Autistic Man Finds Life After 70 Years : Mental health: A child’s strange behavior landed him in a state hospital for the insane. Released at last with his sister’s help, he is learning social skills.

Harriet Casto lived for most of her 88 years with what she thought was a dark family secret: Her younger brother was insane.

“It was just as if Archie had died, except that Mother said that some things were worse than death. It was a disgrace to have an insane person in the family,” she said.

That was in 1919, when Archie, at age 5, was sent to a state asylum. But thanks to his older sister, Archie, now 78, has a new life.

His condition has been rediagnosed as autism. He is perhaps the oldest person known to have the little-understood illness.

After spending most of his life in institutions for the insane, Archie Casto now lives in a home with five other autistic adults.

“I had never known Archie to smile,” his sister said. “And now, since he’s moved into the group home, he smiles a lot. Sometimes his face just beams with joy.”

Recently, the Autism Society of America honored her as the first recipient of its Sibling Advocate Award for those who care for autistic siblings.

“Archie had a very loving family, a very intelligent family,” said Ruth Sullivan, director of Huntington’s Autism Services Center and the mother of an autistic child.

“But all the authorities, all the experts, said, ‘Put him away,’ and the family did what the professionals told them to do at the time,” she said. “Imagine being written off as hopeless at the age of 5!”

The cause of autism is unknown. It is estimated that perhaps 15 of every 10,000 children are born so afflicted. The word was coined in 1943 by Dr. Leo Kanner, who based it on the Greek auto or “self,” because of the extreme aloneness that characterizes such children, half of whom never speak.

As late as the 1960s, Sullivan said, “there were people--professional people--who had not read that article, who didn’t know autism was a syndrome.”

“It would be very easy to say about one of these kids, ‘He’s mentally retarded, put him away,”’ she said.

Autistic children are hard to manage. They often run away from home and ignore the social rules that govern others, she said.

“They often have excellent motor skills and excellent memory, and yet they often don’t talk and seem not to be interested in other human beings,” she said.

Harriet Casto said it was just such difficulties with Archie that prompted her parents to seek medical attention for him.

“He was such a healthy little thing. There had never been any need to take him (to a doctor) before that,” she said. “But he would do such strange, at-risk things. And he loved to run away. If the door was open he would be the first to see it, and out he would go as fast as his little legs would carry him.

“We had to watch him constantly, and it was this constant watching that was required that finally prompted my parents to take him to the doctor,” she said.

The diagnosis was devastating to the family.

“Mother came home from the doctor just sobbing,” Casto said. “She told me he would have to go to the asylum. My parents had to go before the county court and he was committed by the court. After that, it was just as if he had died. We never spoke of him.”

He was first placed in the Huntington State Asylum, just two blocks from home. His mother and sister visited weekly.

“The attendants told Mother that we were among the few people who came to visit their relatives,” Harriet Casto recalled. “She said many people just dumped --and that was the word she used, dumped --relatives there and never came to see them.”

Over the years, Archie Casto was moved from one institution to another, often without notice to his family. At age 50, Harriet Casto bought a car and learned to drive after her brother was moved to Spencer State Hospital, more than 100 miles away.

What she saw there made her worry, she said.

Her brother always loved nice clothes and the family had provided them, she said, but when they visited him he always was wearing hospital garb. Officials told them the clothes they had bought him had simply disappeared.

Once, when Archie had to appear in court for a review of his status, his appearance was pathetic.

“He was wearing a woman’s coat that was two or three sizes too big. Anything that would have been said by the family in his behalf would have been negated by his appearance,” his sister said.

Today, Casto has all the nice clothes he wants, and a closet to keep them in, in his own room.

“Through all those hospitals, they always made me think of that line from Dante: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,’ ” Harriet Casto said. “When he moved to the group home, I just felt like he had been rescued.”

In 1989, she read an article on autism, written by Sullivan, and thought the description sounded amazingly like her brother’s condition. She contacted Sullivan and asked her to accompany her to Spencer to interview her brother.

With Sullivan’s help, she prevailed upon the state to release him from the mental hospital, on grounds that he was neither insane nor retarded.

“He was past 70 years of age and he couldn’t dress himself. No one had taught him to do that,” Harriet Casto said. “Now he takes his own bath, he dresses himself, he sets his own place at the table and he does his own laundry. He also has his own flower garden, and weeds it and takes care of it.”

And he is more outgoing.

“In the hospital days, I was the only one who could touch him or hug him. Now, he even reaches out and touches people. He makes direct eye contact where he always used to shy away from people,” she said.

Casto said she fears there are others like him still locked up.

“I don’t want to take too much credit for going to see him and caring for him all these years,” she said. “That was just a family duty, and it had to be done.

“But they told me once at Spencer that as I left, he watched my car go down the hill out of sight, and I almost cried. I knew then that he knew we belonged to each other. He might not have understood the relationship of brother and sister, but he knew he belonged to me,” she said.

“He has taught me how to love, and that is one of the biggest blessings of my life.”