A high quality PDF of Autism Enters Adulthood with pictures.

Joy and stress – most times in equal measure. The joy of viewing the world from a new perspective, of experiencing true unconditional love, of having a teenager say “Mommy I love you” in a crowded store with no concern for what others might think. And the stress – what does the future hold, who will be there when I’m gone?

In order to create an environment where joy can flourish and to answer the dilemma of Ian’s future we started Autistry Studios. It is our dream to nurture the growth of a community that will accept and embrace our son and all those on the spectrum, a community where all our talents and skills are celebrated.

For our family, autism has meant finding a different path from where we expected to go. School is different. Birthdays are different. Puberty is about the same! The future is even less well known.

But we are not alone and autism has connected us to our community in ways we never expected and in those connections lie the keys to a secure and happy future for our children.

Ian and Michael Lopez

Please join us at the first Autistry Studios fundraiser – a Spin-a-Thon graciously hosted by Michael Lopez at his Body Image Personal Fitness Center.

Info: (see flyer for more information)

The funds raised will be used in our Opportunity Fund which allows us to offer services on a sliding scale to lower income families.

Sunday April 25, 2010
Five one-hour spin sessions: 10am – 3pm
Spin for one hour — or five!

Donate while you sweat:
Five 1-hour Spin Sessions beginning at 10am (Treadmills and ellipticals are also available!)

Donations:
Adults: $40/per hour
Kids (13 – 18): $20 per hour

Make payment to Autistry Studios, Inc.
A Federal 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Space is limited – reservations are highly recommended!
To reserve your bike (or treadmill) call Janet: (415) 945-9788
Or email: Janet@AutistryStudios.com

And – check out the short film about Autistry Studios by Bay School senior Chelsea Mattoon: http://www.autistrystudios.com/blog/index.php/2010/03/a-small-movie-about-autistry-studios/

Let’s Spin!

Location:
Body Image Personal Fitness Center
23 Reed Blvd.
Mill Valley, CA 94941
View Larger Map

• improved energy which improved mood.
• clearer sinuses, better sleep.
• improved ability to withstand sensory input.

Over the next few months more benefits became apparent:

• For our son, we found his ability to attend to his schoolwork improved such that he made new rapid and impressive progress on speech and reading.
• Additionally, our son had needed medication for years to sleep through the night (Ambien and Valium) but we now found that he could go medication-free and we have been for all the years since.
• For our son’s Aspie dad (that would be me): huge welcome weight loss. Sixty-five pounds shed seemingly effortlessly — and still gone a decade later.

Looking back over the years we can see other benefits:

• Improved health. As a family we almost never get sick. Maybe one cold or flu a year.
• Our son knows that right food makes him feel good, bad food makes him feel bad and he acts on this independently. This is an important truth that most adults do not understand.

On countless occasions parents ask us about “doing the diet” and relate that they were not able to do the diet themselves because “it was too hard.”

I’m going to say something really bluntly:

Having an ASD child is HARD.

Planning your diet so it does not have wheat guten or dairy protein is TRIVIAL by comparison.

I do not think the GF-CF diet works for everybody or is needed by everybody. However, if you or your child need a GF-CF diet the benefits are such that it is simply negligent to never even seriously try it just because it feels like too much effort.

Additionally there is a growing body of research showing the serious health problems you risk if you or your children need a gluten free diet but do not get one.

Dr. Mark Hyman MD writes regularly at the Huffington Post and today posted a very good article with several great data points about the dangers of gluten if someone’s body is sensitive to it.

Mark Hyman, Huffington Post “Gluten: What You Don’t Know Might Kill You”

We have had a great year at Autistry Studios but we would like to take this opportunity to ask for your additional help before we launch into a new year.

This week we would especially appreciate any donations you could make of either cash or tools and materials.

United Cerebral Palsy of the North Bay has generously agreed to be our fiscal sponsor while Autistry Studios’ 501 (C) (3) paperwork continues to wend its way through the IRS and State offices. All checks or money orders should be made payable to UCPNB/Autistry Studios and sent to

[Update, we received our own 501(c)(3) status in February 2010.]

Autistry Studios
137 Granada Dr
Corte Madera, CA 94925.

Additionally, Janet Lawson and Dan Swearingen will match all cash donations made between now and December 31, 2009 up to a combined total of $5,000.

Because we are space limited, if you have any tools and/or materials you wish to donate please call us or email in advance since we need to prioritize tool and material donations to only things we can make good use of fairly immediately.

Gift cards also work great as donations: Borders, Amazon, cards redeemable at hardware or grocery stores would be appreciated.

The value of your cash donation or the fair market value of any tool or material donation will be tax deductible as a charitable donation on your 2009 tax return. We will report back to you on how all your donations were used to help us provide services to our growing student body.

This meeting is for Moms and Dads but Doug also runs a regular Dads meeting. Please contact Doug at his email below if you have any questions.

