A little about the book…

…in her latest thriller, author Darcia Helle tells about a teenage runaway who disappears from the streets. The only people that care, or even notice, are her two best friends who are also runaways. For reasons of their own, they can’t go to the police for help. They seek out Michael Sykora, a software designer by day and hitman by night. Known on the streets as The Ghost, Michael has a reputation for taking on the twisted criminals. Rapists. Child molesters. He has never been hired to find the lost. Until now. Michael teams up with ex-prostitute Nicki and full-time hit man Sean. Together they bend the rules of the justice system in order to find a young girl few people care about. In the process, they uncover a world where salvation comes with a price tag and God’s words are used to incite fear in a congregation of believers.

Introducing Darcia Helle

Beyond Salvation

Autism: Today, Tomorrow

Did you ever wish you could see into the future and then you wonder how things will change in autism twenty-five years from now? I often do. As a teacher of children with severe autism, and now a consultant and author, I wonder if the new theory of stem cells will be on the front line. I wonder about diets and the change in eating habits. I wonder about education and the changes that will be made in order to educate our autistic children.

In my newly released book, The Autism Handbook,I discuss a number of possible causes of autism. I also emphasize, that, as of this day, we do not know specifically what causes the disability. We only have suggested causes as well as a number of possible contributing factors. So, we can safely say, during the last twenty-five years we have been able to give names to the various types and degrees. For example, we now use the word autism in a very casual way. The same is true with Asperger’s. However, we are not so quick to use the names Rett Syndrome and Childhoold Disintegrative Syndrome that are also categories of autism. We have learned that Dr. Bruno Bettelheim’s early theory that Refrigerator Mothers (mothers who react in a cold manner to their autistic child) is not the cause; that certain vaccinations have not been ruled out completely as a cause; that the brain most likely plays a role as a cause of autism. Still, we do not know specifically.

It is rather disturbing to realize we can send a woman and man to the moon, land a space shuttle, and have astronauts walk around in space, yet in this same time period we have not reached any kind of clear conclusion about the cause of autism. We have learned to impregnate women, with frozen sperm, which is truly a miracle, but we are still looking to find answers to the puzzle of autism. We have learned how to transplant a human heart, to another human beings body, but, seemingly, we are not any closer to determining what causes autism.

When you think about autism in this perspective it makes one wonder – is it truly because it is so difficult for researchers to determine the cause of autism? Or, is it that there is not sufficient funding allocated to do the research needed to find the cause? Is it because autism is such a puzzling issue, or, is it because there are not enough motivated, interested researchers attempting to piece the puzzle together?

The bigger question is this: Will we have what we need, in the next few months, or, will we need to wait another twenty-five years before we can determine what causes the puzzle known as autism?