Book Review: Creative Therapy for Children with Autism by Janet Tubbs

If you're an arts therapist -- or a parent interested in providing your child with arts therapy -- you may find this book worthwhile. But because it includes an enormous amount of unrelated information about autism in general, the history of autism, or autism and nutrition, it can be hard to find what you're looking for. Intriguing ideas are mentioned, and a few specific exercises, but not enough to qualify this as a handbook or manual.

The title of this book is Creative Therapy for Children with Autism, ADD, and Asperger's: Using Artistic Creativity to Reach, Teach and Touch Our Children. Written by a therapist who describes herself as "new agey," it starts out with thousands of words describing the fairly simple idea that that humans are three-fold beings, encompassing body, mind and spirit -- and that children with autism are no exception to this rule.

Before getting into any discussion of creative therapy, author Janet Tubbs provides an in-depth, wordy, and at times questionable discussion of all aspects of autism and ADD/ADHD, ranging from definitions and diagnoses to causes and treatments. She focuses on diet and nutrition, and makes some controversial claims regarding the effectiveness of gluten-free, chemical-free diets and specific supplements.

The book finally starts digging into creative therapies in Chapter Nine. The ideas presented in this portion of the book are intriguing: They relate to such topics as the power of color, the use of fairy tales and puppetry, music and art therapy, and so on. I would have liked to know a great deal more about how, where, when and under what circumstances they are effectively used. It would also have been terrific to know where to find therapists with similar approaches to autism therapy. Instead, too many pages are devoted not to the therapies themselves, but to the author's perspectives on the therapies, the history of the therapies, and so forth.

The final section of the book actually provides creative arts therapy exercises for children with autism. These, however, prove to be a bit disappointing: Rather than really exploring some of Tubbs' unique theories about color, storytelling and music, they are fairly mundane -- focusing more on skill building than spirituality.