The Great Room Debate: Are private rooms better for students with ASDs

I was asked on Twitter yesterday whether I thought single or double rooms were better for students with ASD. I have mixed opinions that extend beyond 140 characters, so I thought I’d answer that here.

I’ve personally spent the last two years in a double; freshman year with a stranger, and sophomore year with my close friend Mario. Next year, however, I’m opting for a single room in appartment style living. I think this is the ideal option, but it usually only available to upper-classmen.

Singles have the benefit of being completely under your control. If you need your room to have every item placed exactly just so, a double wil drive you to distraction. Singles are also useful for the times when you just have to be alone; to just draw away from other people and hide. But singles have the downside of being almost too comfortable. With an internet connection and food in your room, there is no impetus to leave, which sharply reduces the time you spend socializing. If you have absolutely no interest in socializing, this is fine, but it is usually helpful to have a few friends on campus. And you won’t meet others if the only time you leave your room is to attend class.

Doubles have the benefit of immediately providing you with one social contact. Even though my roommmate and I did not get along last year, I met Mario through that roommate, as he and Mario’s roommate were good friends. But having a roommate also requires a willingness to share, an understanding that sometimes the other person would like to be alone and perhaps you should leave. It means not leaving clothing or food out for weeks (something I really need to work on; Sorry, Mario!), and being (at least relatively) hygenic. A defiict in these understandings could make the experience hell or both you and your roommate.

The bottom line: I think a double should be at least tried for the first semester of freshman year. Anything that motivates you to leave the room and meet people is a positive in my book. If the situation is unbearable, a note from the neurologist or psychiatrist can get a private room secured for the second semester.

Meltdown Style and Mental Health: Connected?

Carl and I have many differences. The movies we enjoy, the books we read, the subjects we talk about. But where we really differ is in our psychiatric symptomolgy.

I am a worrier. Panic Disorder and GAD, I’m very much a navel gazer, and often disappointed with what I see there.  When I burst I implode. My meltdowns are a blur of self-injury, all the anger directed inward.

Carl, on the other hand has a great deal of anger, most of which he can’t control. He yells and curses quite often, and his first reaction to anything is “No”, said automatically before he processes. His meltdowns reflect this; he tends to explode. Walls gain holes, video game systems get trashed, knick-knacks get broken. When his meltdowns end, his room is in tatters but his person is uninjured.

I’m curious if anyone else with two kids with different personalities has noticed this sort of parallel between mental health and meltdown practices.  Thoughts?

Autism Comorbidities Week 6: Tourette’s Syndrome: an Insider Perspective

Today we have a guest post from MommyDearest, who blogs at the Quirk Factor. She is talking about her son’s Tourette’s Syndrome and ASD. One of the cool side notes is that she also has Tourette’s Syndrome.

At about age 2, I began to notice that Jaysen didn’t have the language skills that other kids his age did. Like many other parents, I brought my concern to the pediatrician, who told me not to worry because kids all develop language at their own pace- but I should stop trying to teach him Sign Language, just in case it was hindering his verbal language. Okay- I bought that for the time being, but it was still in the back of my mind.

When Jaysen started daycare at 2 and a half, I remember telling the staff that he has a pretty significant separation anxiety, has trouble with transition, and not to worry about his video tape- he just likes to carry it around.

About 6 months later, the staff approached me that although he was very smart, Jaysen didn’t like to do things with the rest of the group, and did not like to follow direction. They too were concerned with his language development. I took him to see the district speech therapist, who diagnosed him with Hyperlexia. He did not begin therapy because she too, felt that he was still too young for concern. I researched Hyperlexia, and it fit like a glove.

As time went on, the daycare became more concerned. He did not eat like the rest of the kids, and was starting to exhibit meltdowns, and had I had him evaluated for Autism? I was extremely offended that they would even suggest that my son was Autistic. I’ve worked with Autistic kids for 6 years, and although they were awesome, it wasn’t what was going on with my son. I knew something was going on with him, but it wasn’t Autism. I took him to a pediatric neurologist. She talked to me for 15 minutes. Aspergers.

Asper-who? I started my research on Asperger Syndrome. It didn’t fit. How could my son have Asperger’s when one of the distinguishing characteristics was excessively loquacious? My son wasn’t speaking more than one word requests.

