Word: rajapatiranas
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...Those with classic autism often talk more like a balky tape recorder. They may be limited to echolalia - repeating words from songs, television and the environment - in meaningless ways, or lapse into making growling incoherent sounds. Chandima Rajapatirana, a 32-year-old autistic man from Potomac, Md., writes about how hard it is for him to coordinate the working parts of his body and brain to produce speech. He and others have expressed the anxiety they feel about trying to speak and failing. Jamie Burke, a 19-year-old high school senior from Syracuse, N.Y., puts it this...
...Jamie Burke and Chandima Rajapatirana earlier this year at a Syracuse University training session for people interested in learning facilitated communication. FC is a highly controversial technique for helping people with limited or no speech learn to communicate, generally using a keyboard and the help of a human facilitator for both physical and emotional support. It originated in Australia in the late 1970s and was first used for children with cerebral palsy, among other disorders. Both Burke and Rajapatirana had their moms serving as facilitators in our interviews. When Jamie types one-handed, Sheree Burke holds the keyboard. When...
...Proponents of FC concede that when FC is done improperly, the facilitator can take over. They also say that people who are severely autistic respond poorly to the lab setting. And they point to examples like Burke and Rajapatirana, who are not held by the hand or wrist - though both did require that degree of support when they began using the technique...
...Rajapatirana's mother, Anoja, told me that her son suffers from seizures, as do many autistic people. For years, she would crush up his medication and put it in his food, because he couldn't swallow the pills. "One day, he had a headache, and he just swallowed a Tylenol," she recalls. Anoja, amazed, asked him why he had gulped down the Tylenol but had never been able to swallow the seizure medication. He answered, typing, she says, that "he thought that if he didn?t take the pills, maybe he would die." The Rajapatiranas shared this thought from Chandima...
Such descriptions shed light on seemingly self-destructive behavior like biting, scratching, spinning and head banging. For people like Rajapatirana, banging against a wall can be a useful way to tell, quite literally, where their head is at. "Before we extinguish [such behaviors], we need to understand what they are telling us," writes Judith Bluestone, a Seattle-based therapist who is autistic, in The Fabric of Autism...