"Recovery" from Autism: Fantasy and Reality

So it's clear, this is what I have to say about the controversial topic of "recovery from autism."

With the publication yesterday of a new book, The Horse Boy: A Father's Quest to Heal His Son---in which a former horse trainer, Rupert Isaacson, takes his autistic son Rowan to Mongolia to ride horses and meet shamans---I suspect the notion of "recovery from autism" will be batted about at least a bit. An April 14th New York Times article about the book by Motoko Rich notes that publishers are hoping the book will be a bestseller:

Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown, said booksellers had already placed orders high enough to justify a first printing of 150,000 copies.

“It just touched so many points of interest — helping to heal an autistic child, traveling under difficult circumstances,” Mr. Pietsch said. “Most of all, I felt this was a story entirely driven by the chances you’ll take for love, and I felt, who’s not going to want to read this story when they hear the outlines of it?”

Sharon Fennell, who writes The Voyage about "life, family, autism and home-education," is quoted:

In writing about Rowan’s experiences, Mr. Isaacson is careful to avoid the word “cure,” but writes of an amazing “recovery” and “healing.” That has some prospective readers wary. Sharon Fennell, a mother of three in Belfast, Northern Ireland, whose 8-year-old son is autistic, said she had read newspaper excerpts and reviews in Britain, where the book came out last month.

She questioned whether Rowan’s progress could be attributed to what happened in Mongolia or to just typical changes that all children go through. “To make this story more engaging, it has to be portrayed as something miraculous and fantastical, because ordinary, everyday, slow-plodding progress does not read so well,” Ms. Fennell said.

I share Sharon's wariness. As I wrote in Autism Vox on September of 2007 when I first heard about Isaacson's book,

Monogolia via horseback sounds magnificent and I suspect Charlie would enjoy riding a horse, around a ring here in New Jersey or on the steppes of another country in a different latitude. One worries somewhat if parents of autistic children might start to seek out not only horseback riding lessons, but travel to Mongolia or to the Kalahari and seek out shamans—-just as many travel to conferences and seek out certain medical practitioners, for their autistic children. For myself, for Charlie, we seem to do well enough when we travel close to home and try to make the most of what is in front of us.

I'm also more than a bit wary about the shamans in The Horse Boy. Some still believe that autistic children have been "possessed"; in July of 2007, an usher at the Cherry Hill Christian Center in Bloomington, Indiana, was charged with confinement and misdemeanor battery in the attempted exorcism of an autistic teenager (and go to today's Herald Tribune Times to read about the trial of Eddie Uyesugi, the usher). Put the words "autistic child," "shaman," and "healing" into a paragraph----a press release---and certain misguided notions about autism are going to start swirling in people's heads, and 'round the blogosphere/twitterverse/'net.

Feature film rights for The Horse Boy have been optioned by Mark Ordesky, an executive producer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Ileen Maisel, an executive producer of The Golden Compass, which suggests that a movie of The Horse Boy will have an epic quantity making full use of sweeping scenarios of the steppes and---keeping in mind the shamans (and there are shamans, and witches, in His Dark Materials, the trilogy in which The Golden Compass is the first book)---seems that might be some touches of magic in the movie. If you've read those two fantasy trilogies (I have), you'll know that, while (to paraphrase) the forces of good and light prevail of the forces of evil and dark, the ending is bittersweet, and tinged with loss and separation and sorrow.

I've yet to read The Horse Boy to see what its covers hold so, beyond expressing my reservations about talking about "healing" a child from autism---because focusing on "recovery" from autism twists discussions in endless circles about causes and treatments, rather than about lifelong needs and supports and services---I'll just say that life as some mixture of light and loss and goodness and dark----that has been what our journey with Charlie has been like. There've been many epic moments when I felt I was witnessing about the grandest thing the universe could provide---Charlie riding his bike on a street in a midsize north Jersey town, Jim pedaling proudly behind---and it's all been real, no fantasy, and the result not of magic but of hard work, of sweat, some tears, and love.

All of which have been very, very real.