Use of EMDR to treat children with autism

I am a child and adolescent psychiatrist with a particular interest in the neurobiology of trauma. Looking back on the forum there was a question related to the above topic. The 2 replies at the time referred to positive experiences with Children with Asperger's Syndrome.There has been recent compelling work done on an 11 year old autistic boy by Joanne Morris-Smith a clinical psychologist based in Surrey England. Her view (with which I concur) is that everyday experience is traumatizing for these kids. Their iniability to adaptively process this trauma leads to frustration and worsening symptomatology. The therapeutic work on this boy involved tapping on his thighs to initiate processing while he did pencil and paper drawings of the resultant images. The results were astonishing. He processed memories from his time at elementary school age 5 when he had run out of school in a state of distress having taken all his clothes off. What I think this case points us to is that eye movements will not work with autistic spectrum disorders as eye contact is by definition abnormal in this population. Also I believe there are hidden depths to the forms of expression available to autistic children. The use of alternate dual attention stimuli (i.e. taps or tones ) is the key to success. This case is on video and anyone who sees it would be left in no doubt about the benefits of this form of reprocessing therapy.

Replies:

Re:Use of EMDR to treat children with autism, by Sandra Paulsen Inobe PhD, 09/06/03

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