When my son was young, plenty of people – other parents, social workers and medical professionals – seemed to take personal issue with David’s diagnosis. For all sorts of reasons, they didn’t want to believe it.
The simplest retort, I discovered, was to let them spend a couple of minutes with him.
My son was a screamer. He could hit a note of ear-piercing intensity and hold it indefinitely, barely breaking for breath – and no amount of pleading, cuddling or bribing could stop him.
Members of the public have threatened me with violence if I failed to make him stop – or even threatened to hit David. Complete strangers, hearing one of his meltdowns, have banged on our front door and tried to intervene. On one occasion, we were ordered out of the waiting room at Bristol Children’s Hospital and told that, if we wanted to see a doctor, we’d have to wait in the car park because David’s screaming was so unbearably intense.
In the UK, the first cases began to be noticed in the 1950s, when they were classified under ‘childhood schizophrenia’. The first British doctor to use the term ‘autism’ was Mildred Creak, a psychiatrist at Great Ormond Street hospital, in 1963.
In other words, autism was unknown in Britain before the Beatles era.
Nor did you mention what his diagnosis is -- are you saying he has autism?