Using state of the art eye tracker technology, lead author Tiffany Hutchins showed that children with autism begin to focus less on the eyes the more a situation becomes emotional and that in an anxiety state they are unable to do so.

The study showed that children with ASD may look at the eyes in a non-confrontational conversation but as soon as the topic moves from what people do, to how they feel, the gaze will shift from the eyes to the mouth.

Talking about emotions can ‘strain the executive functioning’ (organising, planning and connecting) and make accessing information from the eye region ‘particularly difficult’.

When a threshold is surpassed the child has no capacity to hold eye contact and so making the child do this under duress is non-effective and potentially damaging.

This is something many parents intuitively know. That science is now making sense of this is great but it really it comes down to common sense.

So why do we put our kids through this anyway? And why do we study people with autism as if they are from another planet?

Hutchins is right; it does take more energy to engage with people when there is emotional charge, and it is harder for kids with autism; emotions are harder for them to read. But since kids with autism are people just like us, why do we force them to do things that we ourselves would not want to do?

Taken in reverse this article does point to the future where we might just begin to provide therapies that are safe and pleasing for our autistic kids. They need to feel safe – clearly this allows greater eye contact, they need to feel confident – clearly this allows greater eye contact.

The more they can feel safe and confident the more they can choose to make eye contact. The more they do this the more can strengthen the neural pathways that are used to keep eye contact and the more that they do this the more they competent they will be. It is all there, the neural function is there, they can make eye contact – they just find it hard to.

The autist is only ever going to learn to make eye contact efficiently when it feels right and makes sense to them. Maybe soon our everyday therapies will reflect this.

Ayurvedic medicine can gently realign the body and provide greater strength and calm in those with autism. From a polyvagal perspective, the body’s vagal system is being better supported – which in turn allows the client to have a better, more stable connection between the brain and nervous system. The more the autist is able to be conscious of this process and notice and own the progress the more they can integrate the change at a higher level.

Art therapy can assist in the integration of the nervous system. It can help to address sensory problems and can allow the autistic child to focus on difficult physical feelings whilst learning to self-soothe and channel feelings into creative pursuit.

In the 1940’s Austrian psychiatrist, Leo Kanner, put forward a theory that autism was not a form of schizophrenia but a separate illness noting in particular the superior abilities of the child.

Despite this distinction it wasn’t until the 1970’s and the unearthing of Hans Asperger and his less pervasive form of autism that the psychological milieu changed and Autism was seen to be of a broader spectrum. Autism became more widely appreciated and took on a less ‘psychiatric’ tone.

With this new outlook, came a desire to look further to the causes of autism. Historically autism came to be seen not as an environmental disturbance caused by frigid mothers, but as a biological disorder of the brain.

Since then autism has become prolific, both in the number of diagnoses and the considered origins of the disorder. In the 1960’s the prevalence of autism was estimated to be about one in two thousand, today it is closer to one in one hundred.

With this spike in diagnosis has come a huge amount of anecdotal evidence from families and clinicians to show the prevalence of physical ailments that are associated with autism. Although the psychological consensus still rests on autism being a genetic brain disorder, there is overwhelming anecdotal evidence that autism is as much a body issue as a brain.

Until the Polyvagal Theory we have had no way of properly understanding the relationship between the mind and the body. With this new understanding we can reframe autism and more clearly see our way in providing therapy for those with autism.

Although the 1940’s work of Leo Kanner’s ‘infantile autism’ depicted autism as distinct from schizophrenia, historically autism was seen for years not only as a form of schizophrenia but also as a result of poor mothering.

The clinicians, heavily influenced by early Freud, blamed cold and emotionless mothers for the onset of autism. This lasted well into the late 1960’s, with autism and the term ‘refrigerator mothers’ becoming popular with modern clinicians through the work of psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim.

This myth has been debunked although many families still bear the scars of this kind of analysis and approach to treatment.

Starting the early 1900’s and lasting well into the 1970’s autism was seen to be a small subset of childhood schizophrenia. Clinicians blamed the onset of autism on cold and emotionless ‘refrigerator mothers’. Later the psychological milieu changed and autism began to be seen as a biological disorder of the brain and the less pervasive Aspberger’s Syndrome became more widely known.

It still took another decade or so for autism to be officially distinguished from childhood schizophrenia and ‘infantile autism’ to be listed in the DSM-111 and it was not until 1994 that the DSM expanded to include Aspberger’s Syndrome, which some perceive to explain the dramatic rise in autism diagnoses in recent years (as well as improved screening and diagnostic techniques).

In 2013 the DSM-5 returned to a somewhat earlier position and subsumed Asperger’s’ Syndrome under the more general term Autism Spectrum Disorder ASD, with only two categories, impaired social communication and/or interaction and restricted and or/repetitive behaviors.

This change is not accepted by many who identify themselves as Asperger’s, and this more than anything highlights the shift in the public perception of autism. Autism has moved from a ‘severe mental disorder’ to one where people can publicly enjoy and appreciate their diagnosis.

The greatest change in the history of autism diagnosis is in the cultural and personal acceptance of autism in all its diversity, which as Steve Silberman points out in his book, ‘Neurotribes’, is perhaps where we were prior to the invention and diagnosis of autism!