Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don't have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can't stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there's too much stimulation.

When I was diagnosed, mothers were blamed for causing autism. There was no autism support. They'd put autistic kids in institutions. I had severe autism. But my mom wouldn't accept that. I was put in speech therapy. My mother was always pushing me to do stuff.

I'm a believer in biochemistry. But I tell people to try only one thing at a time to see if it works. And if you do give a powerful drug to a kid, it better have a big wow factor.

One area of study that still needs to be done is the kind of autism where kids have speech and they lose it. Some parents say it's happened right after vaccines. That group needs to be studied separately from others.

If you have a 2 or 3 year old who is not talking, you must start an early intervention program. The worst thing you can do with an autistic 3 year old is to do nothing.

One of the ways to reduce that barking would be to have volunteers come in especially for hte for the dogs and take each dog out for 45 minutes each day and spend quality time with the person - that would help reduce the stress and in fact, one of my students did a study on that.

I'm a visual thinker, not a language-based thinker. My brain is like Google Images.