I took him for another eval at another speech therapist. Expressive and Receptive Language Disorder. More research. Ahhh…this seemed to fit better. He started therapy. This SLP was wonderful. Jaysen loved her, and she worked really well with him. She had countless exercises for us to do with him at home, and the echolalia gradually began to fade. Real words were emerging.

Time went on with this therapist. It got to a point where Jaysen’s behaviors were impeding her progress with him. He began working with her OT partner for sensory integration. They said he was quirky, and may be a touch on the spectrum, but it could also be that he would always just be quirky. They suggested I take him to a psychologist that they knew, who specializes in behaviors, just to see if it was quirkiness, or something else.

My initial meeting with this psychologist (who was also wonderful), was about Jaysen’s history, development, and an all around feel for the type of kid he is. I expressed my frustration with people and the Autism thing. I never bucked these diagnoses because I didn’t believe my son had issues, I just wanted to make sure he had an accurate diagnosis.

I asked him, “why can’t he just be a Hyperlexic kid, has a language disorder, some OCD’s, and sensory issues?” He said “He can. When those things come together, it’s referred to as an Autism Spectrum Disorder.”

And that was my A-ha moment.

He went on to explain that Autism wasn’t the classic Autism that we all thought of. That it is a spectrum disorder. He explained the spectrum, and how these children can vary in areas across the spectrum. He explained stereotypes- “Flapping” didn’t just mean flapping your hands or parts of your body, it was also those repetitive behaviors I assumed were OCD. Jaysen’s official diagnosis was PDD-NOS but that’s not the point of this post.

It took the right person to explain to me that Autism is more than the Autism we knew 10 years ago. It’s more than a checklist of characteristic attributes. As I researched, it became clear. I understood the spectrum.

I became aware.
 
I was comfortable with the Autism diagnosis, and I should have known that once I am comfortable with something, life often throws me a curve ball. 
 
It was one night at bedtime when I first heard it.

Smack-smack-smack. What the heck was he doing?

Smack-smack-smack. I propped myself up so I could see Jaysen’s face. Smack-smack-smack-smack. He was smacking his lips. Did he not rinse good enough after we brushed? Is he thirsty? The smacking continued.

“Jaysen, do you want some water?”

“No.”

Smack-smack-smack. I noticed that the smacking was accompanied by a new mouth-movement. The movement was like he was getting ready to say something, then his mouth closed.

Open-close. Open-close. Open-close. Smack-smack-smack.

Shit- could this be TD? It can’t, can it? There’s been no med increase, and he’s even refused it on occasion.

Jaysen’s always had some sort of tic (for lack of a more appropriate word), lasting from a few days, to weeks- But they’ve always been temporary. I first noticed them around age 3. First it was this eye thing. He would blink his eyes very deliberately in patterns. Then it was a breathing thing where he would shoot out air from his nose as if trying to get something out of there. Honestly, they didn’t concern me because I knew why he was doing them. I couldn’t explain why, but I knew…because I do those same things.

This was different (or was it?). There is a semi-control with my OCD’s. I know I am doing them, yet I can’t stop myself from doing them. However, I have trained myself to do them in a way that is unnoticeable to others. They’re right out there for everyone to see, but I’ve adapted them so no one will.

Were these mouth movements something similar to that? Were they a temporary? Were they actually Tardive Dyskinesia? How do you know? How can you know?

It’s something that I felt I needed to be sure of. I needed to know for sure because it affects his meds, which in turn affects his anxiety, which in turn affects his aggression.
 
I immediately sought out the psychiatrist, who in turn referred us to a neurologist who was also a movement specialist.  He would be able to tell if the movements were part of the ASD, a separate disorder themselves, or a reaction to the med.
 
I have to break here to mention that I’ve often felt that Jaysen and I have this connection. That I understand him. That we have some of the same quirks. I know why he does them, but can’t explain it. Was I a touch on the Spectrum too? I’ve firmly believed that whatever wasn’t “typical” with him, was the case with me as well.

I was not expecting this.

Doc: He does not have Tardive Dyskinesia.
Me: Okay. Are you sure?
Doc: Yes. TD has an onset of adolescence. This is not TD. It’s something totally different.
Me: Alright.
Doc: You have it.
Me: Okay…
Doc: It started when you were in early childhood.
Me: Yes…
Doc: As an adult, you’ve learned to adapt, so it’s virtually undetectable.
Me: Yes…
Doc: It’s genetic, and you passed it on to your son.
Me: Okay…

At this point, I was wondering what the heck the deal was with this huge “reveal”. Was I supposed to guess the affliction? Was this a guess your diagnosis game?

