Hannah Brown Books

If I Could Tell You now available as an audio book from Audible.com

Hannah — Fri, 10 May 2013 01:30:12 +0000

The amazing Julie McKay brings the novel to life!

http://www.audible.com/pd/ref=sr_1_1?asin=B00COMOZ6C&qid=1368149127&sr=1-1

7 Myths About Autism It’s Time to Put to Rest

Hannah — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:32:22 +0000

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hannah-brown/7-myths-about-autism_b_2977120.html?utm_hp_ref=parents&ir=Parents#es_share_ended

It’s official: The astronomically high numbers on autism released in 2012 by the Centers for Disease Control — that 1 in 88 children will be diagnosed with the disorder — have jumped even higher. The CDC came out with new figures in March showing that it’s now 1 in 50 children. Some have disputed these new statistics, but I wouldn’t know how to. I’m the mother of a 16-year-old with autism, not an epidemiologist. And I can certainly say, based on my own experiences seeing children of old friends and colleagues being diagnosed every year, the numbers seem to be on the rise.

Last year, just after World Autism Awareness Day when I published my novel, If I Could Tell You, about four families coping with autism, I began hearing from parents of autistic children from all over the U.S., as well as the world: Japan, India, Norway, Israel, France, Italy, Britain and Argentina.

One subject that comes up often when we chat are the many misconceptions people still have about autism. So, I’m going to list the myths that bother me the most. While no one believes all of these, many people still believe some of them.

1. People with autism are all “Rain Man” geniuses. In truth, only between 5-10 percent have what are called “savant abilities,” such as the ability to tell if a large number is prime, to play a piece of music by ear or to make a detailed drawing of a building they’ve only seen once. It’s fascinating when people have such skills, and that’s most likely why savants receive so much publicity. But most kids are like the son of novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy), whose only remarkable talent is the ability to hear someone opening a package of potato chips from the other end of the house. That’s what my son is like.

2. People with autism are all mentally disabled. That’s the flip side of the Rain Man stereotype. There are still lots of people out there who think that if kids with autism can’t speak, they are mentally disabled. According to Scientific American, “Researchers have long considered the majority of those affected by autism to be mentally retarded. Although the numbers cited vary, they generally fall between 70 to 80 percent of the affected population,” but common sense should tell people that that is because most of them have no interest in the IQ test and often don’t complete it or pay much attention to it.

3. Autism comes from bad parenting. Bruno Bettelheim popularized the theory about autism being caused by “refrigerator mothers” (which had the horrible result that, for a generation, women who had children with autism were blamed for it). About as many people believe this today as think the earth is flat, but now and then, I bump into someone who asks whether I had trouble bonding with Danny when he was a baby. Any number of new moms may have “trouble bonding,” but that simply isn’t what causes autism.

4. Autism is just a kind of eccentricity. Many people with autism are eccentric (and creative and original), but it is not a lifestyle choice. There are many bloggers claiming to be on the autistic spectrum who say that autism is simply a different way of looking at the world and that parents who want to teach their children skills such as speech or using the toilet are somehow oppressing them or don’t love them. Part of the problem is that autism is a spectrum disorder, and those on it range from totally non-verbal people who bang their heads against the wall to people like Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory.” The critical difference, obviously, is that the Sheldons can make their own decisions about their lives. There’s nothing wrong with spending most of your days dressed as a character from “Star Trek” if that’s what makes you happy. But that is worlds away from being so disabled that you cannot tell anyone you are being abused. Perhaps in the future, someone will invent a term that describes the Sheldons better than “high-functioning autistic” and they won’t be lumped together with non-verbal people with autism who are unlikely to ever live independently.

5. People with autism feel no empathy or affection. People with autism sometimes have troubleexpressing affection, but it doesn’t mean they don’t feel it. I have spent a great deal of time with people (both children and adults) on the autistic spectrum and I believe that they feel the same range of emotions we all do: fear, happiness, nerves, anger, etc. It may be difficult for them to understand that everyone doesn’t know the same facts that they do, but that is very different from not feeling empathy. When I’m sad, my son will look at me warily, and then say, with hope, “You’re feeling much better now?” When he was first diagnosed, a distinguished psychiatrist told me that it was “rote behavior” when my son hugged me and that didn’t indicate that he felt affection for me. Later, a teacher told me that my son only hugged people “because he craved sensory input.” I was very upset, but then a neighbor said, “Your son is the warmest kid I’ve ever seen.”

