Marianne here. I am getting lots of emails from parents who are working with different kinds of treatments and therapies. While not all treatments work for all people, it is good to be informed and know what options are available. With that in mind, I am encouraging folks who would like to share their experiences with different therapuetic models to write about them here. The usual disclaimers apply.

Treatment and Therapies

Hi Marianne, Thank you very much for what you did with the movie and this forum. My son is 5 and asperger and I can just see Adam as an older version of him. I recognize every single feeling and issue you brought up in the movie already and we have only had a diagnosis for 3 months...the "endless"ness of this is so daunting... I am also glad to have a forum to discuss treatment. I am finding it extremely frustrating to set up a "best practices" and "beast individual fit" treatment for my son. I know my son needs a combination of ABA, OT, and RDI. With the ABA folks it is mostly ABA or nothing (a bit like religious fundamentalism) and they seem to put down OT and RDI. I hear that RDI teaching wants you to abandon ABA all together....and you can't seem to train OT therapists and RDI therapists for your home program like you do with ABA anyway and there are no affordable treatment options. So what are working parents to do? We have to work harder to make the money for all this, at the same time, we have a full time job trying to develop and manage a treatment centre in our homes. The polarized environment where different camps don't work together makes it that much harder for the parents to find and deliver the appropriate treatment for their kids. Somewhere in there we have to find time to actually be parents to our autistic and non autistic kids! I would love to hear how other parents manage. Thanks, Ms. Nobody