Let Me Hear Your Voice: A Family's Triumph Over Austism

This is the story, told by their mother, of how two children were rescued from the tragedy of autism - and the first account in which diagnosis, therapy and authentic recovery are fully documented. From the opening page, when we are present at the first birthday party of Anne-Marie Maurice, readers of this extraordinary book enter deeply into the life of the Maurice family. We witness their rising anxiety as Anne-Marie, not long after that first birthday, begins to lose the words she has learned, to behave in bizarre ways, to become "a person without a self" - and their response when they learn the terrible truth. We follow their frantic search for anyone who might offer hope - a search that leads them to heed for a time the siren song of Dr Martha Welch's "holding therapy"; we follow their prayers - and, finally, their providential discovery of the work of O. Ivar Lovaas, who, using intensive behavioural therapy with very young children had achieved a documented recovery rate of 47% - children who are now teenagers and are cognitively and socially normal. We are with the Maurices as they scramble to set up a home programme using the Lovaas method; we share their anguish and doubts as the difficult therapy proceeds, and their anger and frustration with professionals who subscribe to the "blame-the-mother" theory of autism, and with those who, while condeming behavioural therapy as "mechanistic" and "inhuman", prey on desperate parents by offering false hopes and anecdotal accounts of miracles. With the Maurices we rejoice as Anne-Marie begins to "come back" - and we feel their renewed pain as Michel, born just a few days before Anne-Marie's diagnosis, shows symptoms of the same illness. Finally, we know the profound joy and thankfulness when the day arrives that the two children and their older brother, Daniel, can play together like any other siblings, and Anne-Marie's kindergarten teacher reports that she has "taken off like a rocket".