Me: So…what is it?
Doc: Tourette Syndrome.
Me: Tourette.
Doc: Tourette.
Me: Well alrighty then!

Being disability savvy, I realized that Tourettes was more than just the infamous coprolalia of hollering out obscenities, and was open to hear what Doc had to say. He proceeded to explain that he’s not totally convinced that Jaysen has ASD, because Tourette is “like ADHD plus tics”, and a lot of the quirks that I described are “classic Tourette tics”. It is often confused with OCD (so much for self-diagnosing my OCD). Apparently, Autism stims can look a lot like Tourette tics as well.  

I was not convinced that was the case. The Doc didn’t seem to think of Autism as a Spectrum Disorder, stating that since Jaysen had social skills (will answer questions, has eye contact), he didn’t feel that he qualified as Autistic. I tend to think his view of Autism was stuck more with classic Autism.  Besides, does Tourette Syndrome have sensory issues as well? What about behavior issues? If it was strictly TS, why does Jaysen have so many issues, when I had practically none of the same ones he has?
 
How the two intertwine is interesting, yet surprisingly natural.  To the “untrained eye”- is it a tic, is it a stim?  Does it matter?  For all intensive purposes, it really doesn’t matter.  The only difference I make is that an ASD stim is executed for a reason.  Whether it be visual input, tactile input, proprioceptive feedback… there is a benefit to the person by doing it.  Tics do not appear to benefit the person, other than the relief of being able to release the tic itself.
 
There are other instances that the two overlap as well.  Was that a perseveration or a verbal tic?  A little more challenging than the tic vs. stim conundrum.  My experience tells me that verbal tics are short lived, often staccato in nature.  Perseverations go on and on and on and on and on and… well, you get the point.  But again, is it important to differentiate between them? 
 
Short attention span, defiance, outbursts… some of the overlapping is impossible to decipher if it is Autism, Tourette Syndrome, or just Seven Year Old Boy.  I figure I can drive myself batty trying to categorize Jaysen’s quirks, or I can enjoy him and offer him the support and understanding in the areas he needs it, regardless if it’s ASD, TS, or SYOB.
 
Recently, I’ve been trying to make Jaysen aware of his differences.  I don’t ever want him to feel like there’s something wrong with him, and there is a reason that he does what he does.  I think the more he understands his quirks (the good, the bad, and the ugly), the more comfortable he’ll feel in his own skin.  The TS has been fairly easy to explain.  I think he’s starting to understand what a tic is, and when he has one.  There was a time that he was afraid of some tics (particularly the lip-smacking one), where he felt out of control of his own body.  Explaining tics and seeing people with them, has helped illustrate to him that it’s not something he’s alone in, and these people are normal too.  He’s not afraid of them anymore.
 
People often say, “you’re such a Saint.  I could never have the patience for that” when they hear about Jaysen.  I’m not a Saint.  I’m a mom.  A mom who loves her son, inside and out.  A mom who’s trying to do what all other moms are doing- and that means building a solid foundation to help Jaysen maximize his potential to the fullest. 
 
Would I change him?  Absolutely!
I would make him happy to clean his room.

Also, Monday MommyDearest turned twenty-sixteen. So be sure to go over and offer her a happy birthday!

If you are interested in guest posting about you or your child’s ASD and comorbidity, please see the instructions here. If anyone has completed their post, please let me know so I am able to research the topic for next week. Thanks!

Edit: Just a note, as there seems to be a bit of confusion. Every line except for the last 3 and first 3 were written by MommyDearest. This was not an interview. The bolded quotes were simply designed to highlight what I thought were the most important things she wrote, so that in case the length deters you, you’ll at least get the highlights. Of course, I hope you read the whole thing because it is quite interesting, but if you are short on time and absolutely can’t, at least read her bolded quotes.

A Primer on Perception

I had to write an essay for Neuroscience explaining in terms a child could understand how we taste chocolate. I sort of liked how it turned out, and thought some of you might be curious about our ability to tatse. So here it is:

      Having located all of the plastic eggs and cracked them open one by one, you now sit in the grass with a pile of chocolate just waiting to be consumed. The wrappers sparkle in the sunlight, and tempt you with their beauty. Gently you lift one of the aluminum foil eggs and begin to tenderly unpeel the wrapper, afraid to smush the slightly melted chocolate. Once the wrapping is fully removed, the brown egg stares back at you. You bring it to your lips and drop it delicately inside. Within seconds, the glorious mix of bitter sweetness fills your mouth and you wonder if you’ll ever taste something this delicious again. Then you remember that a pile of these nuggets await you, and you drift the morning away in ecstasy.

