Dr. Tippy Quoted in Newsday about the CDC’s announcement that 1 in 5 Children suffer from Serious Mental Illness

Below is the text of an article from Newsday by Delthia Ricks. Ms. Ricks called me and asked me if I was surprised at the numbers reported by the CDC. I answered, almost immediately, that the numbers did not surprise me at all. What I see in the Autism world, the fragmenting effect of the technology that surrounds the kids, holds true for the rest of the kids in our society. When kids have to add their ideas to play, when they have time to process despite the processing differences we all have, kids are able to enter the world of increasingly complex social interactions. Interactions with technology are not social interactions, and they do not lead to safety, serenity and peace for kids. Our kids are fragmented, detached, lonely and anxious. When you are lonely, and you do not know how to interact with others, or do not experience others as calming or even useful, you become anxious, depressed, aggressive, fragmented, or any of the other things that the CDC is describing. So no, I am not surprised at what the CDC reports. I am just sad for the kids.

Here is the complete text of the Newsday Article, if you are not a Newsday subscriber.

“About 20 percent of children nationwide have mental health disorders, a problem that has been escalating for more than a decade, federal health officials reported Thursday.
In an investigation described as a first of its kind, a panel of experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracked the prevalence of serious mental health conditions in kids between the ages 3 and 17 — and opened a new window on childhood psychological struggles.
Kids from all regions and ethnic backgrounds are afflicted with conditions that range from anxiety and depression to serious conduct disorders. The most prevalent — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD — affects nearly 7 percent of children nationwide.
It is estimated that more 4 million children have ADHD, but millions of others have equally serious concerns, according to the investigation’s authors.
For example, an estimated 3.5 percent of children have behavioral problems and another 3 percent have anxiety issues. About 1 percent have autism, according to the report.
“No parent, grandparent, teacher or friend wants to see a child struggle with these issues,” CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden said in a statement.
“We are working to both increase our understanding of these disorders and scale up programs and strategies to prevent mental illness,” he said.
The cost of treating affected children is astronomical — about $247 billion annually, CDC panelists found.
“I think the estimate of 1 in 5 children affected by a mental health disorder would probably surprise a lot of people, but sitting in this seat, it doesn’t,” said Dr. Michael Genovese, a Garden City psychiatrist who treats children and adults. He was not involved in the CDC investigation.
Speaking from the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, Genovese said he treats a substantial number of children with ADHD, depression, anxiety disorders and a condition known as oppositional defiant disorder. All are listed in the CDC report.
“Oppositional defiant disorder is a very difficult one,” Genovese said. “It’s generally something you can’t treat with medication.
“People with ODD have no respect for authority; they get in trouble a lot; they can’t follow rules and they have a total disregard for the feelings of others,” Genovese said.
He added that intensive psychotherapy is usually the best treatment because ODD can be a precursor to serious anti-social and violent behavior patterns seen in adults.
Dr. Gil Tippy, an Oyster Bay child psychologist, also said he is not surprised by the panelists’ findings.”Unfortunately, it’s a very sad growth industry,” he said of his role as a child mental health professional “and I would very much like to be out of business. But kids are so anxious and depressed — they feel so alone.”
Tippy attributed some of the mental health issues to fragmented families, a growing disappearance of unstructured outdoor playtime and an education system that doesn’t meet individual needs.”

Dr. Gil Tippy talks about Humanoid Robots to Treat Autism

This is a video of the beginning of the concluding meeting we had at Oakwood Academy in Toronto, after we went to help them with their efforts to work in the DIR/Floortime model. Kim Hirschberg, Rebecca School’s Parent and New Staff trainer, and I went to Toronto as part of Rebecca School’s outreach and community support. At Rebecca, we see ourselves as a community resource, and that community includes any place that wants to do appropriate, respectful, developmental work with children or adults with neuro-developmental disorders of relating and communicating.

We had done two days of direct work and coaching with kids, and we had done a parent meeting in a local high school gym the night before with a very enthusiastic and interested group of Toronto parents, and so we were tired. I got up in my little hotel room, to be greeted with a news story about a breakthrough treatment for Autism Treatment in Toronto. In my fatigue, and grandiosity, I imagined that the news channel had decided to cover my DIR/Floortime work in Toronto. Imagine my deflation with the subject of the news story actually came on.

I made light of it in my lecture to the group, but I actually think it is a little disheartening to imagine that research money goes to supporting children on the Autism Spectrum becoming even more isolated from their loving and warm families, peers and teachers.

