“Thalia’s improvement may be attributed to the amount and level of treatment that she received. Thalia started with therapy before she was three years old. The number of hours of one-on-one daily therapy, her attending a school that specialized in children with autism, and Lorena working with her daughter provided the treatment that she needed in those early years,” wrote John A. Fortunato, Ph. D., professor at Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business.

“The only place I didn’t feel like an awkward weirdo was on those drums,” Carrizzo said.

The reason for his discomfort in otherwise normal situations was sensory processing disorder (SPD), a neurological condition that’s characterized by difficulties in processing sensory information. For people who suffer from SPD, their sense of smell, taste, sound, sight, and touch is, for lack of a better term, out of whack.

For Carrizzo, who graduated on May 19 from Fordham College at Rose Hill with a degree in communications, that meant a reclusive childhood. Milk a cow with other children on a field trip to a farm? No way, the feel of an utter freaked him out. Gaze upon a train as it whizzed by the playground? Not an option; the noise hurt his ears. Even though he loved to play with toy trains, the sight of a real one left him trembling in fear. Even his sense of balance was affected.

“When I was little, I was the most cautious kid you could imagine. I never had a sense of where I was at a particular moment. Even on a small ledge, I’d be so careful and concise about where I was going,” he said.

With his parents’ help, Carrizzo learned how to manage most of the symptoms he endured as a child, and he recently used his experience as the basis of his radio project Hidden in Plain Sight: Sensory Processing Disorder. The 24-minute-long documentary was featured on WFUV, Fordham’s public media station, where he worked from his sophomore to senior years.

“I grew up with this condition nobody knows about, and it affected my life greatly, so I thought it would be good idea to shed light on it,” he said.

The documentary took several months, and in addition to talking about his own experiences, he interviewed experts such as those from the STAR institute for Sensory Processing Disorder, a treatment, research, and education center for children and adults with SPD,  and Temple Grandin, Ph.D., a professor at Colorado State University. Grandin was lauded in Time magazine’s 2010 annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world for her work with people who are on the autism spectrum.

When Grandin, who has SPD, was little, she said, she thought adults had their own language, because she was only hearing vowel sounds. One of the things she recommends in the documentary is to use headsets for alleviating the pain someone with SPD might encounter in public restrooms, where loud, unpredictable noises from hand dryers are found.

In the feature, Carrizzo addressed the ongoing effort to have SPD listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Presently, the association only lists it as a symptom of autism.

He also tried to help listeners understand what it’s like to be feel pain when exposed to everyday sights and sensations. To get across the feeling of being irritated by the buzzing of fluorescent lights, Carrizzo convinced a security guard to let him into the Rose Hill Gym at 1 a.m., where he fastened a recorder to a pole and held it close to a ceiling light.

To cope with such challenges, he developed several strategies as a child. Singing and talking to himself while on swings helped him develop “laser-like focus,” as his mother put it in an interview for the documentary, and playing drums desensitized him to loud sounds.

Carrizzo hopes his own experience can provide hope and advice for parents whose children are experiencing SPD, he said.

“It’s crucial for parents to make sure their children with sensory issues don’t stay in their room all day. To get ‘in sync,’ they need to be exposed to the outside world. They need a ‘sensory diet’ to get them on track,” Carrizzo said.

Today, he said, transcendental meditation helps him enormously. Sound and touch are no longer as challenging for him, but he said he does still have issues with his vestibulur senses, which are tied to balance, and his proprioceptive senses, which give us body awareness. It made for a challenge when he was asked, at an internship at Fox News, to interview people on the street, and he inadvertently got uncomfortably close them. Just being cognizant of this tendency helps him.

“The majority of my symptoms have diminished, but I still have some lingering problems, so I try my best to avoid what gets me ‘out of sync’ so I can live as productively as possible,” he said.

“The best thing for someone with SPD to do is to know themselves.”

He was getting through college the same way, until he took a course on cognitive behavior. There, he began to explore the possibility that his ADHD might be something more.

Through therapy, Browne realized that his attention deficit coupled with social anxiety placed him on the autism spectrum, and that he had been misdiagnosed earlier.

“ADHD is connected to attention domains, but in my case I literally didn’t want to talk to my classmates, not because I felt rejected by them, but because I found no motivation to talk to them,” Browne said.

Browne is earning a master’s in social work from the Graduate School of Social Service. He has already begun a career through the Mental Health Association of Westchester as a recovery specialist for people diagnosed or labeled with mental health conditions from across the autism spectrum. He works at the Sterling Community Health Center in White Plains, New York.

