With the reported incidence of autism increasing dramatically
— sometimes as much as 15 percent in a year — experts are
still uncertain if better reporting is bringing more cases to light or
unknown factors are actually causing more autism.
“It’s clearly a bio-physical disorder,”
said Dwight Sweeney, director of Cal State San Bernardino’s University
Center for Developmental Disabilities (UCDD), “and it boils down
to two questions: Why are certain genes predisposed to autism? And what
is triggering the disorder in those predisposed genes?”
The director of Cal State San Bernardino’s UCDD
since 1997 and a professor of educational psychology and counseling at
the university, Sweeney opened a new comprehensive program for young people
with autism and their families in the Coachella Valley earlier this year.
The program serves local families coping with autism and other pervasive
developmental disabilities. It’s been operating at the CSUSB campus
for 13 years.
“Autism isn’t an automatic ‘life sentence,’
as long as parents can find support and use it,” said Sweeney, who
is a nationally known expert on autism research, with experience in the
field in Colorado, Michigan and Pennsylvania. He is also a past president
of the California Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders. “The
problem with autism is that it’s not just one thing. It’s
a ‘spectrum disorder’ affecting communication and social relationships.”
Most parents of children with autism discover symptoms
of withdrawal occurring between the ages of 3 and 5. In many cases, a
sudden onset seems to be related to an experience like the flu, a virus,
a strong reaction to fever or even a toxic reaction to common childhood
vaccines. However, in other cases symptoms develop gradually, or seem
to be apparent from birth or shortly after. “Nobody knows what causes
it,” Sweeney said. “Nobody has a cure. At this point there’s
no genetic test to predict the presence of autism.” He said research
is continuing and scientists hope to make progress in both treatment and
diagnosis in coming years.
The support services for families at the UCDD include
instruction to children to increase socialization, communication and appropriate
behaviors, activities for parents and siblings, instruction in parenting
techniques and exercises to enhance cooperation of schools and agencies
that serve children enrolled in the program.
The UCDD is one of the largest such programs in the nation,
serving more than 90 families each week. Treatment usually consists of
a once-a-week session, lasting two and one-half hours. (More treatments
per week are available in some instances.) Parents participate in a separate
weekly information and support group. Sweeney said the typical course
is two years.
During construction of the permanent Palm Desert Campus
on Cook Street, UCDD is temporarily housed at the Workforce Development
Center in Indio. The planned third building at the campus will be for
health sciences programs, including UCDD. The fund-raising campaign for
that building is already underway. Recently, a gift of $5,000 to the PDC
from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians went toward the construction
of the health sciences building.
The university has set a goal of raising $10 million in
private, foundation and/or local government funds to erect the health
sciences building, which will house the nursing education program and
other allied health sciences.
Desert History
Cabazon tribal elder Joe Benitez talks about the exhibit
of Native American artwork on display in the Mary Stuart Rogers Gateway
Building at the Palm Desert Campus. The exhibit is on indefinite loan
from the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum and the Cabazon Cultural Museum.
Saving Time
They included student papers predicting how the world would
look in 2054, a laptop computer, issues of The Desert Sun newspaper, issues
of the Futurist and Time and pictures of local students. For this dedication
of a time capsule, Palm Desert Mayor Bob Spiegel led Cal State San Bernardino,
College of the Desert, area high school and World Affairs Council of the
Desert representatives and guests as they collected at Cook Street and
Frank Sinatra Drive to bury the past before it ever was.
When guests arrived they signed a document that was placed
with the other memorabilia in the capsule, marked with a bronze plaque.
Michelle Pollard, a student at the Palm Desert Campus, later read a portion
of the predictions she made in her paper. Fifty years from now, on Oct.
10, this snapshot in time will be broken open.