6. There are many treatments that cure autism. There are therapies that treat autism, but nothing that cures it. Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), which many tout as the treatment of choice, helps some and does not do a great deal for others. My son and other children I have known have actually deteriorated on ABA programs. The same is true for Floortime. Similarly, drug therapies help alleviate certain symptoms of autism in certain kids but don’t help others.

7. Scientists understand what causes autism. Yes, and every day a new study comes out showing that something else causes it.

Let’s move on and put these myths to rest so we’ll have more to celebrate next year on Autism Awareness Day.

Raising Autism: Jerusalem Post article

Hannah — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 19:16:30 +0000

Raising autism

By RACHEL MARDER

“The Jerusalem Post” film critic on parenting and her return to short-story writing.

‘Jerusalem Post’ film critic on parenting and her return to short-story writing Photo: Iris Nesher

When novelist Hannah Brown learned that her son Danny, then about three and a half, had autism, she says she didn’t know where to turn first.“At the time I didn’t know a lot about it,” says Brown, who also writes short stories and has been The Jerusalem Post’s film critic since 2001.“I’d seen Rain Man. I knew in this very general way what it was supposed to be but I didn’t really understand what it meant for him and for us.”The mother of two, who along with her Israeli husband lived in New York City at the time, immediately started reading as much as she could on the subject and tried to figure out where she should take her son for therapy and special education.

But it was the other mothers who also had children diagnosed with autism that she met early on who were the most helpful in directing her. She befriended the parents at her son’s special needs preschool and later, when she moved to Israel, she joined a support group at Alut, Israel’s society for families of kids with autism. Today she swaps stories and advice with parents via a very active Facebook group for single mothers with children who have autism (Brown has since divorced) and has grown close to other parents who send their autistic children to the Feuerstein Center in Jerusalem where her son, now 16, goes a few times a week for therapy.

Being part of a community of parents, she says, and “how much we’re able to help each other get through things” inspired her to write her first novel, If I Could Tell You, about four very different mothers in New York City raising young children with autism. Vantage Point Books published the novel in May 2012.

The book’s characters try out different types of therapy for autism – which is diagnosed in one out of 88 children, according to the Center for Disease Control – including floor time, applied behavior analysis and chelation therapy (a procedure to remove heavy metals from the body), and compare notes with each other on the successes and frustrations. Some are sure one method is better than any other because they’ve been convinced of the research or by experts that this is the cure they’ve been searching for.

“It’s really irresponsible to make that claim to someone, even if it’s a remote possibility,” says Brown, who has tried all the methods except for chelation, which can be very dangerous.

She has found that focusing on steady progress with her son, who has medium- functioning autism, has been the most helpful.

Brown wants for her son what any mother does.

“I just feel like I really, really want my son to get to a point where he can make his own choices and decisions in life,” says Brown.

The book is both a terrific resource guide on autism and an insightful novel on the day-to-day triumphs and setbacks of raising a child with the disorder. It is not without humorous and touching moments of friendship and parent-child bonding, but it does not sugarcoat the challenges or the parents’ pain when their child can’t make eye contact or doesn’t even acknowledge them.

“I really didn’t see any books like this,” says Brown, who seems very familiar with the literature on the subject. “I didn’t see anything about the experience of the parents.”

The dynamic in the support group in the novel is also interesting, as friendships shift and new relationships are formed. The therapist’s calming and supportive voice is also an important one, in contrast with other doctors and experts in the book who talk down to the parents, and with tremendous authority. The women share their anxiety over listening to the experts while trying to do what feels right for their children.

The female characters are relatable and yet all speak with distinct voices and have different backgrounds.

One is career-focused and balancing work with an increasingly demanding home life, another is Israeli and vivacious and raising two autistic sons, a third is a former model and single mom struggling to date and the last, Anne, is a former literature professor turned stay at home mother of two with an uninvolved husband.

“That character of Anne is the one that’s most based on me and my family,” says Brown.

Many of the scenes in the novel Brown took from her experiences with Danny when he was very young and they were living in New York City. For example, Anne bumps into a mother she knows in the park. The mother proceeds to complain about her daughter’s preschool testing scores not being high enough. Anne doesn’t quite know how to respond, feeling overwhelmed by her basic struggles with her son, but is polite and casual. Brown says she wrote this scene from life, but adds that she wasn’t as polite as the character in the book.

“You’re constantly coming up against that stuff, where people are really competitive and evaluating their kids,” she says. “Maybe that’s just normal or part of life, but you feel like you’ve fallen into this different world, this Alice in Wonderland parallel universe and the only people who can understand you are parents who are gong through the same thing.”

