John Doyle: 'A Current Affair' Autism Story - VIDEO

Aussie comedy legend John Doyle, one half of duo 'Roy and HG', opened up tonight on 'A Current Affair' about his sister's incredibly difficult struggle with autism in a bid to help other Australian families.

TO WATCH THE WHOLE STORY, CLICK THIS LINK HERE.

The story also included fantastic profiles on other families with beautiful kids living with autism. I was particularly keen on seeing older kids and teens and young adults and how they do.

Ask any parent of a child with autism, and they will tell you this is the one thing they think about/worry about the most: how they will fare as young adults, how the world 'out there' will treat them.

John's comments at the end of the interview certainly made me cry openly, in front of my children.

My daughter gets it, had told me the report was going to be on, even encouraged me and was excited for me to watch it, knowing I'd get lots from it.

She is seven - can you believe such empathy from someone so young?

Her twin brother's autism has taught her a level of compassion I could only hope for.

And the clincher? At the end, when I explain to her that John's comments about his severely autistic sister has taught him so much in life, and what that all means, and that she herself is so empathic and wonderfully caring to her brother, she declares: "Mum, when I grow up, I want to help people with autism."

After crying all over again, I ask her why.

"Because I just want to help them, Mum."

Photo: Tracy Grimshaw and John Doyle. Source: Facebook

Australian Story: 'I am Jack' - ABC TV

Screening as part of ABC 'Mental As' – a week of distinctive programming on TV, radio and online for Mental Health Week - comes this ep of 'Australian Story.'

It's the story of radio and TV personality Ian ‘Dano’ Rogerson and his wife Nicole, who gave up their home, careers and an exciting lifestyle for the love of their son, Jack.

Ian Rogerson is a successful national broadcaster and media star who in the 1980s was best known for his professional partnership with Jonathan Coleman. As ‘Jono & Dano’, the pair had a 10-year run with top-rating radio shows and a string of national television programs. 

While Jono Coleman went on to forge a successful career in Britain, Ian Rogerson all but disappeared from the entertainment scene for more than a decade.

Five years ago Australian Story filled in the missing years.  Ian Rogerson had thrown in his career – “career suicide”, according to many in the industry – to care for Jack.

Diagnosed with autism as a toddler, Jack Rogerson was hyperactive, could barely speak and was unable to express ordinary affection. Like many parents of autistic children, the Rogersons soon discovered there was little help available. But they were determined to do whatever they could to enable their son to lead a mainstream lifestyle.

The turning point came when they met Elizabeth Watson, a therapist pioneering a treatment called Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA). 

When we first visited the Rogersons, Jack had just completed his primary school education.  Now, five years on, the family’s determination is being richly rewarded.

At 18, Jack has recently graduated from a mainstream high school and is looking forward to a career in the hospitality industry.

In this program, the Rogersons candidly discuss the highs and lows of Jack’s life and explain how he has been able to reach his full potential. 

"Jack’s progress shows what is possible," says Nicole Rogerson, who is now CEO of Autism Awareness Australia and also runs an early behavioural intervention centre in Sydney to help other children with autism.

"We know that kids in Australia, one in a hundred of them, have Autism Spectrum Disorder. The reality is the vast majority are not getting anywhere near best practice guidelines for treatment of Autism. So unless the government makes a genuine investment in this area, so many children are not going to reach their best outcome and I think that’s a tragedy." 

  

Also featured are the Rogersons’ younger son, Tom, high school director of students Adam Lewis, and family friends Angela Catterns and Jonathan Coleman, together with therapist Elizabeth Watson.

'Australian Story – I am Jack' will screen on Monday October 6, at 8pm on ABC.

UPDATED: if you missed the episode tonight, you can watch the whole ep right here.

Note from ABC: This episode was broadcast at 8:00pm on Monday 6 October 2014. It was published 59 minutes ago and is available until 9:01pm on 20 October 2014. File size approx. 144 MB

 

'Today' show: Dr Josie Barbaro and Nicole Rogerson - VIDEO

Did you catch the report this morning on Channel Nine's 'Today' show?

Dr Josie Barbaro, from La Trobe University, explained the new research in the cues they have established for early autism detection.

Here it is. Click on this link.

Why is early detection important? The longer you leave a diagnosis, the less you are engaging with early intervention, such as speech therapy, play groups, and occupational therapy.

These may not make much sense now if your child has not been diagnosed (but you suspect he or she has autism), but it will once you set off on that journey, and can later look back at the benefits of intervention when you see vast improvements over time in your child.

