Dr Temple Grandin comes to the West Midlands

On May 17th and 18th a conference was held in Sutton Coldfield. This was the second joint venture we have hosted in conjunction with the Autism Awareness Centre of Canada. We were delighted to have persuaded Temple to come but in order to do so we had to also facilitate her being able to speak to people working in the cattle industry in some way. Dr Phil Hadley of the British Beef and Lamb Executive was very happy to help and once Temple had spoken at our event she attended a special dinner in her honour in Stratford and then spoke to members of the Beef and Lamb Executive.

As many of the evaluation sheets stated, Temple was inspirational. She spoke about herself and her upbringing as well as current research in the field of autism. The three key areas of her talk that stood out for me were:

• The sensory problems in autism are very real and need to be seen as much more central in terms of both diagnosis and interventions.

• The differences in brain development between people with asd and those with neurotypical brains are very clear. Temple showed us a range of scans of her own brain in comparison to someone of similar age and gender with a neurotypical brain – fascinating.

• Temple described herself as being emotionally like a ten year old but that she has replaced her emotional complexity with intellectual complexity. “I am what I think much more than what I feel”. The talk came to a close with Temple sharing her rule system for life that she recommends to people with asd and she explained how she fits all the rules of the world into her four point framework:

1. Really bad things (murder, stealing etc)
2. Courtesy rules (being polite and not being rude)
3. Illegal but not bad (she told us a story about her aunt (now deceased so it was ok to tell the story) who bypassed bureaucracy in order to get more books for a children’s library
4. Sins of the system (things that are wrong in different cultures that you need to know about ie. swearing, jokes with sexual innuendo).

The second speaker at this two day event was Kari Dunn Buron, the author of a number of books including “The Incredible Five Point Scale”. Kari found Temple a very hard act to follow but by the second day she had really found her feet and those who attended both days were very pleased with the work on social cognition that she shared and the innovative ways she has developed to teach social skills using a golden Labrador and Yoga. Kari was a delightful woman with a real wealth of experience and expertise to share.
The conference closed as it began with a real inspirational talk from John Simpson who has been a service user within autism.west midlands and is now an employee at Gorse Farm. John told his story with clarity and humour. A story that was painful to hear at times as he describes some of the difficulties he had at school that eventually led to his mental breakdown. But one of great hope as he was supported into employment through ASpire and the feeling of self worth this has brought for John that he shared so ably.