New Way of Treating Autism

Middleton: There's a new way of thinking about how to treat children with autism. It's called Relationship Development Intervention (RDI),
and while that sounds technical, it's all about patience and understanding.

6 year old Graham looks and sounds like a normal kid. That is the result of a lot of work by his parents. Graham was diagnosed with the neurological disorder autism at age 2 and a half.

"It was shocking and hard and devastating," recalls mom Jennifer Finlayson-Fife.

Graham's mom Jennifer was not happy with the traditional treatment for autistic children. "Like trying to put a band–aid on the disorder."

Dr. Steven Gutstein agrees, "The assumption was you couldn't treat the autism itself, so you had to learn to live with it and give you whatever abilities you could have given the fact your brain was developing in this way."

Dr. Gutstein doesn't accept that answer anymore, so he created the Relationship Development Intervention program. "We're saying we believe it's possible to change the way the brain is developing so that we're not just treating people with autism, we're treating the autism itself."

Dr. Gutstein says people with autism don't develop the ability to solve problems or develop relationships–and that's why they rarely learn to live independently or develop lasting friendships.

The RDI system is pretty basic. "We slow things down, we amplify things so they can start to become more effective in teaching their child how to think about the world, how to make decisions, how to solve problems," says Dr. Gutstein.

That appealed to Jennifer. "It's teaching social intelligence. It's teaching them the purpose of language is communication rather than labeling the world–which is what he was doing."

And she's seen the results in Graham. "Through the activities that we've done we now have a child that seeks out attention. He comes and seeks out interactions with us."