Lauretta bender biography for kids

Lauretta Bender (August 9, 1897 – January 4, 1987) was an Americanchildneuropsychiatrist known for developing the Bender-Gestalt Test in 1938, a psychologicaltest designed to evaluate visual-motor maturation in children that was used widely used for assessing their neurological function and in screening for developmental disorders. She performed research in the areas of autism spectrum disorders in children (formerly "childhood schizophrenia"), suicide and violence, and was one of the first researchers to suggest that mental disorders in children might have a neurological basis, rather than attributing them to the child's bad behavior or poor upbringing.

Quotes

• Our own definition of childhoodschizophrenia has been a clinical entity, occurring in childhood before the age of eleven years, which "reveals pathology in behavior at every level and in every area of integration or patterning within the functioning of the central nervous system, be it vegetative, motor, perceptual, intellectual, emotional, or social. Further more, this behavior pathology disturbs the patterns of every functioning field in a characteristic way. The pathology cannot therefore be thought of as a focal in the architecture of the central nervous system, but rather as striking at the substratum of integrative functioning or biologically patterned behavior" (1) At present the only concept we have of this pathology is in terms of field forces in which temporal rather than spatial factors are emphasized. Within the concept of field forces, one can accept some idea of a focal disorder, since no one integrated function is ever completely lost or inhibited, and since there are different degrees of severity of disturbance in the life history of any child and between two different children. This also differs with the period of onset.
  The diagnostic criteria for the 100 schizophrenic children which make up this study have been rigid. In each child it has been possible

I was six years old, and so, finally, all the symptoms of my supposed mental illness, playing in the back yard making mud pies, running away from the big children when they threatened me, picking flowers from our neighbor’s garden, fighting with my little sister, and especially, being born to a crazy mother, came to a head. And now I was officially a schizophrenic, proving that the disease was inherited.

And Miss Callaghan declared that I was to be taken to Bellevue Hospital, to be made an experimental animal for Doctor Lauretta Bender. She was one of the leading child psychiatrists of her time, and she needed foster children to try out electric shock treatment on us. How interesting to see what might happen!

And the child welfare agency that was supposed to protect me was happy to provide the children.

I remember nothing of how I got there, and very little of what I actually experienced during that time. But, very unusually for a shock victim, I have a few memories, memories of events that occurred over and over.

Now, writing as an adult many years later, I can only imagine all the terror I must have felt when I was torn from my foster parents then. But maybe it is merciful that I can’t remember.

At Bellevue,I slept in what seemed to me, small as I was, as a gigantic hallway; cold, echoing at night with strange and frightening noises, with a ceiling as high as the sky. There were windows even up to the ceiling, but they had not been cleaned for many years, and the hallway was always dark, even during the day, even when the sun was shining outside. My bed, furnished with a hard filthy mattress that smelled very bad and an olive drab blanket, was all alone in the hallway.

I didn’t know why I was kept alone in the hallway. I wanted to be with the other boys on the ward. I remember vaguely being told that the ward didn’t have enough room, but why didn’t they put some other boy out there so I would have someone to talk to?

Lauretta Bender repeated first grade three times in her home town of Butte, Montana during the first decade of the twentieth century. Teachers considered her mentally defective and she worried that she would never learn. This turned out not to be true, but Bender’s fear and frustration as a young girl may have influenced her decision to become a child psychiatrist. It certainly shaped her belief that developmental and learning problems were rooted in neurological differences, or what we now call neurodiversity. “We all have a bit of cellular loss, brain damage, deviations here and there,” she said in 1960. “This is something that is hard for people to accept.”

Bender was one of the first American physicians to treat and study children with schizophrenia and severe emotional disturbance, terms that were common at the time. She encountered hundreds of severely effected children, including children with autism, during her long career as a researcher and clinician. She also applied her professional perspective to her own children, two of whom had difficulties with writing and spelling. Bender was convinced they had inherited these traits, which would be eventually be recognized as learning disabilities, from her.

Bender’s biological orientation as a psychiatrist made her a maverick during much of her career, especially after 1945, when psychoanalytic perspectives dominated psychiatry in the United States and psychogenesis was the dominant theory about autism. During her lifetime, Bender was well known and widely respected, above all for developing a neuropsychiatric exam, the Bender-Gestalt Visual Mot

American neuropsychiatrist

Lauretta Bender (August 9, 1897 – January 4, 1987) was an American child neuropsychiatrist known for developing the Bender-Gestalt Test, a psychological test designed to evaluate visual-motormaturation in children. First published by Bender in 1938, the test became widely used for assessing children's neurological function and screening for developmental disorders. She performed research in the areas of autism spectrum disorders in children, suicide and violence. She was one of the first researchers to suggest that mental disorders in children might have a neurological basis, rather than attributing them to the child's bad behavior or poor upbringing.

Early life

Bender was born in Butte, Montana, to parents John Oscar and Katherine Irvine Bender. Bender had a difficult time in school when she was young and had to repeat the first grade three times. She often reversed her letters when reading and writing which led people to believe she had some form of intellectual disability. Her father helped her compensate for her dyslexia and she often credited him for making her a strong individual. Her family moved often and she attended high school in Los Angeles where she graduated as valedictorian of her high school class.

Education

Bender earned a BA in 1922 and M.A. in 1923 from the University of Chicago. She completed her M.D. at State University of Iowa Medical School in 1926 (now the University of Iowa), and this is where she wrote her first scientific publication, Hematological studies on experimental tuberculosis of the guinea pig. After graduation, she spent some time studying overseas, completed an internship at the University of Chicago and conducted research at Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins Hospital.^[5&