In Israel, she says, the stigma of having children with issues seems even stronger than it is the US. However, it’s getting better, as parents of children with autism are becoming more proactive about their kids’ options, and talking about it more openly.

Many parents who identified with Brown’s work reached out to her, to tell her “this is my story,” or to compare notes and give or receive advice. One woman with whom Brown corresponds regularly, an African- American cosmetologist and single mother in Atlanta, Georgia, has an autistic son who is afraid of hand dryers in public bathrooms.

Brown says Danny used to have the same phobia.

“We each have developed our strategies so we email about it,” she says. “We have a lot of common ground, where we can really help each other with all these little things.”

Brown hopes eventually If I Could Tell You, which is soon being released as an audio book on audible.com, could transition to the big screen.

Brown also contributed three short stories to Ang-Lit Press’s fourth collection, Love in Israel, which includes 65 short stories by English-speaking writers in Israel and was published in January. Brown’s stories feature strong female protagonists faced with emotionally complex obstacles. In one story most closely based on her life – though she won’t confirm or deny any details – a single mother of two, one of whom has autism, is raising her children and dealing with the fact that her ex-husband’s girlfriend is giving birth.

In another, a young ultra-Orthodox woman finds out that her husband is cheating on her, but the rabbi has given him permission to continue the affair, and in the last, an Orthodox woman in her late 20s is deeply frustrated that she is not married yet.

Though Brown is herself not Orthodox, she says she has been inspired by living in Jerusalem and by the different types of parents she’s met who are also raising autistic children.

Brown, who participated in a reading with other Anglo writers at the International Book Fair last month, says she stopped writing short stories soon after her son’s diagnosis because she became completely absorbed with reading about autism and stopped reading anything else. Fiction seemed silly to her.

“I just couldn’t focus on anything else,” she says. “All the things that were part of who I was, I gave them up, and focused on Danny… Then I came up for air.”

It was a year and a half before Brown began writing short stories again, and when she did, she wrote “A Hard Day’s Life,” featured in Love in Israel, the story about the mother with the two children. One of the sons in the story, who is autistic, is excitedly awaiting the snow to fall in Jerusalem.

“I have a lot of experience consoling my younger son about [snow] not falling,” she says. Often times it’s predicted but it doesn’t end up snowing, she adds. “I always try to manage his expectations… to deal with the crushing, soul-tearing disappointment [if it doesn’t],” she says half-jokingly.

For her next book, Brown says she’s not writing on autism, and hoping it will be on the lighter, more Nora Ephron side. Set in Vermont, her novel follows a couple as they go through a messy divorce.

“I’m kind of at this stage now where I can’t decide if it’s the best thing I’ve ever written or the worst,” she says, laughing.

Still, even a book about autism doesn’t have to be humorless, she notes.

“I get this sense that people feel so sorry for me because I have this son,” she says. “[But] everyone [in my situation] isn’t sort of miserable and depressed and having a horrible life.”

Life for parents raising kids with autism may be more difficult at times, but it can also bring out the best in people, she says, depending on how one adapts.

“Basically all the things that help with autistic kids are good parenting tips in general. I call it ‘extreme parenting.’”

Raising autism | JPost | Israel News

Hannah — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:52:06 +0000

via Raising autism | JPost | Israel News.

Five Facts Autism Families Want President Obama to Know

Hannah — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 18:31:39 +0000

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hannah-brown/autism_b_2089725.html

President Obama,

Congratulations on your reelection! I was one of the millions who voted for you, and as the mother of a teenage boy with autism, I am grateful that you did much in your first term to help families coping with autism. When you signed the Combating Autism Act legislation on September 30, 2011, which assured continued federal support for autism research, services and treatment for another three years, many parents of children with autism were pleased. Declaring World Autism Awareness Day on April 2 was another important step.

People with autism and their families look forward to the hope and change that you spoke of in your acceptance speech today. Here are a few facts about us that I hope you will keep in mind over the next four years:

1. We are a fast-growing constituency. According to statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control in March 2012, 1 in 88 children in the USA has an autism spectrum disorder. This is a 23 percent increase from the CDC’s 2009 report. More children will be diagnosed with autism this year than with cancer, diabetes and AIDS combined.

