Students with Autism Face Vanishing Support at College
May 25, 2018
By: Brendan Borrell and Spectrum
Source: The Atlantic
Kieran Barrett-Snyder was a star student at his high school on Long Island in New York. He had a gift for mathematics and science, and was accepted into all seven of the colleges he applied to. He decided on New York University, both because it has a strong engineering program and because it is close to his home.
During Barrett-Snyder’s first semester in 2014, he did well in all his classes, except for labs that required written reports—a task that felt overwhelming to him. He became so anxious about his workload that at one point he started to feel his heart pounding hard in his chest. “It hurt to lay down,” he recalls.
Barrett-Snyder has autism, and he has felt anxiety for much of his life. But this was more intense than usual. His symptoms persisted for several days, until his mother took him to the emergency room, where he learned he had been having an extended panic attack.