Friday, 30 April 2010
-
Social Cues
This is a response to the article "3 key factors to help children avoid social rejection."
Neurobehavioral researchers at the Rush NeuroBehavioral Center published studies that highlighted the three areas that lead to social rejection: difficulty recognizing social clues, difficulty interpreting meaning to social cues, and difficulty making appropriate behavior choices based on those social cues and meanings.
To me, and many others with autism, this seemed a no-brainer. It was quite a "duh!" moment. But the further benefit of the study was that they can now develop a scientifically sound treatment protocol to teach kids these skills. If it is scientifically sound, insurance companies will be more apt to pay for it.
While the health insurance reform demands that companies not refuse coverage of individuals, it does not mandate that it has to cover specific therapies, from what I read on the bill that passed.
Many insurance companies won't pay for services based on this reason: not a standardized form of treatment and/or not scientifically proven. So, if occupational therapy is needed to address handwriting skills, it can be covered. But if a child need therapeutic support in the form of "buddy groups" to teach social skills, it may or may not be covered because before it did not seem to matter to the insurance companies' eyes in other areas of life.
These studies link the social rejection to other "life failures" such as dropping out of school, experiencing depression and experimenting with drugs. The academic failure piece will help schools implement programs for those that attend public schools for learning these key factors... but what about those that are not yet in school or homeschooled?
Those services are often provided by outside therapists. Those services should be covered by medical health insurance. Hopefully, with these new studies, these service protocols will also be covered by medical health insurance companies, but I am not holding my breath on that one.
RecommendRelated Posts
Post a Comment
- Back to autisable's Autisable Site!
- Note: your comment will appear in autisable's local time zone: GMT -05:00 (Eastern Standard - US, Canada)
About the Author
-
- From: heatherbabes
- Name: Heather
- About Me: I am a writer about special needs kids at www.examiner.com/x-1560-Special-Needs-Kids-Examiner and now also the Tulsa Autism Examiner. I have Asperger's. I have a son Thomas, who also has Asperger's. My son Brandon has another form of autism called PDD/NOS. Brandon is more impacted by his autism than Thomas is in a visable way. Meaning, more people would recognize Brandon as being "autistic" than they would for Thomas. There is lots more to be said about me; however, this site is about autism and those who have it. So I will restrict the details about myself to that topic. :)
Stats: This Week All Time Posts: 0 13 Views: 0 6021 Comments: 0 48 View all posts by heatherbabes
Comments (2)
I work with Josh on social cues... I don't understand them myself half the time, but I am trying. The other day, we had a discussion about tone of voice. I asked Josh a question that required a simple yes or no. He snapped at me and said, "YES!" His tone was very disrespectful (or at least what I have been told repeatedly is disrespectful... LOL) so I stopped him and tried to explain that to him. He was like, "All I said was yes." I answered him, "It wasn't WHAT you said, but HOW you said it. You said it with an attitude." "No I didn't. I just said Yes."
I don't know if he even realized that his frustration with me over what I had asked him had come out in his tone... or if he was just saying it with whatever tone came out at the moment. He is sometimes difficult to read. Yesterday, he said something very "disrespectful" to me, and my husband almost got upset with him for it... but I recognized it as a quote. He was quoting a movie we'd seen recently... so I jumped in and finished the quote... and laughed about it. I don't know if running interference like that is good for him or not... but Josh and I go back and forth with "scripts" all the time. One of them involves me saying to him, "I'm the Captain of this ship and I gave you an order." Josh comes back with, "This isn't a ship, it's a house." I come back with, "Yeah, well I'm still the Captain. I outrank you, now get to it." And that's the end of it. He goes and does what he's been asked to do. If the script gets interrupted, it makes for a very disagreeable moment. John doesn't always get it that there is no disrespect intended. It's just our weird little way of getting the point across.
This is really interesting because I visit a recognized Doctor called kamagra to talk about some specific points about this illness, he told me autistic behavior is something difficult to explain because they use to change quickly, but he told me they're studying the behavior for years.m10m