This work presents the results obtained in a therapeutic social skills group of adults living with Asperger's Syndrome (ASD). The treatment consists in a regular participation in specifically designed groups. Patients meeting the criteria for ASD have been selected with no psychiatric comorbidity and were thus able to optimal group interaction. They were suffering significant anxiety symptoms supposed to lead to inadequate social skills as well as to result from them. Requisite participation included ten sessions in group discussions of topics propose by the patients themselves. Special attention was accord to train the patients in detecting possible functional analysis processes leading to increasing anxiety and in training social skills. The paper concentrates in three assessments by the patient themselves of four different scales (anxiety, depression, self-esteem and social skills in daily life) allowing to the comparison of baseline level (before session 1) with short term (immediately after the last session) and long term benefits of training (3 months later). These different measures revealed significant long term improvement in the patients. These results are important because they consist in training the patients in self-help. They might also contribute to better understanding of the ASD by the scientific community as well as by the patients themselves. Finally, long term treatments such as proposed here are more likely to extend the improvement of the patients' well-being to their social environment, family and professional one. It is thus both a clinical and a theoretically relevant research effort.

Numerous studies highlight the importance of therapeutic context when learning social skills for young ASD patients. Therapy approaches become more complex when the situation involves young ASD patients with a severe mental disability. Indeed, when working with this population, it is difficult to get their attention and have them mimic actions (through video modeling, for example) or interact with peers on a playground. Nevertheless, our study tried to demonstrate the possibility of working on the social skills of young ASD patients with a severe mental disability using a therapeutic storytelling approach. The study involved 10 children (average age of 10.6 +/-2 years). All study participants were diagnosed with ASD and severe mental retardation. 62 sessions divided across two years and twenty repeated assessments were taken during this study, and the results obtained show that the children learned, in a significant way, to imitate the story's actions. They also significantly reduced their behavioral issues. A physiological assessment (eye-tracking) was taken both pre and post-test during the storytelling workshop. The results obtained confirmed a significant increase in attention given to the storytelling scene.

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Objective: This is an unconventional manuscript that attempts to outline a theory of caetextia for adults with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), based on hemispheric dominance due to impaired parallel processing. To take context into consideration, a person must be able to concentrate on and separate out his attention across different elements of a given situation. This is a process of dynamic sensory integration. Yet the deficits and strategies developed by these patients differ according to whether their dominant hemisphere is the right or the left one. Method: By looking at two case studies for didactical purposes, we will attempt to interpret these differences and construct a specific therapeutic approach. Conclusions: The detection of this disability as well as the therapeutic approaches must thus be adapted to this dimension of the disorder. We shall attempt to interpret the differences and design a specific therapeutic plan.

Les pièges inhérents au clivage entre la psychiatrie clinique, scientifique et la réalité