Wild Children

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http://www.feralchildren.com/en/index.php

I read a book on wild children once, and saw a lot of parallels to autism. When reading Temple Grandin's latest book, she commented that a lot of wild children might have been autistic, and I immediately thought of Victor and Wild Peter. Sure enough, this site, which I first saw linked from a personality forum, suggested that those boys were Auties, and that wolf-girl Kamala probably was too, which makes a lot of sense.

When I read the book about the wild children, I though their isolation sounded kind of dreamy and attractive in some ways...another case of my ASD envy, I guess. I also appreciated my own "wild side" and ability to enjoy solitude, and remembered the tale of the monkeys raised without something soft to touch from my high school psych class. Those monkeys ended up rather autistic-like. So autism, in which Temple Grandin said "the abnormal nervous system of the baby rejects the mother," can be seen as something of a neurologically forced wildness. The sensory issues can definitely promote isolation and diminish comfort. Furthermore, any other quirk or circumstance, named or unnamed, that draws people away from other people can create wildlike or autisticlike qualities.

I understand how this links to Autism. Our moods tend to swing a lot.