     But how is it that you can tell chocolate from say, the scrambled eggs you pushed around on your plate this morning? Do you have a chocolate center in your brain which lights up in the presence of the candy but not when served those runny eggs? Not quite. In fact, the process is far less simple than that, but it’s complexity is certainly a part of its charm.

     To fully understand how it is you can taste chocolate, you first need to understand the tongue. You know when your brother sticks his tongue out at you, and through the chunks of half-chewed food you can see little bumps along the sides and back that almost look like pimples? Those are called papillae, and without them, all your food would taste really boring, a bit like eating the boxes the poptarts come in rather than the poptarts themselves. This is because the papillae contain your taste buds. In fact, each papillae can house hundreds of taste buds, which means taste buds must be really, really tiny! And each taste bud then has one hundred taste receptor cells. And your mouth has around 40,000 taste receptors, or about as many as the number of people that live in this town. And all 40,000 of these receptors fit inside the three inches of your tongue. Imagine how tiny they must be; like ants to a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

     The taste receptors can be placed into five different categories: sweet like sugar, salty like the ocean, sour like a lemon, bitter like mom’s coffee, and umami like home-cooked chicken. Each is sensitive to a different aspect of food called the tastant, and when a food shows up that has that tastant in it, the ones with receptors that match are what you will taste. When the chocolate enters your mouth, it matches up to the sweet and bitter ones. Those receptor cells will then send a signal using a special protein that is the equivalent of saying, “Hey, we caught something!” The protein will pass the message on to another molecule, which will open up these tunnels in the cell, that make the cell get positive. Once the cell has become positive, more tunnels will open up, and some calcium ions, which are sort of like staplers, will help storage boxes called vesicles attach to the cell’s membrane, which is a spongy wall. The vesicles are full of special chemicals called neurotransmitters, which will be vomited into the space between two cells, called a synapse. The cell on the other side is called an “afferent neuron” and it runs all the way up to the brain. On the outside of this cell is receptors that grab the neurotransmitters and cause the cell to go positive. Once the end of the cell has become positive, the rest of the cell passes the positive message along until it reaches the end, which is in a part of the brain called the gustatory nucleus. There, more vesicles (which, remember, are boxes of neurotransmitters) will dump out their contents which will be picked up by a new cell. This cell runs all the way to a place in the brain called the ventral posterior medial nucleus, which sounds like a really long word, but really just tells you where the nucleus is in the brain. Ventral means down at the bottom near your chin, posterior means in the back by your neck, and medial means in the center. So the ventral posterior medial nucleus is right around your hairline on the back of your head. This cell then passes the message to a final cell which is in the primary gustatory cortex. This name makes sense because gustatory is a synonym for taste, and this is where the taste message is sent. Now this taste message is being sent in a shorter time then it takes you to blink, which is why you know you’re eating chocolate almost as soon as the food touches your tongue. Imagine how fast the signal must be going for it to happen like that!

     Now, one last thing. When you put the chocolate in your mouth, do you think just one or two receptors can tell its there, or do you think a whole bunch can probably tell at once? Actually a ton of them will all grab the message “there’s something sweet here!” or “there’s something bitter here” and pass it on. When your brain gets all these messages at once, but doesn’t get any messages from the receptors that catch sour particles, it can say, “oh, this must be chocolate. Only chocolate causes this exact pattern of cells to light up. Yum!”

     So do you remember everything I told you about how your brain knows what you’re eating? The food comes in, the taste receptor cells grab hold, become positive, send a message along by making a whole bunch more cells positive as they pass from tongue to ventral posterior medial nucleus to primary gustatory cortex. And then it’s the blend of messages all flooding in at once that tell your brain, “chocolate! my favorite!”. Yes, now that you’ve listened to the whole story you can go ahead and eat all the chocolate. But isn’t it cool to know how your brain figures it out?

Amazingly though, picturing that process doesn’t make chocolate any less delightful to eat.

Very first ABA session!

So today was my very first ABA session with Charger. Needless to say I was terribly nervous (there may have been some flapping on my part, but let’s keep that between us). But it actually went really really well.

