My Childhood Autism Treatment
Loving parents and/or best friends are the best treatment for autism. It requires a ‘magic compatibility’ though. Otherwise it will just be humongous amounts of loving, patient effort (brute-force love). The worse the autism, the narrower the niche, even microscopic for the severely autistic, which are more likely to need more and more brute-force love (or eventual giving up and putting away for containment). Magic compatibility is better, so promoting best-friendships is definitely better when the autistic kid gets older. I’m fully autistic but had a loving patient mother who was able to wiggle out state services (in the late 70s after moving from AZ to CT) and had a very few close friends in life (though I was a total socially non-functional reject most of my grade school years), combined with a libertarian father that hates any ’system’ and hates taxes and believes that anything can be disciplined away (which that part was mostly negated by my mother; but my father’s discipline was always structured, consistent, and not emotion-driven unlike my mother who was inconsistent, and mood dependent), so I had early intervention that was limited to removing self-injourous stimming, developing language and very basic emotion and world-awareness skills.
Right now though I am fully autistic on DSM-IV terms, I function and appear to the outside world as Asperger’s Syndrome. I think my official diagnosis is PDD-NOS because my mother keeps telling me i am ‘atypical’ which is a layterm for PDD-NOS, so probably at official diagnosis time probably at age 5-6, they were able to bribe-away my stimming behavior, accompanied by some clever fibbing (definitly by my father’s order). I think though fully autistic because i do stimm a lot at home in the form of hand flapping, but object-fixation is minimal – I don’t knock on the fridgerator for hours anymore nor stare at driers all day. I may fondle or stare at an object like a pen or a textured object for way too long if I am very bored or very stressed. This behavior was probably conditioned out prior to my offical diagnosis and was easy to hide from a clinician when I was 5-6 and is very minimal right now.
I think the high compatibility close/best friend interface is the only social interface I can function with without large amounts of effort and determination. I have 0 ability in group conversation without reverting to a sub-conversation or emulation via non-rapport broadcasting mode only on intellectual context and I can’t navigate in any kind of social clique. So if you have a high-function autistic / PDD-NOS or an asperger’s kid I would try to maximize the odds of him/her finding a best friend (in a structured environment is ok, but the friendship connection has to be as direct and no-obsticle — etiquette, cultural beaurocracy — as possible) and then once such a friendship forms on its own (not an teacher or parent hand-hold maintained relationship) do all that you can to keep it together. Then maybe auxiliary branch-off friendships will form, all mostly on a 1-1 or very small group interface.
