Bender also conducted extensive research on autism. She believed that autism is a type of schizophrenia, and was often one of the first signs. The lack of ability to communicate one's experience of being autistic (due to age) would cause them to be quiet and withdraw, and this was one of the signs of early schizophrenia. Bender was one of the first to extensively observe and document the behaviors of autism, some of which we attribute to those with autism even today. Steve Silberman, the author of "Neurotribes", is sharply critical of Bender's therapeutic approach to children with autism. In the 1950s and 1960s, he told an interviewer from "The Sun" magazine, "autistic kids were often subjected to seclusion, restraint, and physical punishment by clinicians who did not understand their condition. The head of children’s psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, Lauretta Bender, administered electroconvulsive therapy to autistic patients and also insulin-shock therapy — administering overdoses of insulin to put them into a short-term coma. She gave them antipsychotic drugs like Thorazine. She also tried giving autistic kids LSD every day for nine months or more, but decided they were becoming “more anxious.”