Dr. Tippy’s Blog celebrates 1000 Ausome Things #AutismPositivity2013 by asking for Aspies and Autistics to Design the new cover for “Respecting Autism”

The Old Cover for “Respecting Autism”

To Celebrate 1000 Ausmone Things, I am putting out a plea to the Autistic and Aspie communities to participate in the redesign of “Respecting Autism.” I am trying to correct one of the flaws in the currently available edition of “Respecting Autism”, in that it violates the “Nothing About Me, Without Me,” theme of the Autism Acceptance Movement. I have the family’s voices throughout, and the kids are shown respect throughout, but there is no piece of the book created by an Autistic.

Above is the current cover for “Respecting Autism”, designed by a neuro-typ. I need help for my version 2.0 of the book. If you are Autistic or Aspie, or if you identify yourself as a neuro-atyp or someone with Autism or Aspergers, and you like to, or think you would like to design things graphically, please send me a file with your re-imagined cover for the re-written book.

Book Specs: Cover is 8 1/2 inches x 5 1/2 inches. Remember: There is a back cover as well!

Needs the title, Authors: Stanley I. Greenspan, MD and Gil Tippy, PsyD

Please consider: This book will be for sale on the web, on sites like Amazon, and the picture of the cover will be less than an inch high. The title has to be in font that’s readable in that tiny format.

Added bonus: If by chance your cover is not chosen for the cover of the book, you could still end up represented as a full color, full page runner up in the electronic version of the new edition of the book.

Please, only original material, and things you own as art. Copyright law is very strict, so please no pictures or words you don’t own.

Send your cover, in a format I can open, to grippy@drgiltippy.com

I am excited, and looking forward to your submissions! Good Luck!

Dr Tippy Doing Free Webinar for Mothers Fighting Autism, Sunday, 4-14-13 at 11:00 AM, Eastern Time

I will be speaking as part of this very diverse conference for Mothers Fighting Autism, on Sunday, April 14, at 8:00 am on the West Coast, and at 11:00 am on the East Coast.  I am going to explain DIR/Floortime, and explain why developmental challenges should be treated with a developmental intervention.  Here’s the link to my part of this webinar, and you can go there now to look, even though the webinar has not started.  They even have a countdown clock to when I will be presenting!

http://instantteleseminar.com/?eventid=40056438

Here’s the blurb they have on the website:

Dr. Tippy will demonstrate how a developmental way of thinking about and working with kids on the Autism Spectrum makes sense. Dr. Tippy will connect the world of early childhood development to the functional emotional developmental capacities in the DIR/Floortime model. Finally, Dr. Tippy will address questions about how the DIR/Floortime model manages the same issues that other models manage.

Hope you can all make it, and I look forward to seeing, or hearing from you, there.

Update:  The conference went very well, and I met some new friends who will help shape my thinking as I go forward.  I believe the link to the conference is still up, and you can get a copy through the organization who sponsored the conference, Mothers Fighting Autism.

Rebecca School Music Therapists Teach at MAR AMTA

I’m at the conference for the Mid-Atlantic Region of the American Music Therapy Association with the brilliant Music Therapists, Stacey Hensel, Anne DeWan, Zachary Kandler and Kenji Takeda, where we presented for five hours this morning on DIR/Floortime and Improvisational, Interactive Music therapy.  I promised the folks in the training that I would send them the slides, and Kenji promised them a bibliography, and so the form below is to give me the information necessary to send those two things.  Anyone else can get my powerpoint and the bibliography as well, just identify whether you were at the training or not.  I will be posting video and other things from our presentations from this conference soon, so watch for updates.

4/5/13- Just a quick update:  We also gave a concurrent session today about how to bridge the abstraction gap in Autism treatment.  If you want the slides from that, you can ask for them in the comment section of the form below, and I will send you the whole set, slides, and bibliography.

Name(required)

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I was there/not there(required) I was at the CMTE in Scranton

I was not there, but want the slides and bibliography anyway!

Affiliation

Comment

Of course Eliminating The Asperger Diagnosis will have an Effect!

People from all over have asked me what I think the effect of the changes in the DSM-5 will be, and specifically, whether I think the elimination of the Asperger diagnosis will have an effect.  I wrote an opinion piece many months ago on this subject as a guest on Richard Rende, PhD’s blog on Parent.com  In that blog post, I said I thought there would be a threat to the services offered, as insurance companies would have an excuse to eliminate people from services, arguing that some people now getting services would be sub-clinical, and so not eligible.  I said in that blog post, too, that I thought that the great hope was to band together and lobby our political representatives to prevent services from being withdrawn.  I know there are a great number of advocacy groups, and some of them actually represent parents and families, but I have to admit that I do not see any great support coming to families from the large lobbying groups or fund raisers in the Autism community.  They seem to focus on biological or genetic research, while offering little support for people who need it.

