Rocket Science or Witchcraft: Can we choose different treatments for kids with the same diagnosis?

This text-based course is a written transcript of the course, "Rocket Science or Witchcraft: Can we choose different treatments for kids with the same diagnosis?" presented by Michelle Garcia Winner on January 18, 2011.

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>> Amy Natho: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Nancy McKinley Lecture Series on Topics in Autism Spectrum Disorders and Asperger Syndrome. All events this week are in cooperation with the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire and we're pleased you could join us today. Today's expert seminar is entitled "Choosing Treatments: Rocket Science or Witchcraft? Using the Social Thinking Social Communication Profile to Make Decisions." It is presented by the highly accomplished Michelle Garcia Winner. My name is Amy Natho and I will be your moderator for this online course. At this time it is my pleasure and honor to introduce Michelle Garcia Winner this afternoon. Michelle Garcia Winner is a speech language pathologist who specializes in students with social cognitive deficits. She runs a clinic, has authored numerous books, speaks internationally, and developed the term "Social Thinking?" along with the related treatment approach. Michelle's goal is to help educators and parents appreciate how social thinking and social skills are an integral part of students' academic, vocational and community success. She was honored with a Congressional Special Recognition Award in 2008. Welcome, Michelle. We're very excited about your talk and thank you so much for sharing your expertise today.

[Applause]

>> Michelle: Thank you, guys. All right. Let's get going on this talk - we have a ton of information to cover in an hour. I want to start by saying Nancy McKinley was inspirational to me. I remember stopping by the booth at ASHA and talking to her on many occasions and she was actively encouraging me to get my work into writing. I wanted to take time out of my week to pay tribute to her by doing this hour long talk. I was planning on taking most of the questions at the end but if I see questions come up that represent something that I can answer at the moment I'll take them as we go. As I said, there is a lot of information to cover in an hour.

So to get started, many of you know that the DSM-V is going to be coming out. They're talking about removing the label PDD-NOS and Asperger, and calling everything spectrum disordersd that makes sense. The research is showing that there is a bias towards diagnosing people with Asperger if they tend to come from white, wealthier families and calling kids autistic if they tend to come from lower socio economic families, and so that is the long story short. The research isn't supporting that the clinicians are really able to distinguish the different functioning levels.

All that being said, I have been working for years at my clinic in San Jose, California trying to distinguish the learning profiles of people on the autism spectrum and related disabilities. This talk is not just about the autism spectrum. It is about anyone who has social learning challenges. As many of you know and have seen in your own practice, it is really hard to distinguish between kids diagnosed with ADHD and Asperger Syndrome and high functioning autism and nonverbal learning disability and hyperlexia and even bipolar or emotional challenges or schizophrenia. At times, the diagnosticians are not great at looking deeply at the causal problem and they tend to look more superficially at symptoms. This hour's talk is to give you information on ways that you can think about handling your caseload in a more definable way, to figure out which kids need more ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis)-type treatment versus who is going to benefit more from Social Thinking and who won't benefit from Social Thinking. In a nutshell that is what we're going to be reviewing in the next hour.