Attended a really interesting professional development course on PDD – Pervasive Developmental Disorder. An umbrella term for a range of disorders such as Autism, Asperger’s, PDD-Not Otherwise Specified, Rett’s Syndrome, and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder. Of course the topics under that umbrella that are still areas of concern these days are Autism, Asperger’s and PDD-NOS. While this topic has gained worldwide media attention because of the increasing number of children diagnosed with these disorders, the session today took a big integrative approach to the topic by looking at not just the biological, but also the psychological, and social factors. The presenters from Melbourne’s own Monash Medical Center for Developmental Psychiatry and Psychology Project . The big things I got out of this presentation were:
- Differences in children with Autism with co-existing Intellectual Disability VS High functioning Autism VS Asperger’s
- Importance of understanding parental mental health
- Using the Developmental Behavior Checklist (DBC, copyrighted) developed by Prof. Bruce Tonge and Prof. Stewart Einfeld @ Monash to figure out what behaviors the child presents with (since it’s such a broad bunch of children we’re talking about) and how that might change over time (secondary to development and intervention). This checklist is now being published by Western Pyschological Services (WPS) so peeps in the US might start seeing more of this soon.
They also directed us to really useful fact sheets that parents and even teachers or specialists like me could find helpful as a quick introduction to autism and the different topics (even controversial ones, like vaccinations). The biggest learning point for me was the importance of parental mental health in these families. I’m not yet a parent, and can’t even fathom the big responsibilities that come with parenting typically developing children, let alone children with a disability.
This really made me think hard about paying attention to parents of the children or clients I see – how are they coping? Are they trying to balance their lives and taking care of their own health? This can really affect the child’s performance in speech therapy as well as home follow up. We live in a culture that is so fearful of being invasive and therefore, unless you’re a psychologist or a counselor, or you really know the parents VERY well, you don’t normally ask too much about the parent’s health. I tend to guess from cues like dressing, facial cues, etc., but spending 5 minutes chatting with the parent could give you some very helpful information and with that, direct them to the appropriate source of help if necessary.
Another big thing was using this behavior checklist which looks SO USEFUL. Especially from an SLP’s perspective when planning social/pragmatics/language therapy to achieve the behavioral outcomes we would work on. What do people think? What sorts of checklists do you use? How do you approach parents?
