Temple grandin how old is she

The machine led Grandin to think about her autism as a problem of the central nervous system, with symptoms related to sensory regulation. Autism existed when individuals routinely over-reacted to a flood of sensory information—sounds, sights, smells, and touch—that their brains could neither tolerate nor process. Anti-anxiety drugs like librium and valium had no effect on Grandin, but her squeeze machine worked. By allowing her to manage sensory input herself, it comforted but did not overwhelm her.

It combined two things that autism made incompatible—stimulation and relaxation—and gave her greater access to the social world. At that time, autism was widely considered to be a product of faulty or failed attachment between parents, especially mothers, and their infants. It certainly places her among other pioneering parents and relatives, including Clara Park and Eunice Kennedy Shriver , whose efforts paved the way for the attitudinal and policy changes that made deinstitutionalization a reality and community integration a feasible goal.

But Temple Grandin remains a unique figure whose powerful voice has indelibly changed, for the better, what Americans think autism is and what it means. Temple Grandin, The chute absolutely fascinated her, and her aunt agreed to let her try it out—and Grandin loved its soothing effect on her nerves.

Back at home, she built her own squeeze chute in her bedroom, and an advanced version of that would go on to be used in scores of schools and treatment centers for autistic children in the years to come. The summer on the ranch was significant for another revelation for Grandin: she began to sense that animals and autistic persons shared a signifi-cant trait: both relied on visual clues in order to navigate their world. For example, a squirrel will hide food in dozens of different places for the coming cold snap, but always knows where the acorns and corn cobs are stashed.

Or an ant, passing by a landmark, will turn around and view it from the other side; Grandin says she does this too, while driving on her return trip. Furthermore, like autistic people, non-domesticated animals retreat from human touch. Though medical professionals discouraged her from using the homemade squeeze chute, one of her teachers suggested instead that she try to learn why it worked for her by studying science.

She entered graduate school in animal science at Arizona State University, and began working in the cattle industry as well. She served as the livestock editor of the Arizona Farmer Ranchman for five years, and saw firsthand the methods used to slaughter cattle in the major meat-processing plants.

She recognized that cattle, like some autistic people, exhibited signs of tremendous stress and anxiety when confronted by certain visual or audio clues. Grandin began to think about reducing that unease by redesigning the chute which led the animals to their death. Her first success came when Corral Industries in Phoenix hired her to design some equipment for its plants, but Grandin recognized that though her autism was classified as the "high-functioning" kind, she did not have good interpersonal skills.

Her communication with others was often blunt, and as a result she sometimes found herself alienated from co-workers. Grandin decided that working on her own, in temporary assignments, was probably preferable to a standard job where relationships developed over time, and so in , the year she earned her master's degree, she founded her own company, Grandin Livestock Handling Systems.

Over the next two decades, Grandin became an expert in animal handling in slaughterhouses and one of the most respected names in her field. The results of the research studies she conducted were published in various academic journals and industry trade publications, and in she was granted her doctorate in animal science from the University of Illinois.

By the mids, the fast-food industry began to pay attention to her work, thanks to a libel case that wound through the British court system. In that suit, associates of the Greenpeace environmental group wrote and distributed a leaflet about McDonald's, the fast-food giant, claiming that the practices at the slaughterhouses that worked under contract to McDonald's amounted to animal cruelty.

McDonald's, Burger King, and companies like ConAgra that sell meat to consumers via supermarket counters have perfected large-scale animal processing. These companies, or ones that work under contract to them, breed, feed, and slaughter cattle on vast rural facilities known as animal feeding operations, or APOs.

Beef cattle are slaughtered between 14 to 16 months of age, and the process involves a shot to their foreheads with a stun gun, which renders them unconscious. The next step involves hoisting the animal up by one of its rear legs, and then its throat is slit on what is known as the bleed rail. If the stunning and slitting has been done properly, the animal dies quickly, and then moves on to other processing stations.

