Product Description

"The Jumbled Jigsaw" exposes autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) not as single entities but as a combination of a whole range of often untreated, sometimes easily treatable, underlying conditions. Exploring everything from mood, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, and tic disorders to information processing and sensory perceptual difficulties, including dependency issues, identity problems and much more, Donna demonstrates how a number of such conditions can combine to form a 'cluster condition' and underpin the label 'autism spectrum disorder'. Donna Williams encourages and empowers families to look at what they can do to change their child's environment to address anxiety, overload and other issues. She also gives carers the necessary information to navigate the booming autism marketplace and demand the right tools for the job. The author also challenges professionals to adopt a multi-disciplinary approach to identifying and treating the cluster conditions that make up an autism spectrum diagnosis, and to improve service delivery to those in need. "The Jumbled Jigsaw" is a call to modern society to take responsibility and accept diversity. It is written in a very human and user-friendly way for parents and for Auties and Aspies themselves, but it is also aimed at carers, professionals, policy-makers and service providers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #355094 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 392 pages

From the Author
What Donna says about writing Text Books

I'm not an expert. I'm a social philosopher. As a sociologist, teacher and researcher, I try to avoid talking about pathology and look at processes. I take a stance closer to that of social psychology and raise the issues and perspectives that scientists then explore. My text books have become foundation texts in special education and psychology courses and have changed the treatment, education and educational environments of people on the autistic spectrum quite dramatically over the last ten years. My works are unapologetically controversial and about far more than autism spectrum conditions. I have written about sensory perceptual disorders and differences, cognitive and information processing differences, anxiety disorders, sensing and intuition, about identity, personality and co-dependency, about communication disorders and differences, about condition versus culture and most importantly about the person, individuality, daring and humility. I do not claim at any!
time that autism is any one thing, quite the contrary, I claim it is very diverse and far more like a fruit salad, the combinations of which differ from person to person as do the multitude of underlying causes and the wholistic means of addressing them. My books are read far outside of the autism world alone and as autism is merely normal processes with the volume turned way up, many of the issues I write about give non-autistic people surprising insights into themselves.

About the Author
Donna Williams was born in Australia in 1963 and raised in a working-class inner-city area in Australia. She grew up hearing words such as 'deaf', 'disturbed', 'crazy' and 'spastic', and like many able people with autism born in the 1960s and earlier, she wasn't formally diagnosed with autism until adulthood. As well as writing, composing, painting and sculpting, she lectures and runs workshops on autism all around the world. Donna is also the author of four autobiographies - Nobody Nowhere, Somebody Somewhere, Like Colour to the Blind and Everyday Heaven - along with several other books on autism, Autism and Sensing, Autism: An Inside-Out Approach, Exposure Anxiety, and a collection of her poetry, Not Just Anything: A Collection of Thoughts on Paper. These books are also published by and available from Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Her first international best-selling autobiography, Nobody Nowhere, is currently under option by a Hollywood film company. After 13 years in the UK, she now lives back in Australia with her husband Chris.

Customer Reviews

What if one thing called 'autism' didn't actually exist?
The Jumbled Jigsaw is a very daring book. Where other books have written about co-morbid disorders in those on the autistic spectrum, this book discusses how a combination of such co-morbid conditions could actually contribute to what appears as autism and the developmental and health impacts of infants left with untreated mood, anxiety and compulsive disorders who, without treatment, may never acquire the communication skills to confirm a diagnosis of such co-morbid conditions. Hence, the whole thing becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Williams goes into the taboo areas of environmental impact on people's developmental disabilities. To what degree might an incompatible environmental approach increase the presentation of what is seen as their autism? Can those with autism develop co-morbid personality disorders and, if so, how might these impact on them perceiving otherwise 'normal' environmental responses as 'abusive', thereby compounding their social and communication challenges? How do identity disorders and co-dependency issues interact with an autism spectrum condition and what changes does it take to turn around such complications? This book spreads the net wide in gathering a near encyclopedia of affects that can combine and compound in a presentation that is legitamately labelled autistic.

In a world looking for single magic bullets or attributing all to chemistry, gut, toxicity or environmental issues, this book shows clearly that real solutions to an autism fruit salad lay in identifying what's actualy in that mixture and bringing in not one, but a range of approaches that tackle each of the very different underlying issues.

Written in a very easy to read manner, this book should be an invaluable resource for those looking to go beyond the labels not only to the mechanisms at work underneath those labels but to the very personhood which drives how we do or don't seize learning and develop.