OCCUPATIONAL, AUDITORY & VISUAL THERAPY

Developmental neurologists have noted that autistic children tend to be hyposensitive and/or hypersensitive to one or several sensory impressions, and that their gross and fine motor skills are usually impaired to varying degrees. These are symptoms consistent with Sensory Integration Dysfunction.

Occupational therapy

Occupational Therapy is a health care service concerned with an individual’s ability to function in everyday life activities and occupations that provide meaning to the individual’s life. Occupational Therapy is important when an individual’s ability to participate in and / or perform these tasks (e.g., self-care, work, going to school, play, social interaction and living independently), is affected or compromised by illness, disease, disability or disorder.

How Occupational Therapy could help an autistic child

Pediatric occupational therapy has proven successful in helping autistic children deal more effectively with sensory impressions, use their senses more productively, and become more aware of their bodies. Children are first assessed in their abilities with life tasks then tackles those areas that interfere with the child’s ability to function in such life tasks. Play activities may be used to enhance or maintain play, self-help and school-readiness abilities.

Occupational Therapy seeks to improve the quality of life for the individual through successful and meaningful experiences. This is through the maintenance, improvement, or introduction of coping skills, fine motor skills, self-help skills, socialization and play skills. Occupational Therapists draw upon a variety of approaches in early intervention with autistic children.

Auditory therapy

Auditory therapies include the Tomatis and Berard schools and focus on training the child to use his/her sense of hearing more effectively.

Visual therapy

Visual management therapy, pioneered by Melvin Kaplan and others, is an individualized program designed to develop, improve, remediate, and enhance visual performance. The ideal aim to to have benefits in communication, behavior and ultimately performance in social, academic, and vocational surroundings. Visual therapies may employ prism lenses that distort the child's vision, forcing him/her to use his/her focal vision more productively.

Tinted Lenses were popularized by autistic author Donna Williams in her book Like Color To The Blind and went on to become widely used by people with Autism for the visual perceptual disorder of Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome. Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome is asserted to underpin reading challenges and asserted to result in a visual fragmentation effect in which it is difficult to see a whole face or process objects or a room visually as a whole.

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This autism fact sheet is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation. It is derivative of an Autism and Asperger's syndrome-related articles at http://en.wikipedia.org