“Part of me is very glad for the degree of independence I had in college so that I could figure it out, but I had some very difficult years before that,” he said. “I had to ‘study’ what some kids just ‘do.’”

In his work with autistic clients, he said he sees symptoms that can be very extreme, like repeating a sentence or phrase until it’s said perfectly. Often he recognizes such symptoms in himself.

“I can relate to those folks; I get where a lot of that’s coming from,” he said. “But once I went through treatment I recognized my own dysfunctional thoughts. Now I look for alternatives that push me out of comfort zones that I used to be confined to.”

While Browne says his diagnosis is more nuanced than some of the cases he encounters at work, he has publicly embraced the autism moniker as a way to fight the misperceptions of mental illnesses in general.

“Autism is classified as a developmental disorder, though many who have it don’t love the label because they say labels help others pigeonhole them,” he said. “But I like the label because it explains my quirkiness and because I’ve learned not to be held back by my symptoms.”

Unfortunately, he said, “there’s a profound fear of people with these disorders, and society treats them with suspicion. I see the role of any social worker as working to dispel that fear.”

At Fordham, the celebration began a day early with an interdisciplinary symposium spotlighting faculty and students research focused on disability. The Dec. 2 event, “Diversity and Disability: A Celebration of Disability Scholarship at Fordham,” also marked the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Matthew Diller, dean of Fordham School of Law and the Paul Fuller Professor of Law, discussed how disability law influences people’s participation in the workforce. This participation, Diller said, is socially as well as economically important, because work signifies social status.

“Work is central to how we think about people, their role in society, and whether they are successful members of that society,” Diller said. “There is a social expectation that you should be in the workforce, and if you’re not, then you’re an underperforming member.”

Not everyone can fulfill that expectation, Diller said, so the law allows for some people to be excused from work owing to certain situations or conditions, such as a disability. Some people, however—including people with disabilities—are excluded from work altogether as the result of prejudice, discrimination, or other barriers that prevent them from fully participating in society.

“If we judge social worth by whether someone works, but then exclude some people from the workforce, then we’re inherently denigrating their social worth,” he said.

The value of the ADA, Diller said, is that it focuses on creating systems that integrate people with disabilities into the workforce, thereby restoring their right to work.

However, there remains room for improvement, Diller said. For instance, up until Congress substantially amended the law in 2008, courts regularly impeded the ADA’s enforcement by making the definition of disability extremely narrow. Many plaintiffs seeking excusal from or accommodations for work lost their cases on the grounds they were not disabled—an approach Diller said was “misguided.”

Christine Fountain, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, and Rebecca Sanchez, PhD, assistant professor of English, also presented.

Fountain is doing research with scientists from Columbia University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the sociological aspects of autism, particularly how a noncontagious illness has reached epidemic proportions and who is being most severely affected by it.

Autism, the group has found, is more prevalent in children of wealthy and well-educated parents, and that wealth and education play a role in how quickly and to what extent an autistic child improves developmentally.

Sanchez discussed her new book Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature (New York University Press, 2015), which argues that “deaf insight,” that is, the “embodied and cultural knowledge of deaf people,” is not an impairment, but an alternative way of thinking and communicating.

She offered the example of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 silent film Modern Times. Chaplin, Sanchez said, deliberately chose to avoid the new “talkie” technology because silent pictures allowed for “a universal means of expression.” The plot of the film itself, she said, bespeaks the dangers of forcing people to express themselves in homogenized ways.

The event also included poster presentations by two doctoral students, Xiaoming Liu and Rachel Podd, and Navena Chaitoo, FCRH ’13.

Elizabeth Emens, PhD, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, offered the keynote presentation, “Disability Law Futures: Moving Beyond Compliance.”

The event was sponsored by the Office of Research and by the Faculty Working Group on Disability, led by Sophie Mitra, PhD, associate professor of economics. The group connects Fordham faculty who are researching some aspect of disability.

It’s a long-brewing effort that made strides in November 2013 with a conference among Fordham researchers, educators, and representatives of advocacy groups from outside the University. Next up are more conferences, research, and efforts to change policies and attitudes surrounding the capabilities of autistic people and how they can best be helped.

“There’s still a great deal of misunderstanding of what the needs are of this population,” said Micki McGee, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology and one of the conference’s organizers. “You can’t easily generalize about their needs” because of the sheer diversity of capacities and challenges that are found among autistic people, she said.

The November conference was one of several events Fordham has held in recent years to encourage compassionate and respectful approaches to helping people who have autism, a developmental disorder that impairs communication and social interaction.

