Local experts to share latest insight on autism

By JEANENE HARLICK
Sentinel staff writer

Special education teachers show deaf children how to make up for hearing impairment by reading lips.

Maisie Soetantyo shows autistic children how to make up for emotional impairment by reading faces.

The Sunnyvale behavioral consultant will share the intricacies of her therapy — called relational development intervention, or RDI — with local parents and professionals at a workshop next week at the county Office of Education technology room, at 809-H Bay Ave. Capitola.

The free workshop, hosted by the Special Parents Information Network and county Office of Education, will focus on the latest methods for treating children with autism and related disorders.

Four experts — all from the Monterey Bay area, except Soetantyo — will discuss what they do to coax people with autism into greater social interaction. The workshop takes place Saturday.

The workshop comes amid a recent spike in autism nationwide that has parents, educators and pediatricians scrambling to find ways to treat diagnosed children.

A report released last week by the state Department of Developmental Services found that the number of kids being treated for autism in California has doubled since 1998, far outpacing growth rates.

"Parents are just faced with a lot of frustration," said Mary Balzer, executive director of SPIN, explaining why the organization decided to host the workshop. "There’s just a lot of information out there and it’s hard for them to wade through everything."

In Santa Cruz County, the number of children diagnosed with autism or a related disorder has nearly doubled over the past 10 years, with an unexplained concentration of cases in Aptos. SPIN has been flooded with calls, Balzer said.

The workshop is designed to help teachers as well as parents get schooled on the latest therapies, she said. Carol Lankford, special education director for the Pajaro Valley Unified School District, couldn’t be happier. The district has more than 40 students with autism.

"The population has just exploded over the last five years but, unfortunately, our financial resources have not increased at the same level," she said. "So we are always struggling to pull together enough resources to keep everyone up to date on what the current best practices are."

Practices run the gamut, and include a variety of new and innovative techniques that have been slow to take hold on the West Coast.

Certified RDI therapists like Soetantyo are few and far between. There’s only one certification program in the nation and that’s in Houston, Soetantyo said.

Soetantyo’s approach departs from standard therapy by targeting motivation rather than behavior. Standard practices give kids behavioral recipes for different social situations, or try to condition responses through Pavlovian-like models. Those approaches falter because they don’t tackle what’s causing autistic estrangement, or a lack of motivation, Soetantyo said.

RDI teaches children how to understand facial expressions and respond accordingly, Soetantyo said. It encourages parents to let their faces do the talking, rather than simply telling children what to do. That forces kids to "step up to the plate" and take control of their behavior, instead of having parents mold their reactions, Soetantyo said.

"It’s been amazing... I see parents becoming more relaxed (as) they realize the kids can do everything on their own, if (kids) are given the chance," she said. "We see kids becoming more confident in social situations at school."

Lisa deFaria, an Aptos child development specialist who will also speak at Saturday’s workshop, uses play as a form of therapy. An abstract and interactive practice, play is a skill most autistic children lack. Yet it’s essential to emotional and cognitive growth, deFaria said.

A licensed clinical social worker, deFaria is only one of a handful of therapists who practice developmental play therapy on the West Coast, she said.

"It’s called ‘Floor Time.’ If a child moves toward a ball, you move toward it and encourage them to do something with it. If they push it, you push it back," she said. "At its simplest level it looks like play. But at its most complex level it’s building new (nerve connections) in the brain."

Autism is caused by "brain delay," not brain damage, deFaria emphasized. That’s why, while there is no cure for it, children can still learn social skills that allow them to function in society, she said.

"Different models work best for different types of children," she said. "Autistics are like snowflakes — every child is unique in their pattern of emotional behavior."