Institutional Autism is not a genetically induced autism like most diagnosed  in the United States, but one learned from years of neglect and sensory deprivation. Dr. Ronald Federici, a renowned adoption psychologist has done a vast amount of research on this topic and written numerous articles. He and Michael Rutter, an American psychologist, indicate some of the major symptoms of institutional autism as:

1. Sensory and social deprivation can result in the autistic-like behaviors.
2. These behaviors may diminish after the child is removed from the initial deprived environment.
3. A substantial minority of children will continue to exhibit these difficult behavior patterns for many years.

Risk Factors:

1. Heredity and neurological make-up of the adopted child.
2. Lack of postnatal care and negative conditions of development before institutionalization.
3. Age when placed in an institution and the length of institutionalization.
4. Conditions in institution/country of adoption.

Basically, children learn to be autistic because of their experience in the orphanage…stimulating themselves to pass the time or to entertain themselves. In our case, we believe AJ (an adopted child) was swaddled for a decent amount of the two years he was there. He was chronically ill will bronchial infections due to an undiagnosed milk intolerance and an oat and banana allergy (the two main foods in his diet there ). Thus, if he was ill he would have either been swaddled and placed on his back in his crib or left to sleep in the playpen off to the side.

Now, if you were 1-2 years old with nothing to do, no toys to play with…what would you do????

AJ learned to play with toys inappropriately (line up and spin all toys because what else can toys do?), poke his eyes, spin in circles, stare out windows, throw monster tantrums at ANY change in movement (if you were in the same place ALL day, would you like to be moved?), stare at lights to keep from sleeping, attentive to every sound (in his crib he could not make eye contact but could hear everything)…I could go on but those are the MAJOR items.

Now, those things have diminished, as have most of his sensory issues. As Federici and Rutter state, most children will recover from Institutional Autism given the right home life. Thank goodness he has been given that.

One thing that we are specifically working on is making sure that AJ has the right resources to improve, not just the “positive dynamic in the child’s development of appropriate behaviors in the family.” If he truly does have organic autism we need to make sure to have him tested on a regular basis. Now that AJ has been home two years and has made some language improvements we need to start chronically his improvements. If he does not make any improvements (or falls behind) we should be looking at organic autism, not just institutional autism.