2. We don’t have much cash. Autism takes a toll on families, both emotionally and financially. Many parents of children with autism divorce, and even when the parents stay together, autism drains families financially. A recent study by the Center for Autism Research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia , published in the journal Pediatrics, reported that mothers of children with autism earned, on average, less than $21,000 a year. This was 56 percent less than mothers whose kids did not have health issues. The study also found that mothers of children with autism work seven hours less per week on average than mothers whose children did not have health problems. Family income of families of children with autism spectrum disorders are 28 percent less than those of families whose children had no health limitations. Where does all the money go? Even though some treatments for autism may be covered by our health insurance, many are not. And there are many other costs. People with autism (both children and adults) who are non-verbal or who have limited verbal skills can never be left home alone (what if, God forbid, they have to call the fire department or deal with some other emergency) and all those hours of babysitting add up pretty quickly.

3. We don’t have much patience. Starting early is important in treating autism, so we are often in a rush. When my son was diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder/Not Otherwise Specified (PDD/NOS), a mild form of autism, at age 3, I learned to my horror that he was already too old for early intervention programs. One critical way in which the government can help us is that it can minimize the red tape associated with getting young children into the special-needs system. Just as you stood with Gov. Christie in New Jersey and pledged that the federal government would do its best to cut down on any paperwork that stood between people displaced by Hurricane Sandy and the services they need, the government can do the same when helping children with autism. While many of the funds for special-needs children come from state and local governments, there are federal monies available for some schools and services. If you lead the way, officials at every level will ease our path to getting our children the help that they. You can also help allocate more money to fund research into the causes of autism and new treatments.

4. We are a diverse group. People of all races, ethnic groups and religions are affected by autism. The CDC reported last March that the greatest increases in diagnosis of autism in recent years were among Hispanic children (110 percent) and black children (91 percent). Scientists suspect that some of this increase is due to greater awareness and better diagnosis among these groups. Whatever the reason, the fact is that Americans from all backgrounds are grappling with this issue more than ever.

5. We’re in it for the long haul. In the vast majority of cases, people do not “recover” from autism. It’s a lifelong condition. That said, high-functioning people with autism can often lead totally independent lives, while many others are able to achieve a degree of independence and fulfillment with just a little bit of extra help. Some need a great deal of extra help. But for all our children, the key to a better life is being as much a part of their community as possible. The good news, for you and for us, is that the more independent our children become, the less the government will have to pay to support them over the course of their lifetimes.

So best of luck to you and your family as you go forward, and please keep us in your thoughts.

Best,

Hannah Brown

(aka Danny’s mother)

Zombie Therapy: An Autism Mom’s Take on The Walking Dead

Hannah — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 17:40:20 +0000

Could a zombie invasion be good therapy for autism? Read my Huffington Post piece:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hannah-brown/autism_b_1973619.html

“If I Could Tell You” now available for Barnes & Noble Nook for $6.99!

Hannah — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 14:34:25 +0000

Nook readers can now enjoy a digital version of “If I Could Tell You” for 30% less.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/if-i-could-tell-you-hannah-brown/1103913374?ean=2940014516952&itm=1&usri=if+i+could+tell+you%2c+hannah+brown

New LOW PRICE for “If I Could Tell You,” $6.99 on Amazon Kindle

Hannah — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:43:28 +0000

“If I Could Tell You,” a novel about mothers raising kids with autism, now available for Amazon Kindle at SPECIAL LOW PRICE $6.99! The Amazon Kindle Edition of “If I Could Tell You” is now at the special LOW PRICE of $6.99! Check it out:

http://www.amazon.com/If-Could-Tell-You-ebook/dp/B007VESVWM/ref=kinw_dp_ke

Hannah Brown to give reading on October 30 at Tmol Shilshom

Hannah — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 13:46:29 +0000

The Jerusalem bookstore and restaurant, Tmol Shilshom, will host a reading from “If I Could Tell You” by Hannah Brown on October 30 at 7 p.m.

Click on the link below to get more information on the event:
http://www.tmol-shilshom.co.il/en/events/

Daily Beast: Study says older fathers linked to autism gives mothers a break

Hannah — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:00:42 +0000

Mothers have long suffered the suspicion that their age or “coldness” causes autism. A new study finds the father’s age is a bigger factor. And that’s at least some relief, writes Hannah Brown.

In my novel about mothers raising children with autism, If I Could Tell You, there’s a scene in which a medical researcher lashes out at his wife just after their son has been diagnosed. He blames her for the child’s disorder: “You don’t discipline him, you don’t set limits,” he says, and goes on to criticize her for not playing classical music at home and not taking the child to playgroups. This passage—and this couple—resonated with many readers, who told me they have suffered similar tirades from their children’s fathers or other relatives…

View the rest of the article on “The Daily Beast“.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/24/study-says-older-fathers-linked-to-autism-gives-mothers-a-break.html
Image from Huntstock / Getty Images