The McDonald's trial in Britain was a long and complicated legal proceeding, but one judge did agree that some of the accusations were founded, and that inhumane treatment sometimes occurred in the slaughterhouse. McDonald's hired Grandin as a consultant to improve conditions and avoid a wider public-relations debacle, and she first visited one of the company's APOs with several of the company executives.

They watched that walk up a ramp and right into their product. It is interesting that my speech resembled the stressed speech in young children who have had tumors removed from the cerebellum.

Rekate, Grubb, Aram, Hahn, and Ratcheson found that cancer surgeries that lesioned the vermus, deep nuclei, and both hemispheres of the cerebellum caused temporary speech loss in normal children. Vowel sounds were the first to 1 return, and receptive speech was normal.

Courchesne, Yeung-Courchesne, Press, Hesselink, and Jernigan reported that 14 out of 18 high- to moderate- functioning autistics had undersized cerebellar vermal lobules VI and VII. Bauman and Kemper and Ritvo et al. In my own case an MRI scan revealed cerebellar abnormalities.

I end up toppling sideways, but my reactions are normal for other simple motor tests of cerebellar dysfunction. Vestibular stimulation can sometimes stimulate speech in autistic children. Certain types of smooth, coordinated movements are difficult for me, even though I appear normal to the casual observer. For example, when I operate hydraulic equipment that has a series of levers, I can operate one lever at a time perfectly.

Coordinating the movement of two or three levers at once is impossible. This may explain why I do not readily learn a musical instrument, even though I have innate musical talent for pitch and melody. The only musical instrument I mastered is whistling with my mouth. Throughout elementary school my speech was still not completely normal.

Often it took me longer than other children to start getting my words out. Singing, however was easy.

I have perfect pitch and I can effortlessly hum back the tune of a song I have heard only once or twice. I still have many problems with rhythm. At a concert I am unable to clap in time with the music with the rest of the people. A lack of rhythm during autistic piano playing is noted by Park and Youderian Rhythm problems may be related to some autistic speech problems. Autistics fail to do this.

Condon also found that autistics and, to a lesser extent, dyslexics and stutterers have a defective orienting response. One ear hears a sound sooner that the other.

The asynchrony between ears is some- times over one second. This may help explain certain speech problems. People still accuse me of interrupting. Due to a faulty rhythm sense, it is difficult to determine when I should break into a conversation.

Following the rhythmic ebb and rise of a conversation is difficult. I have two choices: turn the mike on and get deluged with sound, or shut it off. Mother reported that sometimes I acted like I was deaf. Hearing tests indicated that my hearing was normal. Many autistics have problems with modulating sensory input Ornitz, They either overreact or under-react. Ornitz suggests that some cognitive deficits could be caused by distorted sensory input.

Autistics also have profound abnormalities in the neurological mechanisms that control the capacity to shift attention between different stimuli Courchesne, I am unable to talk on the phone in a noisy office or airport.

If I try to screen out the background noise, I also screen out the phone. A friend of mine, a high-functioning autistic, was unable to hear a conversation in a relatively quiet hotel lobby. She has the same problem I have, except worse. Autistics must be protected from noises that bother them. An autistic child will cover his ears because certain sounds hurt. It is like an excessive startle reaction. A sudden noise even a relatively faint one will often make my heart race.

Cerebellar abnormalities may play a role in increased sound sensitivity. Stimulation of the cerebellum with an electrode will make a cat hypersensitive to sound and touch Chambers, I still dislike places with confusing noise, such as shopping malls. High-pitched continuous noises such as bathroom vent fans or hair dryers are annoying. I can shut down my hearing and withdraw from most noise, but certain frequencies cannot be shut out. It is impossible for an autistic child to concentrate in a classroom if he is bombarded with noises that blast through his brain like a jet engine.

High, shrill noises were the worst. A low rumble has no effect, but an exploding firecracker hurts my ears. As a child, my governess used to punish me by popping a paper bag. The sudden, loud noise was torture. Even now, I still have problems with tuning out. I will be listening to a favorite song on the radio, and then realize I missed half of it. My hearing just shuts off. In college, I had to constantly keep taking notes to prevent tuning out.

