How Jelly Was Diagnosed With Autistic Disorder

Similar to the classical description and as documented, the etiology of how Jelly was diagnosed with autistic disorder is unknown. Jelly began to show deficits at a very young age and referred for evaluation. During the evaluation, observation and asked tasks were used to define the scope of Jelly’s deficits. As suggested, autism can only be diagnosed during observation.

The symptoms were all similar. What I observed during fieldwork is exactly as what is described in the classical description. There were many redirection cues, verbal cues, and physical assists (from time to time if redirection/verbal cues are not sufficient) in order for Jelly to complete certain tasks. When Jelly gets excited, she rocks back and forth and flaps her arm. When jelly gets frustrated, she whines and cry, but have learned somewhat of a self-control method: stop, count to three, and breathe.

Typical deficits include lack of eye contact, dysregulation, and habits / patterns. During communication, Jelly can hold a conversation but lacks eye contact. She may hold eye contact for no more than three seconds at a time. Jelly’s dysregulation occurs during classwork and homework. Her emotions in performing certain tasks, such as writing, confuses her because of how far she needs to copy from the board and not recognizing the letters. Another emotion dysregulation occurrs during art class. Jelly needs to color in her sea creatures but cannot because other children were doing other activities that she wanted to. She was not able to understand that she needed to first complete her activity before moving on to the next. A habit, and can be described as an unusual attachment, is smell. Every time she opens a marker to color, she has to smell it. ...

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...s that we have yet to learn, such as the Schoodles. I am not aware of how reliable and valid the Schoodles is, but it does provide somewhat of a baseline of where the child’s education and performance skills are. What it did not do for me was advance my knowledge of autism spectrum disorder. Down to the etiology, it is the same: unknown. There are research to discover and uncover the underlying representation cause of autism, but it is in development. Symptoms vary, but it is engraved in my mind when I see a child flapping their arm, rocking back and forth, and having unusual attachment to objects or smells that they may have autism spectrum disorder. My clinical reasoning skills appears to be improving because I can point out symptoms and occupational performance that appears to be deficits or needs improvement, and make suggestions to how it can be improved.