Autism And Teaching – Treating and Managing Autism

Living with a patient suffering from autism can be grueling and extremely distressing for the parents and siblings of a person suffering from autism. The worst part really isn’t the realization that the patient has the disease, but that the patient will never fully recover from the symptoms. As a result, no matter what you do to treat them, they either show little improvement throughout their lives, or just remain the same way.

There are times when a glimmer of hope is glimpsed in a slight change in the behavioral patterns of the autism sufferer, but these are more often false positives in the recovery arena, more often contributing to the anguish felt by family and friends.

This has however not stopped people from seeking out treatments for the disorder. Various techniques and formulas have been propounded and perfected over time for the treatment of the mentally debilitating condition and some of them have been shown to yield marked improvements in the suffering of the patients and their families. There are also some medications for the treatment of autism that you should know about, but basically they address some specific symptoms of the malady and are by no means a cure.

The first treatment practices you may want to consider for an autism patient are the therapy and training approaches. The Behavioral Modification System is one of such that is used to educate an autistic child by rewarding good behavior and punishing a bad one. These rewards are always immediate so that the patient can connect them to their most recent actions. Sometimes, you may have to go as far as treating the child to mild electric shock when they exhibit self-destructive behavior. As such, it is not an easy thing for a parent to do to their child and more often than not, a caregiver is better to carry it out. It does help in its own way.

The Treatment and Education of Autistic and Related Communication Handicapped Children has practiced a therapy procedure for autistic patients for quite a while that a picture schedule of time-limited assignments to improve the overall skillfulness of the patient. This TEACH therapy also included tasks that the patient likes as reward for good behavior, and it works at a gradual pace. In any case, there really isn’t that much of a hurry since they have a whole lifetime to do it.

Perhaps the best treatment therapy for autistic patients in the Floortime system that applies play techniques by bring parent and child together to perform tasks and activities that the child finds to be fun. The primary objective is to foster bonding between them so that the patient can gain skills while developing a deeper relationship with the parent or sibling at the same time. It is time consuming, but when there are rewards, they are” rewarding.

The available medications for the treatment of autistic patients aren’t particularly for the condition itself but to help the patients with several of the related symptoms of the disorder. For irritability felt by several autistic patients, the drug Risperidone recently obtained FDA approval, used on patients with aggressive tendencies, including anger and frustration. Fluoxetine, fluvoxamine, and escitalopram are other drugs that are used in a bid to help patients with autism deal with some of the related symptoms of the behavioral and developmental disorder.