Grant Times Article

[Guest guest]

Thought I would post my response to Grant's article here too.

To the Editor:

If there were an " anti-Pulitzer " prize for gross ignorance in journalism,

Grant would have my vote. It does not appear that she based her

piece on any research whatsoever. Thank you, Miss Grant, for making life

just that bit harder for families of children with autism - well done. Now

when some spiteful person ventures the corrosive opinion that the behaviour

of an autistic child is the fault of the parent, they will have your piece

to refer to for a dubious authority. Nevermind that you insisted that there

are legitimate cases of autism out there, and that those poor benighted

souls deserve our every sympathy - in the next breath you put the rise in

the incidence of this dreadful and mysterious (and underresearched,

undertreated) condition down to bad parenting, and a modern culture of

excusing bad behaviour and grubbing for disability benefit. If there is a

health authority out there which is handing out diagnoses like sweeties, I

would like to know about it, and you should report on it. It took my local

health authority over a year, and quite a lot of effort within that time, to

diagnose my son. Believe me, autism was not the diagnosis I was hoping to

hear. I wanted to be told it was something he would grow out of, or at

worst, something for which there was a recognised treatment. The real

scandal is not that the diagnosis was reached too easily, but that we were

dropped by our health authority after the diagnosis was made: no therapy

whatsoever was offered to my son. My husband and I have had to pay

privately for all of his speech and behavioural therapy and his medical

treatment for his gut problems. As to his behaviour, we are lucky: his

autism does not manifest itself in the meltdowns which would surely see him

excluded from school. If Miss Grant would actually like to be of some use,

and possibly make amends for the gratuitous injury she has done with her

thoughtless article, she might try doing a piece on the gut and immune

system issues of children with autism. My son did not have the MMR, you

see. Something, or a combination of factors, is causing the physical

manifestations of this condition, and although it is probably environmental,

we just don't know yet what it is. Please let's take this discussion

forward and actually try to do something positive for these children. They

are afflicted enough.

Yours sincerely,