Thomas R. Insel Quotes

It's very important for the parents of young autistic children to encourage them to talk, or for those that don't talk, to give them a way of communicating, like a picture board, where they can point to a glass of milk, or a jacket if they're cold, or the bathroom.

Kids don't talk like adults, but kids on the spectrum don't necessarily fall into the same patterns of speaking or have the same interests as other kids their age.

One in 150 kids is autistic these days. The autism spectrum is growing.

When our son's autism was diagnosed at the age of 2, there was no clear prognosis. We didn't even know if he'd ever learn to talk. But we found talented people to work with him and he improved, slowly at first and then more rapidly.

If you have a 2 or 3 year old who is not talking, you must start an early intervention program. The worst thing you can do with an autistic 3 year old is to do nothing.

When kids are really little, they all look the same. No speech, no social relatedness, cannot emphasize enough the importance of early educational intervention.

My son was diagnosed with autism. He's OK, he makes eye contact, but he doesn't talk. He needs eight hours a day of very intensive school, and you wouldn't even believe me if I told you how much it costs.

Autistic children are very difficult to take care of, especially severely autistic ones. When I was 4, I had almost no language; when I was 3, I had none at all.

When you're dealing with a problem as complex as autism, you have to look at it from many different points of view and assemble evidence from many different vantage points. Biological evidence in humans and in animals, toxicologic evidence, how does the body deal with toxins, and evidence looking at the actual experience in populations.

There is a tremendous range of children with a PDD label.

We've been blessed with four beautiful children. Michael, he doesn't have much of a problem anymore. He is high functional, probably because of early intervention.

My brother was diagnosed with autism at age 2. At the time, I was young, so I didn't really understand what it all meant. The doctors thought there was a possibility my brother wouldn't be able to speak - he was diagnosed on the severe end of the spectrum.

One big question that's come up is: Has autism increased on the mild side of things? I don't think so - they've always been here. Some of this is increased detection.

Autism is a complicated illness, and children with a variety of treatments and non-treatments show improvement over time, which is all to the good.

Autism currently affects one in 88 children in the U.S., and its prevalence continues to rise. That's why it's important to help organizations like Autism Speaks raise awareness and funds to support families and individuals impacted by it.

I had a lot of trouble speaking as a kid. I didn't really speak in coherent sentences until I was, like, 6 years old. There was a long time where everybody was very worried, because my sisters were so advanced for their age, and I would barely talk.

As a scientist leading a funding agency for autism research, I think of autism as a neurodevelopmental disorder.

A child needs to be listened to and talked to at 3 and 4 and 5 years of age. Parents should not wait for the sophisticated conversation of a teenager.

As a parent with a child with autism, it's been really tough to experience your child having autism.

The government is slowly waking up to the scale of the personal tragedy of delayed autism diagnosis.

By looking at autistic kids, you can't tell when you're working with them who you're going to pull out, who is going to become verbal and who's not. And there seem to be certain kids who, as they learn more and more, they get less autistic acting, and they learn social skills enough so that they can turn out socially normal.

If you see a child with autistic-like behaviors at age two and three, the worst thing you can do is just let them sit and watch TV all day. That's just the worst thing you can do. You need to have a teacher working with that child, working on teaching language, working on social interaction, working on getting them interested in different things, and keeping their brain connected to the world.

The position of Autism Speaks has been for quite awhile that we need to find out what's happening. We know there's a genetic component, and there's an environmental trigger, and until we get to the bottom of what's happening, no one knows what causes autism.

Any time you make more than a couple of friends at an event, I think that you actually made no friends.

Back then, people thought if you could talk you didn't have autism. I was just seen as this slightly odd child. I saw another therapist aged 12, and another in my early 30s.