Intellectual Needs

• “All my life I was enrolled in classes for the profoundly retarded. The pain of the isolation, I can’t describe. Some classes consisted of putting flashlights together and then they would be taken apart for the next day’s project. I never spoke or made eye contact. I hummed and self stimmed. No wonder they thought I was hopeless. I was always treated well but my intellectual needs were never addressed because nobody knew I had any intellect at all. Sadly, many like me remain in that same hellish situation.”

• Dan Treacy in The Communicator, newsletter of the Autism National Committee