(I promise not to deliver a play-by-play after each session. Just with this being the first, I felt it needed documentation)

We walked in and Charger threw a fit. He had just spent two hours working with his TSS (who he really dislikes, and who they are actively trying to replace as he knows nothing about autism), and was not in the mood to do any more work. That’s okay, I planned for that. I walked into the other room and came back with his prized toy, a train track set. But there was a condition. In order to play with the train, he first had to put the track together. Three weeks ago, on the night we first met, this was an impossibility for him. I wound up putting the whole thing together (but there was a good request for help in there, so it was justified). But this time he handled the tracks like a pro. Someone is really working on his fine motor!

After five minutes of train time, we sat down for “table time”. I grabbed the pictures and mounted index cards, and we did ten minutes of “Can You read this word? Can you point to Bob’s eye? Can you point to Pilchard’s ear?”, etc. These were all concepts he was intimately familiar with, so it was designed to simply improve his audio processing (he never knew which body part was coming next), and show him how the reinforcement system worked. (Every time he got a correct answer, he got a mini transportation sticker for his chart. Every time he reached five mini-stickers, he was able to get a big sticker for his shirt. Every time he filled his card, he was able to get either an insect, a Cars pencil, or a picture of Lightning McQueen (After Valentine’s Day Sales are the Best. 16 pictures of the Cars characters and 16 cars pencils for $0.50!)). Then he had five more minutes of train time, followed by 10 minutes of working with the magnetic letters. He showed me he could spell his name, Mommy, Daddy, and then was able to work out how to spell his sister’s name, missing only the very end (placing an e, where there is actually an ie). He got another insect and returned to the trains. Finally, we did 10 more minutes of Table Time with the biggest hit of the afternoon, the Match-a-word deck shown on the bottom left. He didn’t even care about the reinforcers at this point, he just wanted to see how many of those words he could match. And after two times through the deck, our time was up! His unprompted response, “This is fun. I come back”. Yes, he sure will. Excellent!

Tonight was also honor society inductions. So in case you ever wondered what one of your favorite Aspie bloggers  looks like at his most handsome and proffessional best:

Thanks for all my Tweeple’s help figuring out what “Business Casual” meant.

Writing Woes

 

If your house is anything like my house, (and I bet many of them are), on a typical Sunday night, Mom comes in carrying all the groceries. We empty the bags and then have this dialogue.

• C: Uh, Mom?
• M: Yes, dear?
• C: Where are the pens?
• M: What pens?
• C: The ones I need for school. You didn’t buy any.
• M: I just bought you pens last week. A whole 10-pack.
• C: Yeah, but Carl took half, and then a classmate needed to borrow one and never gave it back, and then one of them broke, and one exploded in my mouth and then… So now I need some new ones for school.
• M: You couldn’t have told me this before I went to the store?
• C: I figured you knew I needed more pens. Remember last night when I asked you for a pen to do homework?

Now, obviously with me out of the house and Carl taking his notes  by laptop, this is no longer an issue. But it was for the several years we were going to school together. Until my mom came up with the ingenious solution of buying a gross of golf pencils (144). These are great for a number of reasons:

1. They come in a gross. So it takes a whole semester before you have to buy a new one.
2. They cost half the price of the same amount of pens. We bought them 1 gross for $5.
3. They are far less appealing to chew. Because they are so short, your hand is almost in your mouth when gnawing. So they tend to stay in tact far longer.
4. Most people don’t use them. So if you lend one out, you always know which ones to take back at the end of the day, as you’re the only one in the class who uses golf pencils.
5. They can be carried in a shirt pocket without looking nerdish as they cannot be seen over the top of the pocket. This handy carrying space makes them much more difficult to lose.

We’ve always had the most luck at Staples, but I imagine Office max or Depot would have them as well.

This is part five of a series of Skills for School. If interested, more can be found in the upper right corner.

Surviving Bullying

I was reading this post on Hyperlexicon about how her son, Ben, has come to realize he’s being teased at school. And although I don’t have any advice to offer her, I thought I’d share my experience with bullying.

I was strangled to the point of losing conciousness for the first time in Kindergarten by a fellow classmate’s belt. From then until high school graduation, I was a victim of merciless abuse by my fellow students. What kept me from succumbing to it all?

-A strong base. Although most of my friends came and went in my 13 years of schooling, one stuck by me the whole time. We split a juice box on the bus to kindergarten, and last month we split a beer on his back porch. Having one kid that I could always count on to be there for me was probably the single most important thing that helped me get through.

