Chris Murphy: “when I years ago worked as a psychologist at one of the hospitals in Pittsburgh, I was examining a newborn baby. As part…”

“when I years ago worked as a psychologist at one of the hospitals in Pittsburgh, I was examining a newborn baby. As part of examining this baby, I looked to see how this baby responded to sounds and sights. Your average newborn baby when you have a light or something in the baby's eyes will turn toward it. If you hold the baby in front of you and the baby looks you in the eye, you can turn your head and that baby's eyes will turn with you. There was one particular child that I remember holding and looking at. Every time I tried to get the baby's eyes to look at me, this infant would turn away and get distressed. Yet if I held an object or something before the baby, the baby would look. I made a note of that somewhere in my own charts. It was interesting that a few years later when this same child entered my office at age 3, the parents noted that this child did not seem to have emotional reactions to people, did not seem to respond to playing the same way other children do, did not seem to use words the same way. It was almost as if he could neither love nor be loved. This child was an autistic child whom we identified early on as having some of those symptoms. Autism is a biologically based, neurodevelopmental disease that causes severe impairments in their language, in their social interactions, as if there was this wall around them that they can neither love nor be loved. These are not children who are mentally retarded.…”