocking.
A fixation is an interest in something external, such as airplanes, radio, or sliding doors. Engaging in stereotypic behavior for long periods of time may be damaging to the nervous system. In one experiment, pigs in a barren pen that engaged in large amounts of stereotyped rooting on each other had abnormal dendritic growth in the somatosensory cortex Grandin, All my thinking is visual. When I think about abstract concepts such as getting along with people I use visual images such as the sliding glass door.
Relationships must be approached carefully otherwise the sliding door could be shattered. Visualization to describe abstract concepts is also described by Park and Youderian Some parts of the prayer were simply incomprehensible. The only non-visual thoughts I have are of music. Unfortunately there is no way for me to make specific recommendations for schools or doctors.
Only people in your local community are qualified to give specific recommendations. For parents with a newly diagnosed child, I recommend joining a local autism support group. Google and other search engines are very useful for finding schools and other resources. To find a school, type in the keywords: autism, school, and your city or state.
I strongly recommend that you visit a school before you enroll your child. The best results are not always on the first page of hits. Keep looking at more pages until the search gets off the subject and then try different keywords. Many meltdowns and outbursts in public are caused by sensory overload. First of all, the police and other emergency workers need to be trained so they understand how sensory over sensitivity can cause meltdowns. Training of the police would help prevent these unfortunate incidents from being repeated.
Meltdowns are different than ordinary anger because the entire nervous system has gone into overload.
Deborah Lipsky — Managing Meltdowns using the S. Research shows that a minimum of 20 hours a week of one to one teaching is most effective. However, one hour a week is enough time for the professionals at the school to be mentors and trainers of parents and volunteers.
You need to observe the sessions with the professionals at the school so they can work with your child more effectively. Further information is in the answer to Question 1.
It is very likely that they are on the autism spectrum. I had a retired NASA space scientist walk up to me at an autism talk and he told me his grandson had just been diagnosed. He said half the engineers at NASA were probably on the spectrum. The autism spectrum is a broad spectrum that ranges from very severe to mild.
There is NO black and white dividing line between the autism spectrum and being so-called normal. They got a formal diagnosis because their marriages and relationships had many problems. This provided great insight. Older people who suspect that they are on the spectrum ask me all the time if they should get a formal diagnosis.
If their job and life is stable, I recommend keeping it off the electronic medical records. They can obtain understanding by reading books on autism and attending meetings. The only reason to get a formal diagnosis is to obtain services. Autism diagnosis is not precise like a diagnosis for tuberculosis.
It is a behavioral profile. In the DSM-5 the Asperger diagnosis merged into autism spectrum disorder. Do not get hung up on labels. Over the years, the doctors keep revising and changing the labels and their meaning.
Nobody is doing this with a diagnosis of malaria or strep infection. You either have these diseases or you do not. Autism spectrum is a broad spectrum that ranges from very severe to merging into being a personality variant at the far end of normal.
Basic sight words have to be learned by memorization, but ALL words have to be learned by specific examples. For example, to teach the word "down" you need lots of different examples. For the word "down" you could use the following: The airplane goes "down" and lands. I sat "down" in the chair. I laid "down" in the bed. I walked "down" the stairs. Use a similar approach for words such as "in", "on", "over", "under" or "beneath". An example you could use would be "beneath" the table, "beneath the tree", etc.
For words such as "it" and "the", you need to teach them with pure memorization with many specific examples of sentences with "it" and "the". There is no single turning point in life. There were a series of important events that helped me to develop. First of all, I got excellent early educational intervention and mother was always pushing me to do new things.
The second step was having a series of mentors, such as my aunt on the ranch, my high school science teacher, and good people in the livestock industry. The third essential step for me was antidepressant medication that stopped my constant anxiety and panic attacks. Many stress related health problems went away when I took low doses of antidepressants. Many people do not need medication, but for me it was essential.
I gradually developed and emerged. If you have an older child or adult who is not progressing, it is never too late to start. I met a year-old who had not learned to drive and he had been too sheltered by his family. When he got a job away from the family, a friend taught him to drive and he got his license. The child should ne stretched just outside their comfort zone.