-My intellect. Knowing that I was smarter, more successful, and having a much greater destiny than the kids who were trying to keep me down allowed me to put everything into perspective. When I was face down in the dirt or shoved against a locker, running through my head would be the idea that when I was making six figures saving the world they’d be making minimum wage scanning groceries.

-An escape. I gobbled up historical fiction. I imagined myself working in a castle, fighting in a war, learning from a philosophe. In the stories I read and created, I was able to take revenge on my tormenters, who worked for me, and were scared of me rather than the other way around.

-My mom. True, I kept her in the dark about most of the details. Even now she has no idea what I went through at the hands of my peers. But she was there for me whenever I needed her. When I had to vent, we’d go on long car rides, just her and me, and she’d wait even if it took 30 or 40 minutes for me to tell her what was bothering me. She reminded me of my worth and exceptionality, especially when I felt like the most pathetic human being in the universe.

-My Special Interest. I’ve had a couple over the years. Topics I would devote myself to with gusto, and would quickly know more than any of my peers and even most adults about. This gave me a sense of worth that couldn’t be destroyed by any other factors. I really did know more about the topics which fascinated me than everyone but the highest experts, and you could test my knowledge objectively. Knowing this certainly kept me running.

Bullying is horrendous. It can destroy a single afternoon or an entire childhood. But the best thing about it is that it ends. Once you leave high school, it’s for the most part over. And suddenly the tables turn and the bullied are the ones on top. But it’s hard to see that or even be comforted by it when you’re being tortured every day. But with a little help from parents, kids can come to understand that things will get better.

Brilliant Book Showing Self-Calming

I was flipping through the piles of Easy Readers at the library last week, looking for a good “matching faces to emotions”  type work for Charger, when I came across “If You’re Angry and You Know It” written by Cecily Kasier and illustrated by Cary Pillo. I opened it and immediately fell in love.

Sung to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know it” is five suggestions  on how to deal with angry/frustrated feelings, i.e. how to express your feelings and prevent a meltdown. The five suggestions go from most physical/reactive to most calm/logical. They are: Stomp Your Feet, Bang a Drum, Walk Away, Take Deep Breaths, and Tell a friend.

Now these could easily be taught to a child individually as lessons with proper reinforcement etc. But, in song form, they are entertaining and thus seem more like play then a lesson, and are more likely to stay in your son’s mind. If he can think of nothing else when he gets angry next, he might be able to recall the words to the song and act out in one of these socially appropriate ways rather than having a meltdown.

Caution: While a meltdown is occuring is not the time to introduce this book. It should be shown at a time when the child is calm and attentive, and be used as a tool to head off a meltdown, not one to stop one in progress.

I must comment that I also really liked the illustrations in here. The emotions on everyone’s face are very clear from angry to scared to annoyed and embarrassed. Perfect for a game of, “Can You guess how he’s feeling?”

Kudos to Kaiser and Pillo for a 5-star book.

Cale’s First Guest Post

Guest Posting on Mindless Mommy about the benefits of having an ASD. Check it out here

A Must-read on Tourette’s Syndrome

If you’ve been following me on Twitter for the past few weeks, you’ve probably seen a collection of similar Tweets all echoing the sentiment that I couldn’t find a book on TS to meet my needs. I wanted one with personal perspectives, one written for an individual with TS rather than for parents or teachers. I wanted one that looked beyond what a tic was and what the behavioral and medical interventions would be, and instead examined what it was like to live as an individual with TS.

Though it took me a month and a giant stack of books, I finally found what I was looking for in a worn-out paperback published in 1992 obtainable from only one library in Pennsylvania. The book is “Don’t Think About Monkeys” as edited by Adam Seligman and John Hilkevich. It contains 14 stories written by individuals with TS ranging in age from 13 to mid-50s and in symptomology from very mild to very severe. Each of them has a different history and thus a different perspective on life with TS.

The book examined the social ramifications of TS, topics like job discrimination and difficulties in school. It looked at the fears parents with TS have of what will become of their children, and the reflections of adult children on their parents who may have had TS themselves. It examined the camraderie between individuals with TS and the us-them mentality that can form.

This book was everything Aquamarine Blue 5 wanted to be and wasn’t. If you’re looking for a fascinating book on Tourette’s, this is the one to check out.