French autistic children and adults are still widely treated as psychotic patients, in a system (universities, institutions, hospitals...) that continues to promote Freudian psychotherapies/psychoanalysis as the standard "treatments" of choice for autism.Official bodies in charge of educating professionals/families on autism, such as the CRAs (Centre de Ressources Autisme) even offer training sessions presenting at the same level as ABA sessions, practices such as the packing of naked non-verbal kids into cold wet sheets for the sake of helping them to discover their body bounderies!
Lea pour Samy (
http://www.leapoursamy.com/) recently launched an anti-packing campaign. They energetically asked the government for a moratorium temporarily holding this practice within the French health system.The moratorium has been accepted and they are now trying to collect testimonies from international autism experts on the inadequacy of packing and the adequacy of other scientifically validated practices. You will find enclosed some documents on the situation, as well as papers from Pr Elisabeth Fernell and Christopher Gillberg at the following address:
http://www.leapoursamy.com/rubrique_.asp?r=835 (English originals at the bottom of the page). Please forward this letter to whoever you think may accept to write something to be soon presented to the French authorities.
Documents of Interest:
visit http://www.autismtrust.org.uk/page28.html
http://www.leapoursamy.com/rubrique_.asp?r=835 (English originals at the bottom of the page). Please forward this letter to whoever you think may accept to write something to be soon presented to the French authorities.
Documents of Interest:
visit http://www.autismtrust.org.uk/page28.html
Response from ATT:
Our charity, Autism Treatment Trust (ATT) fully supports the protest action against “packing” led by the French organisation Lea for Sami and endorsed by thousands of parents of autistic children in France. This intervention, conducted on vulnerable autistic children is outrageously inhumane. There is no research, no clinical justification, and not even a single piece of current knowledge of what autism is that justifies its use. It violates international human rights.
ATT has been involved in the medical examination of over 400 autistic children. We and others have found evidence of abnormalities of metabolic, physiological, immune, gastro-intestinal, toxicological and genetic origins. Applying outdated models of a psychoanalytical nature, which no one has endorsed since the early 70s in the rest of the world other than in France is pure blinkered barbarism.
It is time that the French medical and educational systems came to grips with the reality of today’s autism. Placing autistic children in hospitals, under psychiatric surveillance, refusing their inclusion in proper educational systems, refusing their access to medical examination
and treatments, violating their human rights and dignity, and even worse still allowing interventions such as “packing” to be conducted in hospital settings is unhelpful and has to be stopped.
The Autism Treatment Trust will support all actions against “packing” of autistic children in France and will promote the dissemination of published up-to-date knowledge of the biology of autism and effective lines of intervention.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Lorene Amet
Autism Treatment Trust
29A Stafford Street
Edinburgh EH3 7BJ
Posts
You said that "The moratorium has been accepted".
ReplyDeleteThe moratorium has not been accepted by our government and it's the big problem. But the association still continue to stop this "therapy". Thanks to talk about what France do. I live there and it's a shame.