This will help the individual to develop. There should be no sudden surprises, it is a gradual stretching and transitioning to different activities. In a new shelter, dog kennels should not face each other because it encourages barking.
Sound absorbent materials hung from the ceiling can help absorb noise. Some people have stated that a horse has to be taught everything twice due to its monocular vision. The reason why it has to be trained in many different locations is due to its specificity of thinking. Horses and other animals are sensory-based thinkers. An object, such as a car, may be perceived as two totally different things when viewed from the front or side. The front view looks different than the side view.
This is why it is so important to carefully and quietly expose horses to many new things. More and more questions are being asked about how to get a child to pass the high school Algebra requirement.
Algebra was impossible for me and it never made any sense. Education has fads and my path through higher education was saved by the finite math fad in the mid-sixties. Finite math was the required course instead of Algebra. Finite math consists of statistics, matrices and probabilities. With a lot of tutoring I was able to do finite math and get a decent grade of B.
I am really concerned that the Algebra requirement in screening many bright kids out. Algebra is not needed for careers in auto mechanics, drafting or industrial design. From many interviews with parents, teachers and individuals with ASD, there appears to be three patterns of difficulty. I have observed students who failed Algebra in High School but they were able to do Geometry and Trigonometry.
If the school will allow it, I recommend immediately putting a student who has failed Algebra into Geometry classes. If school officials tell you Algebra is the prerequisite for Geometry, tell them the Greeks invented Geometry first! You may need to buy the Geometry and Trigonometry books yourself to prove that you child can do other types of Math.
Another approach is getting into college or a technical school by going in the back door. If you show our students portfolio to the right professor; barriers like having to know Algebra may fall. The people who draw all the technical drawings for their highly complex equipment had two years community college degrees in drafting. Silicon Valley has no Algebra requirement.
If you can write good code, you will get hired. They do not care about Algebra. Below are some websites with free materials for teaching mathematics and programming. Just type the name into the Google search box. My mother, Eustacia Cutler, discusses the issues a child with autism has with the ability to understand context. Mother has many videos on her website: www.
Temple Grandin earns Dole Leadership Prize! The Outdoor Scientist Order Now! Brand new book now available! My Teenage Work Experience 13 years of age — Hand-sewed hems and took apart garments two afternoons a week for a freelance seamstress. I cleaned their stalls and fed them. In college, I interned one summer in a research laboratory. Transition to Work Ideally, the transition to work should be accomplished before a student with autism graduates from high school.
This can start with volunteer jobs at a church or community center when the child is 10 to 11 years old. Grandin ultimately went on to earn a PhD in animal science from the University of Illinois in She is currently a designer of livestock-handling facilities, consulting for major U. Grandin will speak at free public event at noon Nov. Seating is limited and is on a first-come, first-served basis. Recently, she answered some questions about the condition and her work with animals from writer Ruthann Richter and Sherril Green , DVM, PhD, professor of comparative medicine.
Grandin: Autism helped me understand animals because I think in pictures. Since animals do not have language, their memories have to be sensory-based instead of word-based.
In my early animal behavior work, I noticed that cattle often balked and refused to walk over shadows or pass a coat hung on a fence. In the s, it was a new idea to look at things that cattle were seeing. There is scientific evidence that animals think in pictures, and that this learning is very specific. When an animal is trained to tolerate one type of activity, it does not easily transfer to another similar activity.
For example, habituating a horse to tolerate the sudden opening of an umbrella does not transfer to a flapping tarp. Animals often get specific fear memories that are associated with aversive events. A horse that had alcohol thrown in its eyes during a veterinary procedure became afraid of black cowboy hats.
A white cowboy hat was safe and a black hat was scary. He was looking at a black cowboy hat when the alcohol was thrown.
The piece also appeared in his book about people with neurological disorders, An Anthropologist on Mars. The persistent media attention has given Grandin stature in the autism community, which has allowed her to advocate for high-functioning children with autism — much as her mother advocated for her — to be educated in line with their distinctive ways of learning and operating.
It's critical that autistic children get plenty of exposure to the world, Grandin said. We form concepts by putting things into specific categories. If you let kids sit in the basement playing video games for hours and hours, they're not going anywhere.
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