Yet another long post! I'm on a roll today! ;^) This one was for the Autism Advocacy (aut-advo) list...
"Professionals" would be more likely to assume that the behavior is the problem, rather than that the behavior is a symptom OF a problem -- that he's troubled by something.
That is, that I bite myself isn't necessarily the problem around here. It's not pleasant, but if forced to stop that, I'll just do something else harmful. I used to cut off the pads of my feet when harassed too much about my hands, because nobody except me would know about it. The real solution was to find out what was stressing me in the first place.
You might try something akin to a tactic I teach people with misbehaving cats to use. "Crouch down on all fours where the problems are going on, down to the cat's level, spend a half-hour there taking notes on *everything* you notice, and then imagine the place 100 times more sensory-intense in every way than it is for you so you can get a grasp of what the cat is experiencing." Often that will tell the caretaker a lot that otherwise wouldn't occur to them: that the litterbox smells, there's movement near the new kitty bed, stuff like that. Taking a similar approach with autistics could help a great deal. So you might go to where Ian most often starts to bite himself, and spend a half-hour writing down *everything* you become aware of, then assume the "most intense case scenario" to get a picture of what might be bothering him -- noise, smells, movements, etc.
The same tactic, I suspect, would work well for parents trying to figure out what their unhappy AC student's day is like. You could go into the campus on a special mission, spend at least a half-hour discreetly everywhere that the kid does, recording everything you notice, than multiplying its intensity by ten... At the end of the day, you might have a really good idea of what needs to change to make the environment more pleasant, let alone tolerable, for him or her.
