Donald Triplett: first person diagnosed with autism – 06/25/2023 – Health

When child psychiatrist Leo Kanner met Donald Triplett in 1938, the five-year-old’s movements were repetitive and not very spontaneous. “He would shake his head from side to side, humming or humming the same three-note tune,” the Austrian-American doctor later recalled.

“Irrelevant phrases” were his normal way of talking, with random words and phrases constantly repeated. He seemed emotionally indifferent to his parents and other children.

But Triplett, who died aged 89, went on to live a life of independence and apparent fulfillment — and secured a place in annals after becoming “Case 1,” the first person in the world to be diagnosed with autism. Although he spent most of his years out of the spotlight, his example has echoed around the world, advancing knowledge and understanding of the condition.

Triplett was born in Forest, Mississippi in 1933. His father, Beamon, was a Yale-trained attorney, whose own father had been the town’s mayor, and his wife, née Mary McCravey, was an heiress to the family who ran the local bank. In Kanner’s description, “The father whom Donald physically resembles is a successful, meticulous, hard-working lawyer who had two ‘nervous breakdowns’ under work pressure… capable whom her husband feels vastly superior to”.

Born into the elite of this small town, the child must have seemed destined to live a life of conventional comfort and success. However, he quickly began to exhibit strange behavior. Notes written by her father prior to the first consultation with Kanner highlight the parents’ pain and bewilderment; not even a festive Santa Claus in full regalia could elicit a reaction from the little boy. However, in a way, at the age of two, he was precocious, able to recite the entirety of Psalms 23 and 25, questions and answers from the Presbyterian Catechism.

“Autism Spectrum Disorder” is now clearly understood to be a developmental disability caused by differences in the brain. It affects about one in every hundred children. But 80 years ago, there was no framework through which to see and understand Triplett’s symptoms. When he was almost four years old, his parents sent him to live in an institution – in a town aptly named Sanatorium – but, after a year, his mother changed her mind and decided he should return to the family.

It was this fateful decision to raise the boy at home that brought him to the care and observation of Kanner, whose seminal 1943 article, “Autistic Disorders of Affective Contact,” offers a rare glimpse into Triplett’s early life and the distinctive set of symptoms that would become the hallmark of an autism diagnosis.

After Kanner suggested that a period in a rural environment might help the boy, he was sent to live for four years with a childless couple on a farm not far from his home, where he seemed to thrive. Upon returning to Forest, he was allowed to enter the local high school and continued his French studies at Millsaps College, Jackson, where he joined a fraternity and sang in the choir.

Just as his early years were described in Kanner’s writings, his later life was remembered by two journalists, John Donvan and Caren Zucker, who profiled Triplett for The Atlantic magazine in 2010. A Pulitzer Prize-nominated book and a PBS documentary, both called “In a Different Key”, followed.

Triplett learned to drive, worked as a teller at the family bank, and loved to play golf. He has also traveled extensively both in the US and abroad. In an age when neurodiversity was not widely understood, his quirks inspired protection rather than ridicule in the close-knit community he was born into. In fact, townspeople were unaware of his autism diagnosis until Donvan and Zucker mentioned it.

Keith Wargo, president of the US nonprofit Autism Speaks, said Triplett “left an indelible mark on our understanding of autism” as a complex condition that was “something to be included, not ‘different’… embraced, not stigmatized”.

It is perhaps this evidence that Triplett could find a place in the world, despite quirks and eccentricities that might have marked him out for bullying or exploitation, that is his most encouraging legacy.

As Donvan and Zucker wrote in The Atlantic following the news of his death: “It demonstrated that accepting someone who is different is not, after all, so hard to do.”

Article originally published here.