Understanding of autism has rapidly evolved in the last 20 years, noted Ann Higgins-D’Alessandro, Ph.D., professor of psychology and a key organizer of the conference. Today, in part because of better diagnoses, approximately one in 88 people are diagnosed with some form of autism, compared to one in 1,000 two decades ago.

Big changes to social policies are needed if those with autism are to live full and independent lives, according to the conference. Those changes include better assessments of autistic people’s needs and abilities; flexible, individualized supports that help the autistic develop their strengths and capacities throughout life; more supports for adolescents and adults with autism; and more public education to reduce bullying and stigma.

Also, the conference found, autistic people shouldn’t only have to seek services through the Americans With Disabilities Act, which frames autism as a medical condition and cuts off services at age 22. New social policies should offer guidelines about how society can reasonably accommodate the needs of autistic people throughout their lives and support the highest degree of independence possible for each of them.

“A medical model, a deficit model that just gives a diagnosis, is static, and says ‘this child can’t do this and probably when she’s older she won’t be able to do X,Y, and Z,” Higgins-D’Alessandro said. “We don’t know that. Autism is like a wild card. You can’t tell which kid is really going to be able to develop higher-level functioning with support. We just don’t know enough yet about the range of developmental paths autistic people can take as they grow older.”

The Nov. 8 conference, held at the Rose Hill campus, made preliminary recommendations that a strengths-based functional model should guide applied research, new practices, and policy.

Fordham professors, administrators, and graduate students worked together with outside educators, medical professionals, service providers, educators, and advocates for autistic people.

Autism Conference attendees, from left to right: John Maltby, panelist from Community Support Programs, Westchester Institute of Human Development (WIHD); Ann Higgins-D’Alessandro, professor of psychology at Fordham and conference chair; Regina Mignogna;  Joshua Weinstein, conference keynote speaker, and CEO of iCare4Autism; Micki McGee, associate professor of sociology at Fordham and conference co-chair; John Tognino, Honorary Conference Chair, Fordham Emeritus Board of Trustees Chair, and CEO, Pepper Financial Group; Sister Barbara Calamari, chair, Board of Trustees of Union Community Health Center; and Lilian Wu, project executive, Global University Programs, IBM Corporate Technology, Strategy, and Innovation, and member, Fordham Board of Trustees.

“It was really a major, major milestone,” said John Tognino, PCS ’75, trustee emeritus of the University, who co-sponsored the conference along with the Departments of Psychology and Sociology, Fordham’s Center for Community-Engaged Research, and Fordham College at Rose Hill.

“It was a great opportunity for everyone to talk to each other, in an attempt to overcome some of the silos that exist when you deal with research and you deal with some of these delicate scientific topics,” he said.

Among the panelists was Samantha Crane, public policy director for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network in Washington, D.C., which tries to ensure that autistic people are represented in all academic conference panels about autism.

“We’ve got a lot of people who follow a very clinical model that presumes that autistic people are subjects to be acted upon or studied, not necessarily sources of information or partners in research and advocacy,” said Crane, who, like all her organization’s senior staff, is autistic.

The conference’s organizers will meet thisspring to finalize its recommendations so they can be circulated to advocacy groups, service groups, and government agencies, Higgins-D’Alessandro said.

Meanwhile, Fordham graduate students in psychology are forging ahead with projects that illuminate the needs and capabilities of autistic persons.

Fordham graduate students Xiaoming Liu and Amie Senland, and Kate Palmer, executive director of the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership, speaking at Fordham’s conference on autism. Photo by Chris Taggart

Amie Senland’s doctoral work challenged the perception that people on the autism spectrum generally lack empathy. While working with those who are high-functioning, she was able to show “the disconnect between how they perceive themselves as being caring and compassionate and their ability to implement that in solving everyday problems,” she said.

Doctoral candidate Xiaoming Liu is designing a study that will measure autistic children’s ability to shift their attention—a problem for many with autism—by having them choose the socially appropriate solution in a series of animated vignettes.

Another doctoral student, Amanda Leeder, plans to focus her dissertation on the role that non-autistic siblings can play in autistic children’s development. Also, as part of her practicum, she’s working with therapists at Emerge & See Education Center in Manhattan who are finding ways to teach autistic children basic conversation skills.

Progress comes in small increments, but those can sometimes make all the difference for autistic children later in life, she said.

“If you can help them get to a point where they can just be right above the threshold of employability, you’ve hit the jackpot,” she said.

Doctoral candidate Audra Olazabal, who conducted autism-related research for her master’s, said she has spoken to groups about starting support groups for autistic people within the Fordham community.

“If you could build a network of social support among people on the spectrum, it would create a more favorable atmosphere and culture—so that they wouldn’t feel so stigmatized,” she said.

