Autism

This op-ed piece in the New York Times caught my attention and reminded me of a day I spent subbing in the autism program at Clark High School in Las Vegas. It was interesting to note the degrees of function that the kids in that program had -- autism appears to be a very wide-ranging dysfunction, judging from that small sample. When it came time for kids in the program to study English, some were struggling with recognizing letters and others were writing essays on the merits of a literary author (I forget whom.) This essay deals with autism as it affects adults who have low function. As I understand it, the difference between autism and mental retardation is that mental retardation is a technical term referring to a child's IQ scores only, whereas autism encompasses a wider range of difficulties -- communicating, especially. The question I have about this article is how low-functioning adults can be reached when, as the author describes at the end of the piece, they have a wide range of behavioral problems.