I can relate because my friend got a DUI about 3 years ago. His worst experience were the stop, the booking and the late night in the cell. But the worst part were the huge bills that followed in the next 12-24 months.

Most people would tell you that the worst part of a DUI arrest is the squad car pulling you over, the police opening your car door, and then throwing you in a cell for the night. The huge fine for the DUI is a close second. But what about the next 12 to 24 months of financial bleeding that occurs after the arrest? These are the huge fines for the DUI and all of the other hidden charges for the DUI that really hurt in the long run.

The immediate costs hit fast

In the first days and weeks after a DUI arrest, there are many costs of a DUI that come due quickly. Often within a few days of a DUI arrest, a person will need to pay for the towing and storage of their vehicle. If a person is unable to post bail following a DUI arrest, they will need to pay for their release from jail. In addition to these expenses, a person charged with a DUI will need to pay for an initial consultation with a DUI defense attorney. Finally, a person charged with a DUI will need to deal with the many administrative tasks involved in dealing with a suspended driver’s license. The costs of a DUI in the first days and weeks following a DUI arrest can be very high.

• Vehicle towing and impound storage fees
• Bail or release conditions (varies significantly by province)
• First lawyer consultation, which some firms charge for even if you don’t retain them
• License reinstatement filing fees once suspension period ends

Most people only hear about the fine of a DUI. Also they are not aware of the financial costs of a DUI prior to the trial of the charges. Yes similar to a car accident the immediate costs of damage to vehicles and medical bills are normally focused on by the public rather than the subsequent insurance claim. It is very similar with a DUI as well, prior to the DUI trial the immediate financial costs of the arrest of a DUI should be brought to awareness to those who have been charged with a DUI.

Legal fees: the long middle chapter

Just because you need a lawyer, does not mean it has to cost an arm and a leg. While there are certainly cases that cost into the thousands of dollars (and yes, in some extreme circumstances even tens of thousands of dollars), there are many cases that will cost in the hundreds of dollars. Simple guilty pleas are generally in the range of $1,500 to $2,500, while more serious cases (contested cases where a defense is being put forth to challenge circumstantial evidence for example) or cases with aggravating circumstances can cost into the $10,000s.

The fines for a DUI can vary quite a bit. For example if there is an accident involved or if the person’s blood alcohol level is extremely high then the fine can be much higher. In fact it is not uncommon for the fine for a first offense DUI to be in the range of $2,000 to $7,000 or more. The minimum fine for a DUI in Canada under the Criminal Code is $1,000 for a first offense.

To find out more about the costs of a DUI conviction, you can check out this link from Smart Start Canada – what a DUI actually costs.

Ignition interlock and its ongoing price tag

The Ignition Interlock Devices (IIDs) that are required in most provinces for a minimum of 12 months after your license has been re-instated, can cost anywhere from $2.50 per month to over $15.00 per month, plus some administrative costs for the installation and removal of the device. For the 12 month period of the interlock, the IID can cost well over $1,000.00. Some provinces and circumstances can require the interlock for longer than 12 months.

The cost for an ignition interlock can range from over $1,000 for a 12 month period. Many provinces require interlock for longer than 12 months depending on previous offenses. The monthly cost of an interlock is quietly added to the other costs of a DUI. In many cases the interlock can be a costly addition but is an effective way to prevent individuals from driving under the influence in the future. It is also a great reminder for individuals who have previously been convicted of a DUI of the dangers of drinking and driving.

Costs that are easy to overlook

In addition to these disclosed expenses, there are many hidden costs of a DUI that surprise drivers who have been charged with a DUI. Many of these expenses fall under the category of “hidden costs of a DUI”.

• Transportation costs while your license is suspended (rideshares, transit, or the awkward business of relying on other people)
• Time off work for court dates and mandatory education programs, which is lost income, not just inconvenience
• Mandatory alcohol assessment or treatment programs, required by some provinces before reinstatement
• Potential civil liability if an accident was involved in the original incident

Breaking down the costs of an event and seeing the various different categories can open one’s eyes to the sometimes hidden financial implications of that event that can cause significant financial loss over long periods of time. It is our intention to open the reader’s eyes to the long list of costs that are often overlooked in discussing the costs of a DUI.

The insurance conversation nobody wants to have

After the cost of a DUI has been disclosed, then attention turns to the car insurance that the person involved in the accident has. This will usually double or triple overnight in cost. Often the standard insurance company will refuse to insure a person with a DUI conviction. That person will have to seek out a high-risk insurance pool that will charge them extremely high premiums with little coverage.

It is also worth noting that a DUI conviction in Canada is typically reported on a person’s driving abstract for a period of 3 years from the date of conviction. Additionally, a DUI conviction is considered to be part of a person’s criminal record and will remain on record unless the person receives a pardon. As such, insurers have very long memories when it comes to a person’s DUI convictions and it is not uncommon for them to increase a person’s premium by hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year.

(And yes, I said earlier that the immediate costs get overlooked, but honestly? Insurance might be the single most financially damaging long-term consequence for many drivers. Both things are true.)

