Steve Silberman, the author of Neurotribes, is sharply critical of Bender's therapeutic approach to children with autism. In the 1950s and 1960s, he told an interviewer from The Sun magazine, "autistic kids were often subjected to seclusion, restraint, and physical punishment by clinicians who did not understand their condition. The head of children’s psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, Lauretta Bender, administered electroconvulsive therapy to autistic patients and also insulin-shock therapy — administering overdoses of insulin to put them into a short-term coma. She gave them antipsychotic drugs like Thorazine. She also tried giving autistic kids LSD every day for nine months or more, but decided they were becoming “more anxious.” Lauretta Bender also opposed Freudian views of childhood disorders. According to Freud and others, childhood anxiety stemmed from early hostility and aggression. Bender observed that childhood anxiety, aggression, and hostility was often caused by frustration or developmental issues, either physically or environmentally. During the time before psychotropic medications and limited understanding of mental disorders, Bender sought to understand childhood disorders. Her attempts were intended for the betterment of the child and the family at a time when the mentally ill were often sent to asylums. Although much of Bender's experimental work cannot be considered entirely beneficial to psychology, there are many other ways in which she succeeded in changing the view of childhood mental disorders and how we understand them. References American psychiatrists Autism researchers American women psychiatrists 1897 births 1987 deaths People from Butte, Montana Scientists with dyslexia University of Chicago alumni University of Iowa alumni 20th-century American women 20th-century American people