Billy was thirty five years old when we met, he was grossly overweight and living in a residential care home with two other men with severe learning disabilities. His care staff said, ‘Billy doesn’t talk, he hasn’t said anything for years’ but when I questioned further, they said they thought he understood everything that was said to him.
When Billy was sixteen years old, a terrible thing happened which shook his family to its core. His elder sister was attacked and murdered when walking home after a night out with friends. The effect on Billy was catastrophic. Emotionally traumatised, he withdrew into himself. His parents were also grief stricken and unable to console him and give the comfort he needed. Medication had no effect on Billy’s mental state and a psychiatrist recommended electric shock treatment. His parents told me that he had been afraid and had not wanted this option but they had been swayed by medical opinion and against their better judgement had allowed the treatment to go ahead. The consequences were devastating.
The series of electric shocks rendered Billy helpless and unable to function. He was totally passive, unable to feed or dress himself, emotionally and physically dependent and unable to communicate. In trying to deal with their own grief, his parents were unable to cope with the extra burden of looking after him. Devastated by the loss of not only their daughter but also their son, they reluctantly placed Billy in a community home for adults with learning disabilities. + Read More
Empowering the Client
Orthodox symptom focused therapy that endeavours to address impaired communication and social interaction, will not be effective in the long term, unless the feelings of the client and their support team are acknowledged, accepted and prioritised. Through my experience as a speech and language therapist and later as Principal of the Academy of Spiritual Sciences where I taught metaphysics and alternative therapeutic approaches, I discovered the importance of offering disadvantaged adults a plethora of healing choices. This offers them a different experience which impacts positively on every aspect of their life.
Memory and Perception
Imprinted memory from past experience is held within our cells and within the subtle energetic field (aura) which envelops and nourishes our physical body. Our memories are continually being triggered and reinforced by events and interactions in everyday life, which unknowingly ‘kick starts’ automatic behavioural response. Our view of the world is restricted by our beliefs, which are shaped by earlier experience, unrelated to our current circumstances. Our perception of the world may therefore be skewed. We all make choices which are dependent on what we perceive to be true. Therefore, in order to choose and respond differently, we must make a conscious effort to pause before responding, re evaluate our current circumstances and then respond in a totally different way. Easier said than done!
Caroline was a forty six year old woman, who was referred by her doctor because of learning difficulties and deafness. The doctor hoped that any attempt to improve Caroline’s pronunciation of speech sounds would improve her communication and quality of life.
Caroline had had a cleft palate repair as a child and lack of oxygen during the repair had left her with a marked speech impediment. To communicate Caroline used a combination of gesture, signing (Makaton – a language programme using signs and symbols) and speech. Her speech was muffled and unclear due to the excessive nasal resonance caused by the cleft in her palate, although her articulation of single words was clearer than connected speech (sentences). + Read More
I first met ten year old Henry, when he was referred to me by his paediatrician. She was concerned about his deteriorating health and wondered if Henry was still grieving for his grandmother, who had unexpectedly died twelve months earlier. Henry had had a close relationship with her and both he and his mother would have been traumatised by her sudden disappearance from their lives. I was told that Henry used a wheelchair because of poor mobility and coordination. His paediatrician believed that his understanding of speech was limited and I was told that Henry made sounds to communicate rather than words. He had a diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorder.
Henry must certainly have been struggling to make sense of his new living arrangements because I discovered that his family i.e. his mother, her partner and his maternal aunt, had all moved into his grandmother’s house after her death. It was therefore a house full of memories for them all. Henry’s mother was also having difficulty coming to terms with the loss of her own mother and family members were adjusting to living together for the first time in somewhat bizarre circumstances.
Norman, a forty eight year old man with learning disabilities, was also blind. He was small in stature and looked permanently worried. I was told that his vision had been severely impaired after he had sustained a detached retina in both eyes at the age of 43. Unfortunately, he had refused to stay in bed after the operation and as a result his vision had not returned. Norman had been incarcerated in a large asylum hospital from the age of six. He was eventually discharged from the hospital in the late 1980s. When we met he had moved to a small group home in the community with two other men, where he received 24 hour monitoring and assistance.
