Temple Grandin by Annette Wood

Author:Annette Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

TWO SEVERE AUTISTICS

“Autistic children seem ‘wild’ for a lot of different reasons,” Temple explains. “A huge problem for autistic children is scrambled processing. The world isn’t coming in right. So young autistic children end up looking wild for the same reason Helen Keller looked wild: parents and teachers can’t get through to them.”1

The families of Jan (my sister) and Neil (who we will discuss later in this chapter) include older children who had developed normally, so their parents knew what normal development was like. I’m sure neither set of parents knew anything about “scrambled processing.” My sister Jan was born in 1954. Our parents had never known anybody like her. Neil was born in 1994. He had four older neurotypical siblings. His parents were baffled, too.

“Autistic people have so much natural fear and anxiety that when they’re young they can be like little wild animals. For years people thought autistic people were unreachable because they were uncontrollable. A lot of people think that the feral children we’ve heard about over the years were actually autistic,” said Temple.2

We certainly knew about the “wild” part. Jan was large for her age, wiry, wiggly, and fast. She had blonde braids, brown eyes, and olive skin, tanned from her beloved outdoors. Mama, who only weighed 110 pounds, said, “Jan was always going in every direction, except the one she was supposed to. I knew I had to have my running shoes on to keep up with her.”

At that time, we had no understanding of the topsy-turvy world she lived in. We did know Jan had autism. But even that much knowledge was rare for that time and place. We lived on a farm in Kansas. Jan had been diagnosed in Chicago in 1958 when she was four years old. We and most of the rest of the world had no idea what autism meant. Leo Kanner had discovered it only eleven years before Jan’s birth.

According to Temple, a high fever at a young age is one of the causes of autism. Jan experienced a high fever at the age of eight and a half months. Though we didn’t know it at the time, Jan probably had encephalitis.

Temple also says that autism is caused by “a complex inheritance of many interacting factors.” There are often milder traits in siblings, parents, and other close relatives. Some traits that seem to be associated with autism are intellectual giftedness, shyness, learning disabilities, depression, anxiety, and alcoholism.3

Many of our relatives displayed one or more of these traits. Jan was the only one with autism.

Jan recovered slowly from her fever, able only to drink 7Up for a couple weeks after her illness. For many days she was pale and weak. Soon after she recovered, we noticed a change in her personality. “Jan stopped talking and concentrated on walking,” my mother wrote in her baby book.

And walk she did. This active, into-everything child disregarded personal harm. She crawled on top of whatever she could reach, ran into the street, and disappeared when no one was watching her.

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