My fave part of this 'Today' clip? When Nicole Rogerson, founding director and CEO of Autism Awareness Australia and managing director of the Lizard Children's Centre (provider of early intervention programs for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder), says, "Don't listen to the lovely cousin Joyce who says, 'Look, Bill was 25 before he spoke, and now he's heading NASA!'"

Brilliant, Nicole.

I know EXACTLY what you mean by that.

When I got the diagnosis for my son Rafael at age 2 (although I know at 1 year and 8 months. Yes, I can pinpoint it), I vividly recall saying to my husband: "I don't want to hear any bullshit from anyone who says, 'Don't worry! He will grow out of it!'

"Here is the diagnosis. We have work to do. There is no point denying it, or listening to any stories about anyone's anybody. This is our son, and we know what we are doing."

Trust me, you become 'tiger mother' who has to roll up sleeves and get to work. Listening to well-meaning stories is okay, but don't let it derail what you know is the truth. As Nine's Lisa Wilkinson says in this interview, "trusting your gut."

Amen to that.

Bravo Dr Barbaro. Here's to more and more research into early detection into autism, and helping families to figure out what to do, sooner.

'The Real Housewives of New Jersey': Jacqueline Laurita's son says "I love you"

Okay, yeah.

I like reality TV.

I am, I will admit, maybe a little over it of late. Like, say, 18% less satisfied than usual.

And that defintely goes for my affection for 'The Real Housewives' franchise.

However! Sometimes, a clip from the show may surprise me with an actual message beyond demonstrating privileged lives and/or living beyond your means.

Like this beautiful clip from the current season of 'The Real Housewives of New Jersey', which features cast member Jacqueline Laurita's young son - and the first time he says 'I love you' to his mother in a very long time (he has regressed - he has said those precious words in the past).

It is touching and sweet and reminds parents of neurotypical kids why parents of kids with autism rejoice SO much in the little things. It tears me up every single time.

Watch the clip here.

What has your child with autism done recently that makes you jump for joy?

Carly Fleischmann: 'The Doctors'

Have you heard of Carly Fleischmann?

At the age of two, Carly was diagnosed with severe autism and an oral motor condition that prevented her from speaking. Doctors predicted she would never intellectually develop beyond the abilities of a small child. Although she made some progress after years of intensive behavioural and communication therapy, Carly remained largely 'unreachable.'

And then, at the age of ten... she had a breakthrough.

While working with her therapists Howie and Barb, Carly reached over to their laptop and typed in "HELP TEETH HURT".

Not surprisingly, everyone was astonished.

This was the beginning of Carly's journey toward self-realisation.

Carly first joined 'The Doctors' in September 2012. Here she is more on her role on the show:

Inspiring, huh?

60 Minutes Australia: iPad Apps for Autism

Did you watch the 60 Minutes Australia story on autism, and specifically, how severely autistic kids - and adults - can now communicate with those around them via particular autism apps on an iPad?

The story had me speechless during the entire thing... and then had me crying floods of tears afterwards, as my husband and I discussed what we'd seen.

"Compelling," he said. "Yes," I agreed through tears.

We then we spoke about how the past three years have been all about early intervention and meetings and more meetings and more goals set (and met!), and more meetings still, and yes, iPad apps. While our son Rafael can communicate, and speaks many words and complete phrases (he has a mild autism diagnosis) we have found the iPad an absolute godsend. We have watched on as he has quite literally had his brain unlocked, by learning how to communicate via this electronic tablet. It is wonderful to see.

(Here is a cute pic I just took of my boy on the iPad... he loves it).

And this story is equally wonderful, and hugely inspiring.

Here is a video link to the actual story, and below is the full transcript of the story:

http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8550313

Reporter: Michael UsherProducer: Phil Goyen

Imagine not being able to communicate with your own child, never knowing what they're thinking or how they feel.

That's what life's like every day for the parents of severely autistic children. And it's just as distressing for the kids who have no way of expressing themselves and often lash out in frustration.

But finally, there's a way. Just as computer apps have revolutionised our lives, they're also changing how autistic children interact with their world.

Now they're truly connecting with their mums and dads for the first time.

And if you think that's remarkable, consider this: world first technology has made it possible for doctors to see how autism affects the brain, providing hope that we'll one day find a cure to this most mysterious of conditions.

For more information on the The Lizard Centre, visit www.lizardcentre.com.

Full transcript:

GRACE: Hi, Mum.

