Nevin Eracar

Through the Turkish Autism Association that she founded, Nevin Eracar is helping families, institutions, and society better support and integrate people with autism.

Nevin has spent over a decade looking at the world through the eyes of her 20-year-old autistic daughter. As the mother of an autistic child, she has seen that few services exist to help disabled children, doctors are not clear on many of the diagnoses, classroom teachers do not know how to accommodate such children, and the public knows little about disability generally, compounding the shame that families are made to feel in having a disabled child. As head of one of Istanbul's main psychological hospitals for 15 years, Nevin also sees the problem through the lens of a doctor. She realized that by visibly rescuing one group–and autism made the most sense, for obvious reasons–she could provide a template for addressing other disabilities as well. To pursue this aim, she founded the Turkish Autism Association, the first of its kind in Turkey, to conduct training, raise public awareness, provide help and support to families with autistic children, advocate for laws that guarantee rights for people with autism and other disabilities, and establish camps that help with integration. Through these efforts, she achieves tangible gains–improved services for her daughter and others with disabilities–and one less tangible: she hopes to make Turkish society a little more open to difference, a gain she hopes will have far-reaching effects not only for health and services to those who suffer from illness or disability, but also in other closed areas in society.

As one form of disability, autism affects 4 in 10,000 people; about 1 in 10 people has a disability of some form. In Turkey, people who are disabled are excluded almost completely from mainstream society. They are shut out physically because buildings and other facilities may not be designed with them in mind; they suffer psychological and emotional isolation as well and many are made to feel unwanted. Many factors in the environment–exposure to sound and light, in the case of autism–can dramatically affect a disabled person's feeling of security, and the wrong combination of factors, arrived at even through the good intentions of uninformed families or teachers, can trigger seizures, tantrums, or shock.

There are several organizations in Turkey that work with autistic people, and the existing efforts are to educate those with autism to make them more similar to those who are normal. This is the traditional behavior modification approach. A special center was planned to open in Izmir but with only eight people enrolled, it was not financially feasible to open, and no steps were taken to see its establishment through. A private daycare center operates in Ankara but only works with children, not families or society; in Istanbul a daycare treatment center that works in cooperation with the Ministry of Education opened in the fall of 2000. The government has agreed to open more classes for handicapped people, including those with autism, but there are not qualified teachers to fill the openings.

Nevin's professional background in psychology, coupled with her deep understanding of the emotional aspects that accompany disability in any family, have allowed her to reach critical groups–doctors, parents, teachers, university students, lawyers, and disabled people themselves. In one element of her strategy, she provides opportunities to increase social development in peer groups through her Autistic Integration Camps. She has held these camps each year since 1997 on an island near Istanbul. She works with the people in the village where the camp is located, with those who volunteer to work with the children, the families of the children, and professional people who come to work with the children. Not only do the camps allow the children to experience life in an integrated setting; they also serve another critical function: they provide a core group of devoted parents and supporters who return to their own professional circles and neighborhoods to educate and campaign for greater awareness and services, either formally by establishing their own groups or informally through conversations with colleagues and friends.

Nevin sees that the media have a critical role to play as well. She works with journalists and appears on public and private radio and television stations for regularly scheduled and special broadcasts, providing information to the public on disability, particularly autism and schizophrenia.

Nevin is working with local authorities and with teachers to increase understanding of disability among these groups. In southeastern Anatolia, she works with representatives from the government who are newly responsible for working with the disabled. She provides ongoing training for teachers, using the technique of learning by doing–or, in this case, being–to show teachers what learning techniques work best for children of different abilities. For example, she puts teachers in the roles of the disabled, allowing them to experience life as a blind person or a wheelchair user. After an initial week of introduction and training, teachers return to their homes and teach other teachers. After one month, they get together and trouble-shoot, listen to one another, and try to bring up and support their own programs. This work lasts for one year.

Nevin was recently in Cyprus in her role as advisor for the integration program there. This is the first step in a pilot program that she has set up to open classrooms for disabled children within schools for nondisabled children. In this program, all children would spend some time in each other's classrooms. She will send some of her own university students there as volunteers. She sees that this effort can extend to mainland Turkey as well, by showing its specific successes, raising support and awareness, and growing into a larger plan.

A psychologist by training, Nevin was introduced to autism not through her professional work but through the experience of having an autistic daughter. She saw that no programs were available to her daughter. To give her a chance in life, Nevin started to research and develop a different approach to educating and training autistic children. Building on the skills and contacts she had made during her 15-year directorship of the Taksim Psychiatric Center, she formed the Turkish Autism Association.

Nevin consults with the Ministry of Education and the Istanbul Foundation's Handicapped Collective Adaptation to Life project. From 1979 to 1994, she was responsible for the Psychological Ward of Taksim Hospital, during which time she also delivered lectures on psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy at different high schools. Nevin is the mother of two children, a 26-year-old son who studies sound engineering, and a 19-year-old autistic daughter, who continues to inspire her work. Nevin has studied psychology in Turkey and France and has published four books; in addition to introducing systemic changes, she continues to write on this and similar topics.