The young man from Portugal also wrote that carrying on a conversation was very difficult. I often misbehaved in church, because the petticoats itched and scratched. Sunday clothes felt different than everyday clothes. Most people adapt to the feeling of different types of clothing in a few minutes. Even now, I avoid wearing new types of underwear.

It takes me three to four days to fully adapt to new ones. As a child in church, skirts and stockings drove me crazy. My legs hurt during the cold winter when I wore a skirt. The problem was the change from pants all week to a skirt on Sunday. If I had worn skirts all the time, I would not have been able to tolerate pants. Today I buy clothes that feel similar. My parents had no idea why I behaved so badly.

A few simple changes in clothes would have improved my behavior. Some tactile sensitivities can be desensitized. Encouraging a child to rub the skin with different cloth textures often helps.

The nerve endings on my skin were supersensitive. Stimuli that were insignificant to most people were like Chinese water torture. Ayres lists many good suggestions on methods to desensitize the tactile system. It was an approach-avoid situation. I wanted to feel the good feeling of being hugged, but when people hugged me the stimuli washed over me like a tidal wave. When I was 5 years old, I used to daydream about a mechanical device I could get into that would apply comforting pressure.

Being able to control the device was very important. I had to be able to stop the stimulation when it became too intense. When people hugged me, I stiffened and pulled away to avoid the all- engulfing tidal wave of stimulation. The stiffening up and flinching was like a wild animal pulling away.

As a child, I used to like to get under the sofa cushions and have my sister sit on them. At various autism conferences, I have had 30 or 40 parents tell me that their autistic child seeks deep pressure stimuli. Research by Schopler indicated that autistic children prefer proximal sensory stimulation such as touching, tasting, and smelling to distal sensory stimulation such as hearing or seeing.

At age 18 I built a squeezing machine. This device is completely lined with foam rubber, and the user has complete control over the duration and amount of pressure applied. A complete description of the machine is in Grandin , , and Grandin and Scariano The machine pro- vides comforting pressure to large areas of the body.

It took me a long time to learn to accept the feeling of being held and not try to pull away from it. I feel that the lack of empathy may be partially due to a lack of comforting tactual input. This cat used to run from me, but after using the machine, I learned to pet the cat more gently and he decided to stay with me.

I had to be comforted myself before I could give comfort to the cat Grandin, I have found from my own experiences with the squeeze machine that I almost never feel aggressive after using it.

In order to learn to relate to people better, I first had to learn how to receive comfort from the soothing pressure of the squeeze machine. During my work with livestock, I find that touching the animals increases my empathy for them. Touching and stroking the cattle makes me feel gentle towards them. The squeeze machine also had a calming effect on my nervous system. Squeeze machines have been in use in clinics working with autistic and hyperactive children Figures and Lorna King, an occupational therapist in Phoenix, Arizona, reports that it has a calming effect on hyperactive behavior.

Therapists have found that deep pressure stimulation has a calming effect Ayres,, At puberty, my behavior took a bad turn for the worse. Gillberg and Schaumann describe behavior deterioration at puberty in many autistics. Shortly after my first menstrual period, the anxiety attacks started.

The feeling was like a constant feeling of stage fright all the time. Now just imagine if you felt that way most of the time for no reason. It was like my brain was running at miles an hour, instead of 60 miles an hour. Librium and Valium provided no relief. They subsided late at night and early in the morning. The constant nervousness would go in cycles, with a tendency to be worse in the spring and fall.

For weeks I had horrible bouts of colitis. I was desperate for relief. At a carnival I discovered that riding on the Rotor ride provided temporary relief. Intense pressure and vestibular stimulation calmed my nerves. Bhatara, Clark, Arnold, Gunsett, and Smeltzer have found that spinning in a chair twice each week reduces hyperactivity in young children.

