Wandering, Water, Sense of Danger and Accidents

We were recently at the seaside in Greece, where Monty was enjoying swimming in the sea. He is now a very competent swimmer and behaves in the water just like any other confident swimmer. Together with Mum he actually rescued a Russian swimmer in distress.  Monty does not get crazy ideas to swim to islands in the distance, or anything like that. Not so far, at least. 

Water is behind a shocking number of wanderings and deaths.

In the North American media, you can see that on a very regular basis children with autism and/or ID/MR (Intellectual Disability/Mental Retardation) wander off and get lost. Very often they are found in or beside water.

In Europe you hear much less frequently about children wandering. A high-profile case recently was an Irish teenage girl with MR/ID who disappeared while on holiday at a tiny jungle resort in Malaysia.  She left behind an open ground floor window and was found 10 days later beside a stream in a ravine a mile away. 

She had holoprosencephaly, which is an umbrella term for conditions relating to when the forebrain of the embryo fails to develop into two separate hemispheres, it includes Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum (ACC) when the part of the brain that is supposed to connect the two hemispheres fails to develop. Partial ACC and the exact opposite are features appearing in some severe autism.

People with MR/ID have no sense of danger and are usually enchanted by water. Wandering is far more likely than abduction.

Another case recently was an American teenager on a cruise arranged by his residential care home, it appears that he jumped over the deck railing at night to go for a swim in the ocean.

Even a bath tub can be dangerous, a young man with autism and epilepsy was left unattended in a bath at a UK care facility. He had a seizure and drowned.

I do think much more could be done to prevent wandering and water-related accidents. Firstly, people (parents) should be made more aware of who is at risk; anyone with a low IQ and unable to travel independently is at risk.

People with ID/MR often live in a world of cartoons, where all kinds of crazy things are possible, like jumping off a cruise ship and nobody ever gets hurt.  Going to a jungle retreat, like you are living in the Jungle Book cartoon, why wouldn’t you sneak downstairs in the night and enter your private jungle world?

Just because you have never been able to wander before does not mean you never will. 

The shortened life expectancy of people with severe autism is in large part down to preventable accidents, seizures and poor basic healthcare.

I do think that treating MR/ID would be much more socially acceptable than treating autism. Understanding the danger of crossing a road, or falling into a lake is more important than being able to tie your shoe laces.  If you can improve cognition with a pill, who could possibly object to that? 

It is no surprise that we have www.Treatable-ID.org but no www.Treatable-ASD.org 

In reality you will struggle to have treating ID taken seriously, although for many people it is possible.