Interesting.
Is it similar to what I would have called metacognition in the self? The understanding of how we understand, a deeper form of analytical self-knowledge?
How does it link with ideas of emotional literacy?

Let's not even get started on Schizophrenia and it's possible prevalence among prophets.

I mentioned Jehovah but I think I got away with it.

My mother taught mentally disabled and severely autistic children in a school that was situated within an enormous mental hospital. The school was run by the local education authority and the children lived in the hospital grounds in 'villas' that were split into separate male, female and children buildings. The children attended the school in much the same way as 'normal' kids, ie three terms and the same holidays. Trouble is that when the children came back after the long summer break they had forgotten much of what they had learned (which was pretty basic). When they got to 18 they moved up into the adult villas where they would deteriorate rapidly until it was almost as if they had received no help.

It was like Flowers For Algernon but such a waste.

Autism is a spectrum and the DM can't or doesn't want to distinguish between the milder version of Apergers' (that my granddaughter has) to the severe cases my mother taught. These children usually had other problems as well and could be violent, my mother was attacked many times.

Oh, I forgot to mention that she worked for 25 years with these kids and retired with a princely £1200 pension. That's per year. Gold plated public sector worker pensions, eh?

While I'm at it, the hospital was closed down when the Tories introduced Care in the Community. It took many years for the developers to break down planning laws and eventually the grounds provided rich pickings for them as an executive housing estate sprang up there in the heart of the rich south east.

Autism was seen as a form of extreme schizophrenia until Asperger recognized that Bluers work identified a completely different condition. This is the part of science the Mail doesn't like. Advances can be made and overlooked, someone spots something and another person puts it with something else and a little more light is shed on what we don't know. I imagine most mail readers imagine science to be rather like Percy discovering Green.

http://youtu.be/TkZFuKHXa7w

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Blog...http://itsjustahobby.wordpress.com/

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets. Nye Bevan

Nethen or Cane Hill?

Not just the Mail. Most of the press (think Express, Sun, Mirror) seem to believe that science is a process of replacing what went before rather than adding to it, so each new 'discovery' completely eradicates all previous understanding of a subject. I suspect that a lot of readers feel the same way - they aren't trained to hold two or more ideas in their heads at the same time and it makes them confused.

Daley Mayle - I have a son with severe and complex learning difficulties (ie, in outdated parlance, severely mentally handicapped and autistic). The idea of special education and mental hospitals being linked is appalling to me. Someone with learning difficulties isn't mentally ill unless they also have a recognised mental illness. Not all autistic people are violent; my son has never hit anyone in his entire life and the same is true of the majority of kids at the school he went to (a local authority day special school for kids with severe and complex learning difficulties). The violent ones there were so much in the minority that they were taught on their own - no more than six or seven out of a school population of 70-odd. I don't mean to say anything at all about your mother's experiences, but my fairly wide experience of autism, and the education and adult services associated with it, at least over the last 20 years, has been very different from what you describe. And my (adult) son is severely autistic and has a learning age of around 4, although that too is an outdated concept now.

May i reiterate that this is not intended as a criticism of any kind, just as my perspective on the situation. Care in the community has not been all bad. The thought of my innocent child, as a child, living in the ambience of a mental hospital horrifies me. And may I also add that it is precisely this model of dealing with those with severe learning difficulties that has made so many older people so spectacularly unsympathetic to those affected. I've heard too many mutterings of 'in my day these people were put away where normal people didn't have to look at them' to have any kindly feelings towards that model. It is very striking, when you have a child who draws attention to himself like mine, to see the age-divide. When you're out with such a child, you generally find that any problems come from teenagers (which you'd expect because of their immaturity) and old people. Those who have grown up meeting disabled people in everyday situations are much kinder in general.

I think all he was saying was that that was how it used to be done.

In Wandsworth we had an internationally-acclaimed centre for teaching autistic children. The council closed it down to save money and sent a number of autistic kids into mainstream schools with precious little extra resources. Where they did very badly. That wasn't because of prejudice or old-fashioned ideas, but containing a child and developing them are two very different things, and that is incredibly hard to do in mainstream if you have so many autistic kids as to swamp your resources.

That confusion should not be the scary thing it appears to be, we all start as questioning beings so where does it go wrong for some?

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Blog...http://itsjustahobby.wordpress.com/

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets. Nye Bevan

The way people eat up the version of science put forward by the press is quite distressing. People who seem to be otherwise quite sensible and capable of thinking critically about what's in the papers often seem to develop a blind spot when it comes to science. I was talking to some people the other day about junk DNA and the rather sizeable chunks of our genome that don't really seem to do anything and the person I was talking to said something along the lines of "Well they say that this week but they're always changing their minds, scientists, one week beer is good for you and the next it will kill you [and so on and so on]." It's useless trying to explain to some people that so much of that is stuff that's wilfully misinterpreted or distorted by the press and scientific consensus isn't some strange, arbitrarily vacillating belief system that changes for no real reason. Painting it as such does, I think, quite a lot of damage to public interest in the sciences.

We live in more enlightened times GG. I was talking about the 1970s. At the time the place was considered to be one of the best but that was only because the News of the World had done an expose of physical and mental cruelty that went on there previously. The villas containing the patients were built in the grounds of a place called Leybourne Grange near West Malling in Kent and, for the time, was pretty good accommodation and was well staffed and they were well paid. I was a ward orderly there when I was a student and worked 12 hour weekend shifts at double time and earned the weekly average national wage for two days work.

There was a wide mix of children in the school, Down's and autistic and generally mentally disabled. They were also heavily medicated, chemically coshed, as The Mail might have said so there wasn't a great deal of aggression but it did happen and my mother was decked a few times.

I had a great deal of affection for the people with Down's Syndrome, they are truly special, usually very kind and affectionate and always willing to please. But, again, the degree of disability caused by Down's varies greatly. There was usually a couple of 'high grade' Down's on each villa who helped out in the kitchen and domestic work. They were very proud of their position that set them above their fellow patients.

I saw an awful lot in the years I worked there and the experience makes me grateful for what I've got and recognise that we are all very different but not necessarily better or more normal than the next person.

One of the saddest experiences was meeting some lovely old ladies who had been put into the mental institution system because they had fallen pregnant out of marriage at a young age and had shamed their families. They were now completely institutionalised and could not exist outside.

I've heard of this before, I believe they were put in on the grounds of 'moral deficiency' or some such nonsense. It's apparently one of the great unspoken shames of our nation that many of them are still in institutions to this day, having been completely broken at a young age.

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Soppy anti-British, pro-crime, anti-education, pro-immigration, anti-family nonentity

A similar mindset to the one that allows honour killing. But probably one that appealed to the Mailites at the time.

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Sick Left-wing Zealot.

Family Values. Otherwise known as sweeping the undesirables out of view and forgetting about any reminder of your own failures.

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"Common Sense is the collection of prejudices aquired by age eighteen" - Albert Einstein