The collective experiences of these caregivers point to the need for more flexibility and co-ordination of respite care services for children with special needs.

Pharmacologic treatment of acute stress disorder (ASD) is a novel area of investigation across all age groups. Very few clinical drug trials have been reported in children and adolescents diagnosed with ASD. Most of the available, potentially relevant, data are from studies of adults with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The atypical antipsychotic agents have been reported to be effective as an adjunctive treatment for adults with PTSD. There have been a limited number of studies published regarding atypical antipsychotic treatment of PTSD in children and adolescents, and there is no current literature available on the use of these agents for children with ASD. This report describes the successful treatment of three preschool-aged children with serious thermal burns as a result of physical abuse or neglect. Each of these children was hospitalized in a tertiary-care children's hospital and was diagnosed with ASD. In all cases, risperidone provided rapid and sustained improvement across all symptom clusters of ASD at moderate dosages. Minimal to no adverse effects were reported. These cases present preliminary evidence for the potential use of risperidone in the treatment of ASD in childhood.

This article contributes to the critical disability and human-nonhuman animal studies literatures through a discourse analysis of newspaper stories about animal-assisted therapy (AAT) and children with disabilities published in the United States and Canada. The articles in our corpus form a recognizable genre that we call AAT human-nonhuman animal interest stories. We pose two central questions of the genre: (1) how is the therapeutic value of AAT constituted? and (2) what are the effects, in discourse, of associating nonhuman animals and children with disabilities in narratives of therapeutic benefit? We emphasize the normative tensions associated with the representation of children with disabilities and nonhuman animals in news stories about AAT. On one hand, news articles objectify children with disabilities, inscribe their need to be made “normal” and silence their own experiences of AAT. On the other hand, they are written in ways that extend and strengthen the disabled body and self through connections with nonhuman therapy animals. They disrupt sharp species distinctions and present narratives of how interspecies relationships formed through participation in AAT co-constitute the agency of nonhuman therapy animals and children with disabilities. We argue that the normative tensions in the popular representation of AAT present important possibilities for intervening in public discourse about disability and nonhuman animals.