May is Mental Health Month. (Or Mental Health Awareness Month, depending on the website.) Here are some resources you might find helpful: National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI): www.nami.org NAMI StigmaBusters is “a network of dedicated advocates across the country and around the world who seek to fight inaccurate and hurtful representations of mental illness”. [...]

My mom told me that she had found gold-foil wrapped fancy chocolate bunnies for Easter, just like the kind she got when she was a kid. And they did look really nice. (Yes, I know that Lindt donates 10 cents from these bunnies to Autism Speaks. See my comment and challenge to Lindt at the [...]

ScienceDaily (2011-02-22) — A computational physicist and a cognitive neuroscientist have come up with the beginnings of a noninvasive test to evaluate an infant’s autism risk. It combines the standard electroencephalogram (EEG), which records electrical activity in the brain, with machine-learning algorithms. In a pilot study, their system had 80 percent accuracy in distinguishing between [...]

From DailyFinance, an AOL Money & Finance Site: The High Cost of Autism: One Parent’s Tale By JONATHAN BERR Posted 3:30 PM 01/12/11 Having an autistic child can be as big a challenge financially as it can be psychologically. Parents often spend thousands of dollars in the hopes, fleeting as they may be, of finding [...]

People ask me why I tweet on Twitter. “Why would you want to fill out 130 characters and send it out to the world?” For 10 good reasons: 1. You can get great customer service from companies. My Delta flights were changed, and I wasn’t sure if there would be a fee to change flights [...]

The Lancet, a British medical journal, has retracted a 1998 study that linked vaccines to autism. It is rare for a medical journal, especially one of The Lancet’s prestige, to retract an article. The article by Katie Drummon,”1998 Study Linking Autism to MMR Vaccine Is Retracted”, states that The Lancet retracted the study: after an [...]

Mike Porath, editor-in-chief of Sphere.com, writes about his autistic daughter being diagnosed with Chromosome 15q Duplication Syndrome. The article states that Chromosome 15q Duplication Syndrome is “the most frequently identified chromosome mutation in people with autism”. (Keep in mind that we are still learning about chromosomes and their impact on autism, so this information may [...]

Around 52 to 95% of children with autism are treated with complementary alternative medicine (CAM) therapies. A survey asked 539 physicians (90% of whom were pediatricians) about their practices and attitudes about CAM therapies for autism. The most encouraged CAM therapies: – Multivitamins 49% – Essential Fatty Acids 25% – Melatonin 25% – Probiotics 19% [...]

Measles cases in the U.S. are at the highest level in more than a decade, with nearly half those cases resulting from parents who rejected vaccinations.  Wall Street Journal story The U.S. typically sees only one outbreak of measles every year, affecting 10 to 20 people. In the past seven months, there have been seven [...]

From the New York Times article: On the July 16 installment of his program, which is broadcast every weekday, Mr. [Michael] Savage suggested that “99 percent of the cases” of autism were a result of lax parenting. He told his audience: “They don’t have a father around to tell them: ‘Don’t act like a moron. [...]