Childhood Psychosis in the First Four Years of Life

Henry Massie and Judith Rosenthal

McGraw-Hill, New York, 1984

Early in my career treating children, families with autistic children gave me their home movies to study for clues to when and how the condition began. This led to a project in which I collected a large series of movies of the first two years of life of children who were later diagnosed with autism and pervasive developmental disorders, and for comparison sake a like number of movies of the infancies of school children without difficulties. Using frame-by-frame microanalysis of the movies, my collaborators and I documented the appearance of the first signs of autism in the first 12 months of life. For example, we saw that the babies failed to return their mothers’ gaze and respond to her smiles in the first 6 months, and by 12 months the children were failing to develop the ability to express emotions and meanings with facial expressions, which is the forerunner of communication with speech. Most of the autistic children did not receive formal diagnoses until 3 years of age or later.  If treatment had begun before 3, it would have been more likely to succeed.  The film study pointed the way to the subsequent Massie-Campbell Scale of Mother-Infant Attachment During Stress (ADS Scale).