What Is the Real Picture of Autism?

A few weeks back Lisa Belkin, a wonderful writer, had a piece on a New York Times blog about the recent study addressing the stress parents of children with autism experience. Well, this article has generated much attention and created some interesting comments.

Here is the original column
The University of Washington released a study earlier this month concluding that being the mother of a child with autism is more stressful than being the mother of a child with other kinds of developmental disabilities. One reader’s first reaction to this news was “I could have told you that,” because her son, who is five, has Asperger’s syndrome, and his condition rules much of her life.
Then she read the report, and became angry. Its description of life with a child who has autism was sanitized and simplified, she thought. In part that’s because the words that exist in the English language fall short in evoking what she calls “the nightmare.”

Here is a response written by Lisa Jo Rudy, of about.com, the mother of a teen on the spectrum.

Be sure to scroll down and check out the comments.