A coalition of Fordham professors, students, and administrators has come together around the goal of improving the lives of autistic people by changing the way they’re treated in American society.

It’s a long-brewing effort that made strides in November 2013 with a conference among Fordham researchers, educators, and representatives of advocacy groups from outside the University. Next up are more conferences, research, and efforts to change policies and attitudes surrounding the capabilities of autistic people and how they can best be helped.

“There’s still a great deal of misunderstanding of what the needs are of this population,” said Micki McGee, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology and one of the conference’s organizers. “You can’t easily generalize about their needs” because of the sheer diversity of capacities and challenges that are found among autistic people, she said.

The November conference was one of several events Fordham has held in recent years to encourage compassionate and respectful approaches to helping people who have autism, a developmental disorder that impairs communication and social interaction.

Understanding of autism has rapidly evolved in the last 20 years, noted Ann Higgins-D’Alessandro, Ph.D., professor of psychology and a key organizer of the conference. Today, in part because of better diagnoses, approximately one in 88 people are diagnosed with some form of autism, compared to one in 1,000 two decades ago.

Big changes to social policies are needed if those with autism are to live full and independent lives, according to the conference. Those changes include better assessments of autistic people’s needs and abilities; flexible, individualized supports that help the autistic develop their strengths and capacities throughout life; more supports for adolescents and adults with autism; and more public education to reduce bullying and stigma.

Also, the conference found, autistic people shouldn’t only have to seek services through the Americans With Disabilities Act, which frames autism as a medical condition and cuts off services at age 22. New social policies should offer guidelines about how society can reasonably accommodate the needs of autistic people throughout their lives and support the highest degree of independence possible for each of them.

“A medical model, a deficit model that just gives a diagnosis, is static, and says ‘this child can’t do this and probably when she’s older she won’t be able to do X,Y, and Z,” Higgins-D’Alessandro said. “We don’t know that. Autism is like a wild card. You can’t tell which kid is really going to be able to develop higher-level functioning with support. We just don’t know enough yet about the range of developmental paths autistic people can take as they grow older.”

The Nov. 8 conference, held at the Rose Hill campus, made preliminary recommendations that a strengths-based functional model should guide applied research, new practices, and policy.

Fordham professors, administrators, and graduate students worked together with outside educators, medical professionals, service providers, educators, and advocates for autistic people.

“It was really a major, major milestone,” said John Tognino, PCS ’75, trustee emeritus of the University, who co-sponsored the conference along with the Departments of Psychology and Sociology, Fordham’s Center for Community-Engaged Research, and Fordham College at Rose Hill.

“It was a great opportunity for everyone to talk to each other, in an attempt to overcome some of the silos that exist when you deal with research and you deal with some of these delicate scientific topics,” he said.

Among the panelists was Samantha Crane, public policy director for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network in Washington, D.C., which tries to ensure that autistic people are represented in all academic conference panels about autism.

“We’ve got a lot of people who follow a very clinical model that presumes that autistic people are subjects to be acted upon or studied, not necessarily sources of information or partners in research and advocacy,” said Crane, who, like all her organization’s senior staff, is autistic.

The conference’s organizers will meet this spring to finalize its recommendations so they can be circulated to advocacy groups, service groups, and government agencies, Higgins-D’Alessandro said.

Meanwhile, Fordham graduate students in psychology are forging ahead with projects that illuminate the needs and capabilities of autistic persons.

Amie Senland’s doctoral work challenged the perception that people on the autism spectrum generally lack empathy. While working with those who are high-functioning, she was able to show “the disconnect between how they perceive themselves as being caring and compassionate and their ability to implement that in solving everyday problems,” she said. 

Doctoral candidate Xiaoming Liu is designing a study that will measure autistic children’s ability to shift their attention—a problem for many with autism—by having them choose the socially appropriate solution in a series of animated vignettes.

Another doctoral student, Amanda Leeder, plans to focus her dissertation on the role that non-autistic siblings can play in autistic children’s development. Also, as part of her practicum, she’s working with therapists at Emerge & See Education Center in Manhattan who are finding ways to teach autistic children basic conversation skills.

Progress comes in small increments, but those can sometimes make all the difference for autistic children later in life, she said.

“If you can help them get to a point where they can just be right above the threshold of employability, you’ve hit the jackpot,” she said.

Doctoral candidate Audra Olazabal, who conducted autism-related research for her master’s, said she has spoken to groups about starting support groups for autistic people within the Fordham community.

“If you could build a network of social support among people on the spectrum, it would create a more favorable atmosphere and culture—so that they wouldn’t feel so stigmatized,” she said.