From Doug:
Come and discuss strategies for getting over any holiday bumps, offer your winning strategies and build camaraderie with other parents who share similar life circumstances.

Since December is a busy month please call Doug at 415-785-4319 or respond to lipinski@sbcglobal.net if you plan to attend.

Parents of Children and Adolescents with Autism
Parent Support Group
Thursday Dec. 17th 7:30 – 9:00 p.m.
30 North San Pedro Road Conference Room
San Rafael, CA 94903

Refreshments Provided.
Free and Open to the Public

Bad Things happen to him. Ben is driven past his limits and it is unclear until near the end how it will come out. I will not spoil the story for you in case you wish to see it.

If you are ASD or have an ASD person in your life, Ben X is heart breaking but a very good movie. If you want someone to see what it is like to be ASD this is perhaps the best film portrayal I have ever seen.

Dutch language with English subtitles. Available at Netflix (streaming or DVD) and Amazon.

Courses are available in English and Spanish and four grades: Kids, Teens, Young Adults, and Adults. We are going to be drawing on these lessons and the great instructor guides (available as pdfs) to add a financial skills component to the transition programs we offer.

We would welcome any feedback about this program or other programs you have heard of.

This is unfortunate because people with ASD have skills that can be profitable for an employer. Our experience in Autistry Studios has been that there is an astounding range in skills and interests in the people we work with so generalities always have exceptions but there are some common threads that we agree with:

Strengths:

• good memory for details.
• ability to focus on a particular task for extended periods of time.
• comfort with structured tasks and situations.

Weaknesses:

• poor communication skills.
• poor social skills.
• discomfort with rapidly changing dynamic situations.

Again, these are very broad generalizations. Your mileage may vary.

I’ve worked my whole professional career with folks like this except we called them “software engineers,” “digital artists,” or “QA testers.” If this is so, why such a gap between the people I work with and people with ASD having trouble getting work?

The problem is that people who have been assessed to be on the ASD spectrum got there because their particular mix of strengths and weaknesses is acute enough that they encounter failure to perform well in “normal” circumstances.

What it takes to hire austistics and aspies is some assistance in the job seeking process and appropriate job assignments and delegation.

Appropriate jobs and their structure

I’m going to discuss the “appropriate job assignments and delegation” part first because there are some concrete examples handy.

This month’s Wired magazine has a short piece Thorkil Sonne: Recruit Autistics about Thorkil Sonne’s company Specialisterne, a QA testing company Thorkil started to take advantage of the strengths of ASD workers. Here’s another article about Thorkil’s company at the Harvard business Review.

Thorkil’s business (a for-profit company) has a structured training process and takes time making sure each employee is in the right role and that their points of contact within the business and with customers are well managed.

In my business, while we do not overtly seek to hire people with ASD, we know that many of our employees prefer what we call “individual contributor” roles, small teams, a quiet workplace, and well defined tasks. As a manager I know that I will get the best work (and therefore best profit) if I take care in how people are managed. Internal business communication is largely handled by people who have stronger communication skills. We call them “Tech Leads” if they are also programmers and we call them “Producers” or “Project managers” if they are less technical. The Producers handle the bulk of the actual interaction with customers and the programmers by far prefer it that way.

I think these are models that could work in other kinds of workplaces.

The job seeking process.

Find a job, interview for the job, get the job.

Easy, right?

Actually, practically everyone knows this is a hard process. For people with ASD there are particular difficulties.

To find a job you need to hear about a job or read a job listing, imagine whether you could do the job and imagine whether you’d like doing that job. This is precisely the kind of unstructured imaginative creativity people with ASD can find very difficult.

To interview for a job you need to successfully put on a social performance – for a stranger. This part in itself is very stressful and can be a challenge. In the course of the interview you need to hear the questions the interviewer asks and deliver answers that simultaneously are: a) what the interviewer wants to hear; b)  cast a favorable light on you the candidate; c) truthful. This difficult communication challenge is beyond most people who have an ASD diagnosis unless the employer is incredibly accommodating.

I think a solution to the job seeking difficulties is to do something similar to what seems to work in the workplace: matching technical people with “people-skill” people. We could call these people “Recruiters.” By this I mean that a recruiting company that specializes in placement of people with ASD might be a good model to address this problem.

One of the recruiting firms I work with today meets with every candidate and they often escort the candidates to our office on interview days. In the event of a hire they escort the new employee to their first day of work. What I am proposing for ASD folks is that the recruiters stay with the candidate deeper into the process.

This needs some cooperation from the hiring firm but as an employer, if a placement firm consistently brings me good candidates — and even in tough economic times like now good software engineer candidates are scarce — I’m willing to be a bit more flexible.

Practical Next Steps

One of our driving principals at Autistry Studios is that our students and their parents teach us what is needed. We have initially focused on getting our kids ready for life, college, and work. We are increasingly feeling the push to extend our work into helping our students get work and successfully stay at work.