#869 Wednesday 16 April

A friend wrote to me recently saying:

  Does her anxiety come from difficulty to communicate or is it more than that ... like not understanding how “our” world operates on a larger scale.  Will she not catch up in development as the therapy progresses?

My reply was:

Anxiety .... I think that the anxiety is not 'caused' by factors such as you mention .... in a normal person, anxiety has causes .... but in an auty one the anxiety is a physical condition .... which can be triggered by external causes but the 'cause' need not actually occur.  The anxiety just is.  That's why it responds to medication .... because it's a chemical imbalance in the brain.

She will probably have this problem all her life and if she becomes sufficiently self-aware as she grows older, then she may be able to manage the problem to a point where she can remove the artificial aid (that is the medication). 

The therapy does not help in this area.  There are two aspects to her autism ...
1) too much Anxiety  .... which shows are melt-downs and lack of ability to control emotions
2) too little Concentration ... or ability to think ... or awareness of the outside world ..... which shows as stims and difficulty with learning and with social cues and responses.

Therapy does nothing with the first but is vital for the second.

The therapy cannot happen if both aspects are not controlled.  Lovan for the anxiety and Risperdal for the ability to think.
  Without control of melt-downs, therapy simply can't begin.  Without control of stimming, therapy cannot "get through" to her.  I have a visual image of her mind without Risperdal .... as being Kaylia inside a bubble and constantly whirling round and round.  The Risperdal breaks that cycle and allows her to actually be aware of questions ... of outside events.  This then allows her to begin learning. 

Because this ability to be aware of outside events had almost totally stopped when she was around two or three, she never learned "how to learn" .... this is what the therapy is doing .... teaching her how to learn and teaching her the skills that she missed out on in her early childhood.