Phoebe Caldwell

Books - Autism

The Good Box: Beyond Sensory Turmoil and Pain in Autism

The Good Box: Beyond Sensory Turmoil and Pain in Autism is about understanding and helping those who struggle with sensory overload due to autism.

The Anger Box

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Sensory turmoil and pain in autism

The Anger Box: Sensory turmoil and pain in autism by Phoebe Caldwell explores the sensory issues and pain experienced by those on the autism spectrum.

Delicious Conversations Reflections on autism, intimacy and communication

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This book shows how we can have effective communication with those on the autistic spectrum and how we can learn to ‘read’ other people by recognising our subconscious reactions to their body language.

Listening with All Our Senses

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Establishing communication with people on the autistic spectrum or those with profound learning disabilities and sometimes distressed behaviour

This handbook offers a new perspective for those supporting people with ASD and/or profound and multiple learning disabilities. It offers practical advice for ways that we can help to alleviate the distress that may be at the root of such behaviours, by communicating with people on their own terms.

People with severe autism experience the sensory information they receive from the world completely differently to those not on the spectrum. They feel cut off and overwhelmed, and their behaviour can become very distressed. This handbook shows how we can engage with people who are non-verbal or semi-verbal and sometimes even those who have speech but lose the power to process it when they are in crisis. We can help them to make sense of the world.

Intensive Interaction uses a person’s own body language to make contact with them and Sensory Integration develops the capacity of an individual to receive, process and apply meaning to information provided by the senses through targeted physical activities. These techniques can be used to develop an environment tailored to the particular sensory needs of the person with severe autism, reducing factors that cause distress.

With illustrations, case examples and a wide range of tried-and-tested techniques, this practical guide provides indispensable tools for parents, carers and other professionals supporting people with severe autism and other learning disabilities.

Phoebe Caldwell's remarkable new book makes accessible for the first time the complex, intricate inner and sensory worlds of people whose learning disabilities are combined with autistic spectrum disorder and, often, difficult-to-manage behaviour. Based on many years of working with such people, many of whom have withdrawn into a world of their own, she explores the different sensory reality they experience, showing it to be infinitely more complex and varied than is widely understood. She introduces a practical approach known as Intensive Interaction, which uses the body language of such people - who have hitherto largely been regarded as unreachable - to get in touch with them, giving them a way of expressing themselves which shifts their attention from solitary self-stimulation to shared activity. The outcome is not only a marked improvement in behaviour and ability to communicate but, more important, many parents will say 'they are just much happier'.

Covering not only the practical aspects of introducing this technique, but also the thinking behind it, this landmark book has much to say on behalf of a group that has in the past largely been denied a voice, and will open new avenues for both practice and research. It is invaluable for parents, carers, and all who work with this group.

If you have no language, how can you make yourself understood, let alone make friends? Phoebe Caldwell has worked for many years with people with severe intellectual disabilities and/or autistic spectrum disorder who are non-verbal, and whose inability to communicate has led to unhappy and often violent behaviour. In this new book she explores the nature of close relationships, and shows how these are based not so much on words as on the ability to listen, pay attention, and respond in terms that are familiar to the other person.

This is the key to Intensive Interaction, which she shows is a straightforward and uncomplicated way, through attending to body language and other non-verbal means of communication, of establishing contact and building a relationship with people who are non-verbal, even those in a state of considerable distress. This simple method is accessible to anyone who lives or works with such people, and is shown to transform lives and to introduce a sense of fun, of participation and of intimacy, as trust and familiarity are established

CHAPTERS IN BOOKS

1. 'Speaking the other's language: Imitation as the gateway to relationship', in 'Infant and Child Development',

Special Issue: 'Imitation'

2. 'Intensive Interaction: Getting in Touch with a child with severe autism', in 'Promoting Social Interaction for Individuals with Communicative Impairments. Making Contact.' ed Suzanne Zeedyk

3. 'Self-injury and loss of sense of self' (2012) Chapter 11 in 'Understanding and working with people with learning disabilities who self- injure'. ed. Heslop, P . Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

4. 'Autism Spectrum Disorders' (2013) Bradley, E., Caldwell, P. and Underwood, L. Chap 11 in Handbook of Psychopathology in Intellectual Disability, ed Tsakanikos, E. and McCarthy, J. Pub. Springer