ANNE: Hi, Gracey, thank you. How was your day?

GRACE: Good.

ANNE: It was good. How was your day?

ANNE: How was my day? My day was great, thank you. Good girl.

STORY – MICHAEL USHER: Nine-year-old Grace Masi has a lot to say.

ANNE: Excellent spelling, well done.

MICHAEL USHER: But frustratingly for her and mum Anne, she’s had no voice - until now.

GRACE: I want rice cake, please.

ANNE: You can have rice cake, what beautiful asking. For her not only to be able to read, but spell, and then edit what she wants to say, is really powerful. Oh, you want to play with the phone.

MICHAEL USHER: So she’s just punched in phone. She’s spelt that.

ANNE: Yeah, she just spelt that.

MICHAEL USHER: Grace is among the 30 per cent of people with severe autism who cannot speak. But she, and thousands like her, have had their lives transformed by computer tablets and specially-designed applications or apps. How much of a difference has it been?

ANNE: Oh, it’s huge. We’re seen her come out, we’ve seen her character, we’ve seen her cheekiness. You know, she’s a real trickster, and it just – she seems to have blossomed.

MICHAEL USHER: And she’s communicating with you.

ANNE: Absolutely.

MICHAEL USHER: She’s telling you what she wants.

ANNE: Yeah, you mightn’t always want to hear what she’s telling us, but that’s the same as any child.

MICHAEL USHER: As you’ll see tonight, groundbreaking technology is not only changing the lives of children, but adults as well. And an incredible new brain scan shows us for the first time what autism actually looks like. And it could transform therapy. Wow. And all this - it’s a psychedelic look, isn’t it? But these are all the cables of brain.

WALTER: These are all the cables. And this gives us an ability to look at that part of the brain and begin to understand what the meaning is.

MICHAEL USHER: There was no such technology when Joshua Hood was diagnosed with autism as a boy. So, for 25 years, he’s struggled to communicate with his mum Nancy, immersed in his own private world.

NANCY: If I could not understand it, he would search the room and he’d be like trying to see if there was a picture of what he was talking about.

MICHAEL USHER: You were communicating through charades.

NANCY: Through charades, yeah, and you know, can you point to it. It was like he was speaking a foreign language, and I was like, I don’t speak that language.

MICHAEL USHER: What day is your birthday? But two years ago, a window into Joshua’s world was opened by an ipad.

JOSHUA: August 25th.

MICHAEL USHER: That’s your birthday. The computer tablet, with its downloaded apps, did what so many therapists had tried - it gave Josh a voice.

MICHAEL USHER: Can you put in a sentence how much you like this ipad?

JOSHUA: Josh loves 1000.

MICHAEL USHER: You love your ipad 1000 - that’s a lot. That’s a lot. What does it help you do?

JOSHUA: Music class. Education room, music class.

MICHAEL USHER: It helps you with school.

NANCY: It was almost like that button you hit on the computer screen, and all of a sudden it was just kind of like, wow, I can communicate with him, and now he can communicate back to me, and we each understand what the other one’s saying.

MICHAEL USHER: You’re actually finally having a conversation with your son.

NANCY: I am. I am, yeah.

MICHAEL USHER: But the evidence is more than anecdotal or wishful thinking by parents and teachers. World-first research at this school in Toronto Canada is providing hard evidence that apps and ipads can unlock the hidden thinking of children with autism. The study has taken two years, and its success is encouraging to say the least.

RHONDA: It’s a massive breakthrough, because for the first time, these children can control their environment to an extent that you know, they never have been able to before.

MICHAEL USHER: Professor Rhonda McEwen from Toronto University has spent the past two years working with teachers and students here, carefully studying just how, and why, apps can be so useful for kids with autism. What is it about this device that breaks down that barriers, and lets these children communicate for the first time?

RHONDA: My research is showing that it seems to be the multi-sensory aspect of it, cause and effect that’s so immediate. I can use my finger to touch something and immediately there’s an effect.

MICHAEL USHER: Take a look at just how immediate it is, as young Jennifer is asked to identify numbers on the sheet of paper.

STACIE: Where’s number 1? Where’s number 1?

MICHAEL USHER: She’s distracted - can’t concentrate.

STACIE: Jennifer, looking.

MICHAEL USHER: Then, with the ipad, an incredible difference.

STACIE: Good looking, Jennifer.

MICHAEL USHER: Now Jennifer is holding her attention. So too with Wallace. His frustration with this wooden puzzle is palpable. But bring in the ipad and he solves the puzzle time and time again.

