As a child he was theCase 1» in the history of the diagnosis ofautism. As an adult he has become an influential case study on how people with autism can find fulfillment. Donald Triplett died at his home in Forest, a small town in the Mississippi central, at the age of 89 following a tumor. The news of his disappearance was published by the “New York Times”.
FURTHER INFORMATION
It was the doctor Leo children to use for the first time in 1943 the term acoustic spectrum disorder to diagnose a social and emotional disorder: and the first patient to whom the diagnosis was applied was the American Donald Triplett.
Autistic child, condominiums distrust the family: “Too many screams, have him followed by qualified assistants”
Chi era Donald Triplett
Donald Gray Triplett was born in Forest on September 8, 1933 to Mary McCravey Triplett, a high school English teacher whose family owned a local bank, and Beamon Triplett, a lawyer who had studied at Yale Law School. Donald seemed to live in a world apart from his family and the rest of society. He didn’t respond to other children, not even to a man dressed as Santa Claus or his mother’s smile. He used language in ways that suggested private meanings, inexplicably assigning numbers to people he met and repeating mysterious phrases like “I could put a little comma or a semicolon” and “through the dark cloud that shines.”
Donald had a craze for other repetitive behaviors, including turning round objects like saucepans. If any of his various rituals were interrupted, he would throw a destructive tantrum. He had abilities equally baffling to those around him. He could answer without hesitation the result of multiplying 87 by 23; he could sing songs with perfect pitch after hearing them once. He was said to have calculated the number of bricks in his high school’s facade with just a glance.
The first diagnosis of autism
In August 1937, Donald’s parents sent Donald to a state children’s facility in a Mississippi town called “Sanatorium”: they visited him only twice a month and the child spent his days listlessly, sometimes even immobile. It was common at the time for children with severe psychological problems to be permanently institutionalized. But after about a year, Donald’s parents insisted that he come home. They immediately took him to a Baltimore doctor named Leo Kanner.
Dr. Kanner had founded the first child psychiatry clinic in the United States at Johns Hopkins University. Initially, he didn’t know how to describe the child’s condition. The doctor had studied the concept of autism developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who in the years preceding the First World War had used it as a term to indicate the total self-absorption of some schizophrenic patients. In a 1943 article titled “Autistic Disorders of Touch,” Kanner described the cases of 11 children who he said illustrated a condition that differed “markedly and uniquely from anything hitherto reported” in the annals of psychology.
With Donald as the inaugural case – referred to as “Case 1” and “Donald T.” – Dr. Kanner outlined a disorder that included obsessive repetitive habits, “excellent routine memory” and the inability to relate “in an ordinary way” with other people. He called this form of autism “rare,” but added that it was “probably more frequent than indicated by the paucity of observed cases.”
That scientific article, along with the copious notes made by Beamon Triplett describing his son’s condition to Dr. Kanner, became the basis of what is now known as autism spectrum disorder. Its official description in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders still recalls Dr. Kanner’s theorizing 80 years ago.
The life of Donald Triplett
As he got older, Donald Triplett never stopped haunting, talking sluggishly and struggling to hold a conversation. But his life has also taken a trajectory that would have seemed unimaginable when he was a 4-year-old boy in an institution. He graduated not only from high school but also, in 1958, from Millsaps College in Jackson, Missouri, where he studied French and mathematics. The skills he lacked as a teenager he acquired in his 20s and 30s. He learned to drive, for example, and got around in his own Cadillac. He found work as an accountant at the local Bank of Forest, which his grandfather had founded. With the help of a Jackson travel agent, he was able to take solo vacations to countries around the world.
His remarkable self-sufficiency became a national story in the United States thanks to journalists John Donvan and Caren Zucker, who wrote an article about Triplett’s life for The Atlantic in 2010. From that article, a book was born, In a Different Key: The Story of Autism», finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for essay writing, and for a documentary of the same title broadcast by PBS last year. Donvan and Zucker drew several conclusions from Triplett’s story, including that his family’s wealth and social status were instrumental in helping him secure a life of dignity. But above all they underlined the importance of Donald Triplett’s hometown and its approximately 3,000 inhabitants.
The Forest community, they argued, “made a probably unconscious but clear decision about how it was going to treat this strange boy, then man, who lived among them. In short, they decided to accept it». He had many friends. Some of them, a group of men, joined Triplett outside Forest City Hall for coffee every morning. The neighbors welcomed him to their team for the Forest Country Club golf tournament and he played respectably. His fellow citizens spoke with admiration of his abilities in music and mathematics, to the point of exaggerating how genius he was.