Where Do I Start?

Finding treatments and therapies to address specific autism-related problems

Many of our members, as well as numerous parents, clinicians and researchers throughout the world have found that addressing underlying problems in children and adults with autism, including treating comorbid or underlying medical problems, can lead to improvements in a wide range of symptoms, including sleep, irritability, aggression, and self-stimulatory, repetitive and obsessive behaviours. Some have observed improvements in the core symptoms of autism including in some cases, a complete recovery from autism and subsequent loss of autism diagnosis.

Treating the child, NOT their autism label

1. Assess the situation

If interventions are to be successful, you must first take some time to figure out what your child’s specific problems and difficulties are. Ask yourself which areas need tackling, and in what order, for your child to have improved quality of life, better executive functioning, self-care and life skills. Assessment will include careful observation and recording of behaviours and symptoms. You perhaps might ask other adults to do the same. You may seek testing through health care professionals.

2. Research interventions – why no single intervention for ‘autism’ will be right for EVERY child

When trying to find right help for your child it is best, for once, to ignore the diagnosis of autism, or any other behaviourial diagnosis for that matter. This is important because diagnostic labels are widely encompassing characterizations that say little about the specific difficulties your individual child is facing in their everyday life. For example, a person with a diagnosis of autism might have fluent or even age-advanced speech, but very poor social skills. Another individual with the same diagnosis might actively seek contact and company of others, but be unable to communicate or follow the pace of neuro-typical interaction and be unable to join in with peers. Some individuals with autism diagnosis are very advanced academically, while some are severely impaired and unable to learn alphabet or understand numbers. Some people with autism do not appear intellectually disabled, but will struggle with poor attention or memory, which badly affects their academic performance.

If you have met a number of people with autism you will know that aside from a wide range of severity of core symptoms, most will also struggle with other autism-related problems like anxiety, challenging behaviours including aggression and self-harm, sensory integration issues, sleep difficulties, severe executive dysfunction, obessesive compulsive behaviours, and more. In addition to the wide range in core areas of an autism diagnosis, there can be a wide range of other challenges.

It goes without saying that diagnosis or not, everyone is an individual – and needs to be treated as such. Research and lived experience have shown that autism is not a homogenous condition; therefore, it is not surprising that interventions will have different results for different people.

 3. Dig beyond surface symptoms and diagnostic labels – everything is caused by ‘something’!

Always remember that the diagnosis of autism is given on the basis of surface symptoms alone. Having a diagnosis of autism does not explain anything. A child or adult will be given a diagnosis of autism because they have communication difficulties or restricted and repetitive interests and behaviours severe enough to be considered a disability–not the other way around.

In other words, autism is only a descriptive word, it does not cause those symptoms but is those symptoms. The same is true for comorbid conditions common to autism – none of these are caused by the label of autism. Rather, all the symptoms and difficulties that an individual has will have an underlying reason, and that underlying reason is not ‘autism’. Those underlying reasons can be of biological or psychological nature, or both.

To illustrate this point, let’s consider some examples of biological reasons for challenging behaviour common in autism:

If an individual with autism is having aggressive, irritable, oppositional or obsessive behaviours, those behaviours will not be because of his or her ‘autism’. As we have already established the term autism is just a shorthand for a list of diagnostic symptoms and therefore cannot be the cause of anything. Instead, those challenging behaviours will be a result of an underlying problem. That problem could be medical: undiagnosed seizure activity in the brain can cause aggressive and self-harming behaviours, and so can disturbances or sudden fluctuations in blood sugar and glucose, or pain from conditions such as reflux, indigestion, and ear infections, making it very important to always rule out medical conditions especially when symptoms are sudden-onset or suddenly change in intensity.

Another perspective on challenging behaviours can focus on sensory processing dysfunction. The majority of children and adults diagnosed with autism suffer from sensory processing dysfunction–the difficulty of processing and integrating the auditory, visual or tactile information coming from the environment.

When a person is not able to process incoming information from the environment in ‘real time’ (or at the same speed as a neurotypical person) it can be a true struggle understanding and reacting to normal speech, or to signals and gestures coming from other people. To an individual with such sensory processing problems the world, and the people in it, can appear too fast, too loud, too jarring, overwhelming and ultimately intolerable.

This inability to process and understand what others are saying or doing in real time can in turn cause the individual to become anxious and avoidant when amongst peers, and to seek solace in obsessive and repetitive behaviours, or alternatively to become frustrated and aggressive towards themselves and others

4. Look at your child’s behaviours as possible symptoms

Ask yourself about the issues that appear most significant for your child. Does your child crave/exclude certain foods? Engage in certain unusual behaviours (chewing shirts or licking non-food items, for example)? Have noticeable physical symptoms like red ears, rashes, eczema, pushing on the gut, very dry hair, excessive ear wax, white tongue, spinning, unexplained laughing, irregular bowel movements? Have erratic or abnormal sleep patterns? Have obvious sensory issues (covering ears for example)? Does your child become aggressive at certain times? Avoid certain places?

Often, speaking with other adults who are involved in your child’s life will help you to remember or notice things that might otherwise be overlooked. You need to look at the situation with fresh eyes and with a determination to discover. By documenting as much about your child as possible, you will find patterns that will help you make sound decisions about treatment. This information will also help any health care practitioner you choose to work with.

5. Find the most suitable interventions and practitioners

Once you have started observing your child carefully to gather information, you will be better enabled to seek out interventions and practitioners. Our publication ‘Treatments and Therapies for Autism’ will provide you with a quick overview of just some of the available interventions, but those do not constitute recommendations – always be sure to do further research and ask deeper questions to establish if an intervention is suitable and appropriate for your own child.

Practitioners include medical doctors, nutritionists, occupational and sensory therapists, speech and language therapists, acupuncturists, homeopaths and other alternative therapists.

We suggest parents start with finding a knowledgeable medical practitioner, with experience in treating the health problems of children on the autistic spectrum. Such practitioners will assess your child’s presenting symptoms and help investigate and rule out possible underlying causes. They give guidance and impart knowledge based on clinical experience, and generally help parents to treat their children safely and with greater efficacy. Many parents treating their children work with one or sometimes more practitioners.