I have read and thought a great deal since writing the previous blog piece, and have a more militant position than I did then.  Of course there will be a tremendous effect on all aspects of treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) because of the new DSM5 criteria.  That is the intent of the change.  But, the change is not in the diagnosis of people with the disorder.  I still think that thoughtful clinicians will make accurate diagnoses.  I still think that insurance companies and others will use the new criteria to limit payment.  My new belief is in the tremendous effect that the changes will have in WHAT services will be allowed.

Who benefits from the new DSM-5 criteria?  First, the new external behavior set of criteria will be embraced by the people who do a certain kind of research.  Those studies that require easily measured behaviors, that change external behaviors, that is to say, virtually any study funded by government or the big money raisers in the field, will be easier to do, and will look more relevant.  Moreover, the grants to do these more easily measured studies will be easier to write. Never mind that their results will still be non-sensical and irrelevant.  They will show that they can stop external behaviors, and this will suddenly, because of the new behavioral criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorders, appear relevant.  So, this is a boon to much university research, much of the research funded by the government, and much of the research funded by the big charities and funders in the autism community.  Their research will not be more helpful to the autism community, but many people make their livings this way, and that is no small thing.

The second group who will benefit from the new DSM-5 criteria are the test makers.  This is also a large community of folks, with some overlap, or considerable overlap, with the previous group.  Their tests may become more relevant with this new criteria, they may statistically show better reliability, better validity, and be easier for a wider range of people to score.  This will make this kind of testing more marketable, without ANY gain for the Autism community.  Still, there are a lot of people who make their livings this way, and as I said at the end of the previous paragraph, that is no small thing.

The third, and largest group who will benefit are those people who are either practitioners or advocates for the Applied Behavior Analytic (ABA) Model of intervention for Autism.  They have been doing an entirely irrelevant intervention for Autism Spectrum Disorders for years, ignoring the core deficits of Autism as outlined by the DSM-IV TR and earlier versions of the DSM, as there were virtually no behavioral criteria, and virtually all of the criteria had at their core a lack of social and emotional reciprocity.  Despite their success convincing government agencies and other partially informed groups that ABA was the way to go, they must have known that the intervention they believed in was not actually addressing the core deficits of Autism.  So now, with a few clicks of the electronic keyboard, and a new set of behavioral criteria, ABA suddenly appears relevant!  This must be a great relief to those who believe in ABA.  There are lot’s of people who make their money this way, from lobbyists, to fund raisers for charity, to simple ABA therapists, and as I said earlier, that is no small thing.

So, there are many who will benefit from the new DSM-5 criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder.  The Researchers, the Test Creators and the ABA Proponents, including Lobbyists and Fund Raisers, all benefit.  So to do the Insurance Companies.  But, those facing the challenges, the families, they will not benefit.  There will be a greater fight for services.  There will be diminished availability of ways to intervene with Autism Spectrum Disorder, other than ABA.  Other respectful, developmental, appropriate and effective ways to work with ASD’s will be pushed aside, so that the pseudo-scientific methodologies supported by the new DSM-5 can take the exclusive position they are comfortable in.  I, for one, wish to support choice and greater availability, and am loath to see an intervention that I find so disrespectful and ineffective be offered as the only choice.

So, I have gotten more certain in the months since I wrote the first guest post for the Parents.com blog, that the changes that are coming are a problem.  Whether you identify yourself as an Autistic, someone with Autism, or a loved one or supporter, the coming DSM-5 changes are not intended to make your life better.  They were intended for a very different purpose, indeed.

Gil on the “I” in DIR at Oakwood Academy in Toronto

This is a video of me answering a question for a parent in an open forum in Toronto, in support of Oakwood Academy, a school for kids with neurodevelopmental challenges. They are using the DIR/Floortime model as part of their comprehensive curriculum, and I have been supporting them, doing case conferences and coming to the school, as they work to create a great educational program for their kids. They are a really wonderful group of people, so hard working and dedicated, and they are doing a great job in the model.

During my recent visit, the Oakwood Academy people rented a local gymnasium and invited their parents, and others in the community, to come hear me speak about DIR/Floortime. The reception we got was fantastic, which is not surprising, as we talked about a developmental model, that takes into account who a child is, and respects that child for who he or she is. Parents are always excited to find that there is an appropriate, developmental model, which respects their child, and works!

There will be other videos from my three days with this great group of people at Oakwood Academy coming soon.