Richter-Scale Tantrums: New Hope for Exhausted Parents (Autism‪)‬

EXCITING NEWS IS EMERGING that could change the lives of many parents of children and adolescents with autism. Extreme tantrums often "run their lives," according to Dr. Lawrence Scahill, Professor of Nursing and Child Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, CT. As the Director of Yale's Research Unit on Pediatric Pharmacology (RUPP), Dr. Scahill, along with colleagues around the country, is spearheading research that examines complementary use of the drug Risperadone with a therapist-taught parent behavioral training model. RUPP researchers hope to improve the lives of families coping with frequently occurring, excessive tantrums. "When tantrums and other challenging social behaviors were out of control, learning could not take place," stated Dr. Scahill. Could opportunities for learning adaptive skills be improved in these children with autism if their tantrums were less frequent? Often, the tantrum is just an 'extreme peaking' in a day filled with other stressful behaviors enacted by the individual with autism. These might include repetitive fixation behaviors (perseveration), such as a child repeating phrases constantly or engaging in repetitive body movements, like rocking or spinning. A child's anxiety might manifest as uncontrollable vocal outbursts. His refusal to cooperate might result in his flopping to the ground or throwing and/or destroying property. One parent described living with this set of conditions as though she were imprisoned: "If set off, before we learned to use 'ABC' data to discover his 'triggers,' our son would tantrum for six hours, screaming continuously. We felt like hostages, never going out because of it," stated Eve Kessler, President of the Special Education PTA (SPED-NET) in Wilton, CT.