Tag: representation

img_4504-7835127
Disability

Autism Researchers You Should Know: Dr. Deb Karhson

Posted on by

Dr. Deb Karhson is a postdoc at Stanford University, where she researches biology-rooted therapeutic approaches to improving autistic quality of life. She is also the “baby sib” of an older autistic brother. We are looking forward to having Dr. Karhson as a featured researcher during this week’s #AutIMFAR chat at IMFAR, the International Meeting for Autism Research. Even better, we got to  interview her beforehand: Dr. Deb Karhson [image: Smiling Sri Lankan/Nigerian-American woman with long curly black hair pushed to one side, wearing glasses & hoop earrings.] TPGA: Tell us about your research: What is your focus? Dr. Deb Karhson: Broadly my current work is focused on biomarker discovery and drug development in for autism, which simply put means I’m looking for objective, testable, biological signatures of autism and whether candidate biomarkers can be leveraged for biotherapeutic development. And specifically, that means I’m interested in understanding the role of the…

Disability

Autism, empathy, and violence: One of these things doesn’t belong here

Posted on by

Some news coverage in the last 24 hours has mentioned autism in the context of the tragedy in Connecticut, particularly referencing Aspergers or “high-functioning” autism. Talking heads have brought up the “empathy” factor when discussing autism, and I’d like to set some of the record on that straight. Empathic ability comes in two forms. One is the social ability to recognize the emotion someone is feeling by following social cues, subtle vocal fluctuations, and other nonverbal communications. Psychopaths, for example, might be quite good at reading people, at applying this cognitive empathy and then possibly exploiting it. Autistic people, on the other hand, generally tend not to be that great at this kind of recognition in non-autistic people. After all, the hallmark of autism is difficulty navigating this territory and registering the meaning of a nonverbal language that is unfamiliar to them. Worth noting, non-autistic people also seem to struggle…

pcdw_nova2b_mag-7367599
Disability

How One Mother with Asperger Syndrome Grieves Sandy Hook Elementary Victims

Posted on by

Today, December 14, 2012, I got a text about four minutes before I walked into my son’s school to play the piano for a winter program. The text said that 18 (then up to 20) children had been killed at an elementary school, not unlike my son’s. Children the age of the children I would be making music with in a few minutes. I was in shock. The texts I was receiving came from my dear brother, who has small children of his own. Since I was not online or near any media sources, he wrote to me what I was seeing on breaking news, and we texted together, as parents, about how horrible, how unthinkable, this heinous act was. His children were with him; mine was in school, and I had to resist an overwhelming impulse to sign him out and leave. Then I had to go into the…

tumblr_m1l429n7tz1r13h5ho1_r1_500-4876339
Disability

Someone Who Moves Like You

Posted on by

Julia Bascom juststimming.wordpress.com Buckle up kids, because this gets long and personal. So, a long time (~seven months) ago, in a galaxy far, far away (rural New Hampshire) there lived a sad little girl (or KICKASS ADULT) named Julia who just so happened to have a friend named C. C and Julia had spent the past several months talking too much altogether about the TV series Glee, and C had begun to push for Julia to add a second show to her plate. Some brightly-colored sitcom about derelicts going to a community college. And Julia was skeptical, but C was persistent, for she knew that if Julia liked the first two minutes, Julia would have a new favorite show. See, C knew something that Julia did not. C knew that Abed Nadir existed. Now, there are a couple of things you, gentle reader, must know about Julia in order to…