Travel to Foreign Lands and Places

So here's a treatment for autism, yet unproven, known to the world only by the report of a parent.

Said parent takes his autistic child to a foreign country where, in an environment where everything---the language, look of the buildings, the customs and the food and the whole way of living----is different, the child does very well and starts to change and grow. On returning back home to the US, the child has clearly changed; there's a sort of transformation, and animals are involved.

I'm talking about Rupert Isaacson's recently published The Horse Boy, right----a book that's been attracting its share of attention from the media and many others, with self-advocates and figures in the autism community including scientists and doctors something less than certain about the validity of going to Mongolia and riding horses and meeting shamans (and being whipped by one) as the reason for Rowan Isaacson's being "healed"?

You can read those opinions here. There's a general sense in the comments that, while going to Mongolia is beyond the means of most and that actually testing such a "treatment" is highly difficult, a "change in the environment" and the experience of the new that a part of travel for anyone may very have been beneficial effects. Certainly travel is often an arduous undertaking for individuals on the spectrum precisely for those reasons, hence some recent discussion here about airline access; today's Sun describes the plight of a 16-year-old Thomas Hill, who is unable to go back to Britain from Australia. Thomas has Asperger's Syndrome and he and his mother remain in Australia, while his father and sister have returned to the UK; Thomas, it's reported, has tried twice by plane and once by ship to leave, and been unable to.

While Jim and I have figured out how to make air travel fairly smooth for Charlie (we fly out to California every December to see my family), we've felt a lot less sure about being able to take him to places he's not as familiar with or never been to after he had a tremendously hard time in California that was the start of Charlie's woes in 2009. Since going to Greece back in March, I've wanted very much to go back with Jim and Charlie. I really don't know if Charlie would ever be able to go on such a trip---aside from a 13 hour plane ride, what would he do to find himself in a totally different country and culture where the language spoken is different, the food all different, and nowhere a place he's seen before?

Ok, I know a trip to Greece is an extravagance and life will go on fine, thank you, without Charlie going. But I still like to contemplate the thought of taking Charlie there (and to Ireland, and Spain, and Italy....). I first got a sense of what taking a child like Charlie to a foreign country might do from reading anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker's account of his daughter Isabel in France in Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism. There's an excerpt from the book here in which Grinker describes a young Isabel's love of a book, Linnea in Monet's Garden, about a Swedish girl who travels to the painter Monet's house and gardens in Giverny. Isabel took the book everywhere with her and---after Grinker and his wife, Joyce, read her the book---started sounding out the words and reading. As Grinker writes,

Three years later, when Isabel was eight, she rediscovered the book. Joyce bought an animated version, and Isabel became hooked on that too. We took her to the National Gallery of Art, to see one of Monet's paintings of the famous water lily pond and the Japanese bridge. Isabel stared at it from around a corner, peering at it only briefly, then darting away, seeming to take in the entirety of the image in a split second.

Sometimes she stood on the shiny, circular, marble coffee table in our living room, dressed in a black tee-shirt, sun dress, black shoes and hat, just like Linnea, and said "Japanese bridge." As she focused on the surface of the table, I imagined she saw in it Monet's double garden, the pool with its water lilies and the reflection of the sky and landscape. She was uncharacteristically calm at these moments, a calm that would not return until August of the next year, when we took her to Giverny to spend the day - as Linnea - in Monet's Garden.

We went to Giverny to help Isabel make the leap from the book's finite words to other realities like French culture and language. The place was a marvel. In the late morning, after a rain shower, the garden was overwhelmingly green. Like Monet's painting at the National Gallery, the land and the water blurred together at the edge of the mirror Isabel knew so well. She raced toward the Japanese bridge and stood at its apex for an hour.

She seemed mesmerized and was more serene than I had ever seen her - like Monet, I thought, who must have watched the pond for hours waiting for the just the right impression to inspire him. Did Isabel notice how the pond changed with every new wind or movement of the clouds? There were carpets of flowers, streaks of color that she probably never noticed because Giverny was, for her, the repetition of a script. Dressed like Linnea, she sat on the same steps Linnea did, picked up her right foot and stretched her arms above her head in joy the same way Linnea did and, like Linnea, took a small green leaf to press inside a book. She was getting her own impressions, but I think they were impressions of completeness: the book, the video, and now reality.

Call the trip extravagant but a single day in Giverny would transform her, and in a way we never anticipated. She started saying words in French, so often that we enrolled her in a French class. It was like speech therapy, simple conversation in pretend social settings, and she blossomed. I had to sit with her to keep her on task, but she absorbed the vocabulary and pronunciation with amazing speed. After the second week, the teacher asked me if Isabel's mother was French.

Then, one day, she approached a stranger, walking his dog, and asked, "Le chien est gentil?" I translated - "Is your dog nice?"- he nodded yes, and Isabel, who had been terrified of dogs for years, touched the top of its head.

Few experts would ever suggest that a child with autism study a foreign language. But it worked for her. She applied the lessons learned in French class to new situations, at home and in public. The people she spoke to - the cashier at the grocery store or the man walking the dog on the street - didn't speak French, but it didn't matter to us. She was interacting with the world.

Today, Isabel is more social than we ever expected. She also has her own dog, a French Bulldog named Linnea. She's registered with the American Kennel Club under the name Linnea of Monet's Garden.

Perhaps the point to be taken from Grinker's and Isaacson's, accounts of autistic children changed significantly after a trip to a very different place is that we should be wary of assuming that a "change in the environment" is simply never possible. Indeed, such a change might lead to a transformation quite unexpected and more than memorable.

So no, I am not writing off the possibility of Jim and Charlie and me in Greece, not just yet.

CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities & Autism Speaks invite you to join us for a presentation by Roy Richard Grinker, PhD. "Autism at Home and Around the World: Perspectives of a Father and Anthropologist" is scheduled for Thursday, April 23, 2009, 6 pm to 8 pm at the Tom Harkin Global Communication Center Auditorium B, 1600 Clifton Road, NE.

Register by April 20, 2009: http://tinyurl.com/autism-awareness-event

Refreshments will be served. No charge to attend, open to the public. For additional information please contact Melody Stevens at 404-498-3849 or sme1@cdc.gov.