The Sound of a Miracle

Any book with the word "miracle" in the title immediately raises suspicions. So I approached The Sound of a Miracle with scepticism, expecting a very biased account.

Annabel Stehli's second daughter Georgie was diagnosed with autism, but she is not as central to this book as the title might suggest. It reads more like Stehli's autobiography than one specific to her daughter and focussed on autism. It's a rambling account of her life including marriages, divorce, the leukemia suffered by her other daughter, her tranquilizer dependency, and religious faith.

At the time of Georgie's diagnosis, the ideas of Bruno Bettleheim held sway. He believed that autism was caused by poor parenting, and if only mothers could be more loving their children would emerge and develop normally. At the time many parents and professionals swallowed this whole, including the author. This led to a huge amount of guilt and a lot of haughty but useless "experts" whose job description seemed to be to make parents feel bad. This atmosphere of ignorance and scapegoating is portrayed very vividly.

Stehli doesn't come across as particularly level-headed. Given the events in her life this is no surprise. However it makes it hard to trust her version of the events in her life without feeling that they have been over-dramatised.

Georgie was unusually quiet as a child, unresponsive to others and with a tendency to rock. At two years old she learnt to tie her own laces and to draw. But at three she still was not talking, and she was diagnosed with autism. She attended the Bellevue Autistic Unit, where she began to pick up some words.

For the reader it soon becomes clear that Georgie has problems with sound, often reacting extremely to certain noises. It is much easier to see these things in retrospect however, and for a long time the author was unaware of her daughter's auditory sensitivities. She sent Georgie to a mainstream school, where she failed to thrive. Reluctantly her mother took her back to Bellevue, and then on to another special school called Childville. She made some progress in these places.

Then, when Georgie was 12, they went to Switzerland and came across Dr Bérard. He was pioneering a method of auditory training that would normalise hypersensitive hearing. With Georgie this was unusually successful, and she improved so much that she was able to go on to get a diploma at art school.

Although essentially a tale of triumph over tragedy, this is quite a harrowing read at times. Stehli may be an enthusiastic advocate of the auditory treatment, but this is tempered by Dr Bernard Rimland's comments. Rimland writes in his afterword,


In the postscript he says of research into the treatment:



This isn't a book that I would recommend people to read for pleasure. However it explores some ideas about sensory impairment and auditory training that are worth considering if you are looking after an autistic person. The tone is a little too black and white though, and the author doesn't acknowledge that the help given by Georgie's special schools may also have played a large part in Georgie's triumphant outcome, as well as the reasonable intelligence she possessed to begin with (even though it didn't show up on tests very well). Not so much a miracle, more The Sound of a Significant Improvement.