A few days later I tried the cattle squeeze chute, and it provided relief for several hours. The squeeze machine was modeled after a squeeze chute used on cattle. Prior to building the squeeze machine, the only other way I could get relief was strenuous exercise or manual labor. There are two other ways to fight the nerves: fixate on an intense activity, or withdraw and try to minimize outside stimulation. Fixating on one thing had a calming effect. When I was livestock editor for the Arizona Farmer Ranchman, I used to write three articles in one night.

While I was typing furiously I felt calmer. I was the most nervous when I had nothing to do. With age, the nerves got worse. I started waking up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding and obsessive thoughts about going blind. In the next section, I am going to describe my experiences with medication. There are many autism subtypes, and a medication that works for me may be useless for another case. Parents of autistic children should obtain medical advice from professionals who are knowledgeable of the latest medical research.

The symptoms described in this paper sounded like my symptoms, so I decided to try Tofranil. Fifty mg of Tofranil at bedtime worked like magic. Within a week, the feelings of nervousness started to go away. After being on Tofranil for four years I switched to 50 mg Norpramin desipramine , which has fewer side effects. These pills have changed my life. Colitis and other stress-related health problems were cured. Paul Hardy in Boston has found that Tofranil and Prozac fluoxetine are both effective for treating certain high-functioning autistic adolescents and adults.

Both Dr. Hardy and Dr. John Ratey personal communication, have learned that very small doses of these drugs must be used. These doses are usually much lower than the dose prescribed for depression. Too high a dose can cause agitation, aggression, or excitement, and too low a dose will have no effect.

It took will power to stick with the 50 mg dose and let the relapse subside on its own. Before taking the drug, the engine was racing all the time.

Now it runs at normal speed. The effective doses for Prozac have ranged from two 20 mg capsules per week to 40 mg per day. Too high a dose will cause agitation and excitement. If an autistic person becomes agitated the dose should be lowered.

Other promising drugs for aggressive autistic adolescents and adults are beta blockers. Beta blockers greatly reduce aggressive behavior Ratey et al. During the eight years I have been taking antidepressants, there has been a steady improvement in my speech, sociability, and posture. The change was so gradual that I did not notice it. Within the last year, I had an opportunity to visit an old friend who had known me before I started taking antidepressants.

My friend, Billie Hart, told me I was a completely different person. She said I used to walk and sit in a hunched-over position and now my posture is straight. Eye contact had improved and I no longer shifted around in my chair. I was also surprised to learn that I no longer seemed to be out of breath all the time, and I had stopped constantly swallowing.

Various people I have met at autism meetings have seen steady improvement in my speech and mannerisms throughout the eight-year period I have taken the medicines. My old friend, Lorna King, also noticed many changes. I had a odd lack of awareness of my oddities of speech and mannerisms until I looked at videotapes.

I think videotapes could be used to help many high-functioning autistics with speech and social skills. There is much that can be learned from family history. She was fortunate to get early speech therapy. Her teachers also taught her how to wait and take turns when playing board games. She was mainstreamed into a normal kindergarten at age five. Sacks profiled Dr. Grandin in his best selling book Anthropologist on Mars. Grandin became a prominent author and speaker on both autism and animal behavior.

She also has a successful career consulting on both livestock handling equipment design and animal welfare. Articles about Dr. When she was young, she was considered weird and teased and bullied in high school. The only place she had friends was activities where there was a shared interest such as horses, electronics, or model rockets.

Carlock, her science teacher, was an important mentor who encouraged her interest in science. When she had a new goal of becoming a scientist, she had a reason for studying. Today half the cattle in the United States are handled in facilities she has designed. In , the American Psychiatric Association revised the diagnostic criteria for autism. This greatly broadened the spectrum. It now ranges from brilliant scientists, artists, and musicians to an individual who cannot dress himself or herself.

Over the years, the diagnostic criteria have kept changing. It is not precise like a lab test for strep throat.