His care staff requested my help because they were concerned. Norman was becoming increasingly disinterested in walking and was in danger of losing his mobility. The staff team were also worried about Norman’s behaviour because although he enjoyed being outside on a summer’s day and would stand at the garden fence in the sunshine, his mood would change suddenly if he was disturbed . When this happened, he would lose his temper, kick over garden pots and pull up flowers. + Read More
Having worked for several years in a school for children who were severely physically and intellectually disabled, I came to the conclusion that children with communication impairment prefer to be involved with music, movement and play rather than those activities that have an expectation of interaction. However when there is a difficulty with communication, the ability to interact in play will also be restricted and these children will often prefer to isolate themselves from other children to create their own world.
Children who find it hard to express themselves through words and language remind us to be accurate, brief and clear in our communication. Our body language and tone of voice need to match what we are saying so that we don’t give a conflicting message. To avoid confusion and misunderstanding, it may help to offer multi sensory aids (music, objects, pictures, sounds, fragrances) to cue the child into the activity. Encouraging the child to listen, feel, see, touch or smell means that they don’t have to rely on only one channel of communication in order to understand the words being used, or the request being made.
When Paul was referred to me, I was in the midst of juggling my work as a speech and language therapist within the National Health Service with my Academy of Spiritual Sciences holistic therapy training in the UK. I had received an urgent telephone call from his elder sister, telling me that Paul had Down’s syndrome and had lived with his parents in a busy seaside town until tragically, after a short illness, his father and mother had died of heart attacks within months of each other. Following the intervention of social services, Paul had to move away from the only home he had known ,to live with one of his older sisters. The sister with whom he was now living, was a single parent with a little boy of her own. Paul and his sister came from a large family, however all was not well because the brothers and sisters were not on speaking terms with each other. At a family meeting, the other siblings had been against Paul living with any other member of his family, although this particular sister had wanted to take responsibility and care for him.
Paul had a very marked stammer (stutter) and his breathing was shallow and fast. However, he told me of ‘nice dreams’ when his Mum came to talk to him and asked him how he was. He said that he told her he was fine and said that his Mum told him that she was missing him a lot.
Lenny at ten years old, was the oldest of four children. The family’s Health Visitor had noted his delayed development and limited communication when he was two years old. He was subsequently seen by a variety of professionals and submitted to repeated episodes of intervention in an endeavour to effect some improvement, with limited success. Hopeful beginnings rapidly deteriorated into disillusionment and non cooperation.
Lenny’s negative behaviour escalated until school became a place of containment rather than learning. This negative spiralling eventually resulted in his exclusion from school and a home tutor was appointed for ten hours a week. At the time of Lenny’s referral, his home tutor had established a good and trusting relationship with Lenny’s parents but her pre-planned structured teaching approach with Lenny was failing miserably. His speech was virtually unintelligible; he continued to explore objects by putting them in his mouth and chewed pencils and other inedible items. His tutor was endeavouring to relate to him through play but asked for help and advice to do this. She readily agreed to my offer of training and supervision, which included a joint hour with Lenny every three weeks. Not much I know but it was the only mutually agreeable time we could arrange in our busy schedules.
My work in Ireland introduced me to some amazingly creative children. One of them was a little boy called Finbar. I only saw him twice but he taught me that children are able to quickly gain what they need in a space free from judgement and expectation with a variety of versatile props to allow them to express themselves creatively.
Finbar was seven years old, the only child of parents who lived in a cottage deep in the Irish countryside. Finbar’s mother was a healer who used alternative therapies and astrology to solve her difficulties in life. She was warmly expressive and colourfully dressed with long dark hair and olive skin. Finbar’s father was gentle voiced of slight build with long wispy hair which fell onto his collar. At home and school, Finbar refused to sit on the toilet and refused to have his hair cut. In a previous interview his mother told me that she was concerned about Finbar’s preference for girlish things and desire to play the female role and he had difficulty maintaining friendships because of his toilet phobia and soiling.
Jim had learning disabilities and lived in a Residential Home with five other men. He was in his early fifties and was referred to me with anxiety and depression in the hope that I could discover what was causing his unhappiness. Jim had a very limited vocabulary of single words. A word he used continuously was Tuesday and to Jim everyday was Tuesday.
His care-staff were concerned because he was exhibiting what they termed ‘bizarre behaviour’. They told me that when no one was watching, Jim would slip out into the back garden, ‘pull the heads off weeds’ and put them into a plastic carrier bag. He would then thrust his head into the bag to seemingly examine them more closely.
I decided to observe this behaviour first hand, in an attempt to gain some understanding of what was going on. Observation revealed that the weeds Jim was specifically selecting were dandelions. When he felt he had gathered enough dandelion heads, he put his head into the bag and kept it there for about ten seconds.