STACIE: Alright! You did it! It’s shocking. It’s jaw open, no words can explain, when you see someone do something that you didn’t think they could do.

MICHAEL USHER: Their teacher here at the The Beverly School is Stacie Carroll. What’s the biggest change that you’ve noticed when the kids start using these ipads?

STACIE: The biggest change is level of student engagement - how long I can hold their attention in a given activity. When you see a child who has a lot of behaviours and is non-verbal sit down at a tablet and correctly identify 20 nouns that you didn’t think that they knew, it reminds you to never, never make an assumption of what a person knows or what a person can do.

JASPER: I want pizza.

MICHAEL USHER: Have you been able to measure how much more focused and engaged these children are using the apps?

STACIE: After a month and a half, all of a sudden we had children who were attending for six seconds move to 20 seconds, and then to almost 40 seconds, and so it was a very fast exponential shift.

MICHAEL USHER: The ipads may not work for everyone, but they are changing lives in the most unexpected ways. Amanda Williams’ son Nathan was one of the children involved in the study.

AMANDA: What happened? Did you turn it off?

MICHAEL USHER: Watch as he matches vegetables, showing thought planning, and motor skills - something he couldn’t clearly demonstrate until now.

STACIE: That is huge. That’s a skill that would normally take a long time to try and teach a child with autism to do. It’s phenomenal, it’s phenomenal.

MICHAEL USHER: But what’s even more phenomenal is that since using the ipad, Nathan’s often erratic behavior - so typical of someone with autism - has decreased dramatically.

STACIE: The biggest thing is just in his demeanor. It’s made him much calmer. The tablet has really helped to calm him, and make him feel more secure and more confident, and that’s because it’s his. It’s his to control.

MICHAEL USHER: While apps are transforming the way people live with autism, new technology is revolutionizing our medical understanding of the condition. The University of Pittsburgh’s Dr Walter Schneider is using a computer program, developed primarily to help people with traumatic brain injury, to work out why so many severely autistic people can’t speak.

WALTER: So this is all the cables of the brain, we can go into and segment a particular cable.

MICHAEL USHER: These psychedelic pictures represent the intricate wires in a brain. And for the very first time, we can actually see what autism looks like. On the left is someone with autism, on the right, someone without. Look at that. Wow. It has a whole lot more of these fibers and cables going on.

WALTER: Right.

MICHAEL USHER: These particular fibers make it possible see something and then say what it is. But in this brain of a woman with autism, that connection between seeing and saying is a jumbled, wiry mess. The message gets lost in the tangle. Do you know where all of these extra fibers in her brain are going?

WALTER: We do know where they’re going in the sense of which piece of the brain. We don’t yet know enough about the brain to actually know what each of those pieces are.

MICHAEL USHER: The hope is, now that we can see autism, we will one day be able to repair it - by focusing on the damaged part of the brain and rewiring it through therapy.

WALTER: Autism is an extremely difficult situation for the parents. Many of them will go through decades of misdiagnosis. If we can get a biological marker saying your child has this subset of problems in the wiring, we have a much better handle on trying to do interventions, to give them some ability to communicate, and have a more normal developmental sequence.

NANCY: What would you like, Josh?

JOSHUA: I want a drink of Coke, in a can.

MICHAEL USHER: Back in Boston, Nancy and her younger son Jimmy would love to actually see which part of Joshua’s brain is affected. But for now, just ordering his lunch via the ipad is a breakthrough - unimaginable only a few years ago.

JOSHUA: I want fish macaroni.

NANCY: I never thought that anything was ever going to come along that you’d be able to get to communicate with him, that he would be able to talk to you and carry on a conversation. It was just -

MICHAEL USHER: You never thought that was going to happen?

NANCY: No.

MICHAEL USHER: Have you got any questions for me? I’ve been asking you all the questions, do you want to ask me a question?

JOSHUA: Cool guy.

MICHAEL USHER: Me? I’m a cool guy? Man, Joshua, you are the best, that’s the best thing that’s ever been said to me. Thank you very, very much. You know what, I think you’re a cool guy too. For so long, the world of autism has been a total mystery. Now, many questions are being answered, by the very people who have been locked in for so long. And for Anne Masi, and her daughter Grace, they can now explore life together in a whole new way.

ANNE: I’m proud of her, you know. Because her determination, and what she puts into each day, is massive, so for me it’s a blessing.

What are your experiences of iPads and electronic tablets, and how have they assisted your child's development? Feel free to comment below.