A person who is defined as a nonspeaking autistic person has very little language abilities. They might mimic snippets of television and movie scripts. They will also have seizures, emotional meltdowns and violent outbursts. They don’t have the ability to even ask for what they want to eat much less hold a conversation.
It turns out the conversation with these nonspeaking autistic people was being held in the wrong way. There’s a therapy program called Spelling to Communicate (S2C) that has turned the idea of conversation on its head by using a method of spelling for the autistic person to communicate.
Here's how it works: The therapist teaches the person to use their arm muscles to point to letters on a hard board. While initially hard for the autistic person to do, it becomes easier and easier for the person to pick the letters.
As an example, a therapist read a story about an astronaut to the autistic person with the autistic person not paying any attention to what was going on. At the end of the story, the therapist asked the person if “they would like to go to outer space.” This nonspeaking autistic person then spelled out on the board - N-O T-H-A-N-K-S M-Y W-O-R-L-D I-S R-I-G-H-T H-E-R-E.
This meant that this person was actually able to listen, to process what he heard, to understand it and to spell what he wanted to ‘say’. This person has now written a book, letter by letter. His name is Gregory Tino and the book just came out in December and is called The Autistic Mind Finally Speaks: Letterboard Thoughts.
These nonspeaking autistic people are now having the opportunity of breaking out of a prison of silence so others can discover that these people have very high-functioning cognition.
There is at least one more book that one of these nonspeaking autistic people wrote letter by letter called Underestimated by Jamison Handley and his father J.B. Handley. It came out in March.
The founder of this work is Elizabeth Vosseller and you can learn more about this from her website - https://growingkidstherapy.com/
So…for us speaking folks who haven’t even written one book, we might want to label these people again, and the label I would give them is ‘truly inspirational’!
(Reported What Doctors Don’t Tell You, May 2021)
The magazine that I got this story from is giving away 3 issues at no charge so you can check them out. It’s called What Doctors Don’t Tell You and you can go to their website to register to get the issues at www.wddty.com/referafriend and enter the code REFERMAY.
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