A Practical Note Before You Start Reading

So long before you have a hearing or get found guilty of a DUI in Canada it can cost you in the range of $1,000 to $2,500 for your lawyer in addition to the aforementioned fines and penalties. For those in accidents the amount of money you need to spend can be in the thousands. Here is a great link for those wanting to know more about the true cost of a DUI in Canada.

Please be advised that this article is only intended to provide general information and is not intended to be used as legal advice in relation to any specific DUI charges. Since laws for DUI are subject to change from time to time, and are typically governed by each province in Canada, it is strongly recommended that a DUI defense attorney be consulted immediately to discuss the specifics of any charges that have been laid.

I spoke with the documentation manager of a large manufacturer of medical equipment last year. She managed a number of different manuals for different products worldwide, each with its own set of warning labels in different languages. The information was organized in a 43 x 5 spreadsheet with 43 rows and 5 columns. The spreadsheet was color coded and updated by hand each time engineering made a change. She did a great job managing a process that was set up for her.

The reasons for the development of DITA-based CCMS platforms, like the reasons for the development of the HTML and XML standards, spring from the nature

What’s actually going on under the hood

DITA stands for Darwin Information Typing Architecture (what did a biologist and a software architect have for breakfast that created this?). Darwin Information Typing Architecture basically is a structure for information that is very easy to work with. Information is written in so called topics, single parts of information. These topics can then be re-used in as many documents, in fact in all, documents that are created. This is where DITA-based CCMS really starts to add value to an organization’s content.

A CCMS (Component Content Management System) is the infrastructure that manages the content chunks at a large scale. Features of a CCMS include support for version control, managing of metadata, support for conditional content and for localization. All the content of a company is stored in one place (e.g. shared drives, email, web sites etc. are no longer needed).

DITA and a CCMS change how you work as a content team. The content of a company is organized by a DITA-based CCMS.

The reuse problem nobody talks about honestly

For many documentation teams however the promise of reuse is a false one. This is often because it is sold as part of the larger documentation management software package and so teams are lead to believe that the features of the larger system are sufficient to enable them to reuse content. In practice, however, most such systems are designed with an orientation towards copy and paste. So, for example, in order to update a single change to a single paragraph in fifteen different documents, documentation teams must copy and paste the change each time, adding more documentation ‘debt’ with each change as the time and effort to make the update continues to rise as the documentation evolves over time. DITA, together with a DITA-based CCMS, takes a very different approach. DITA content is organized and written as single topics of content which can be authored once and then reused as required across all of the different places within which that content is needed. Those topics are then stored in a CCMS which allows them to be used as required in all of the different output formats, by all of the different product teams, in all of the different languages needed within an organization.

DITA-based systems support single-source authoring. Single-source authoring allows a writer to create a topic once and store it in the CCMS. Later, that same topic can be referenced in many different documents. The best part is that when the content for that topic is updated, the change happens everywhere that the topic is referenced. There is no more searching for where the updated content was copied. There is no content drift. And, there is no forty-three-row-spreadsheet.

In addition, for regulated content such as Medical Devices, Aerospace, and Pharmaceuticals, any tool that makes your life easier is likely to be a lifesaver. The way that such content is normally used is in hard copy and online, and it is used by Engineers, Sales people, and Customers alike. The material is published in large numbers of copies, and therefore change to the information in the published copies can be challenging to implement. However, the biggest challenge is ensuring that all of the published copies of the information contain the latest version of information, and it is this challenge that DITA-based CCMSes are designed to address.

(But this scenario keeps me up at night, and that is why documentation managers exist).

Where enterprise teams actually feel the difference

It shows up in a few specific places. Not always the ones the sales deck leads with.

• Localization at scale. When content is structured and modular, translators only touch what’s new or changed. Not the whole document again. For a company releasing documentation in fourteen languages, that’s a meaningful cost reduction and a faster time to market in every one of those markets.
• Multi-channel publishing. The same source content can render as a PDF, a help portal, a mobile app screen, or an embedded tooltip without manually reformatting anything. The structure does the work.
• Conditional content. One set of source files can produce different outputs for different audiences. A field technician and an end user reading about the same product don’t need the same level of detail, and DITA handles that distinction without requiring two separate authoring efforts.
• Review and approval workflows. Enterprise documentation rarely involves one writer. Legal, compliance, subject matter experts, product managers — all of them touch it at various stages. A CCMS routes the right content to the right reviewer without the version chaos that email threads inevitably produce.

I am currently working at IXIA for 3+ years. I implemented and manage the IXIA CCMS DITA platform for hundreds of topics. These topics are written for multiple products and are written in multiple languages. The output is published in multiple formats. This is extremely powerful for intelligent content reuse for structured review workflows.

A quick look at what changes (and what doesn’t)

The left column is where most organizations currently are, and while it doesn’t have to be that way, the costs of not having a proper CCMS are typically hidden and therefore not felt until later, at which time the pain of migration to a DITA-based system with a CCMS is very real.

Is it worth the learning curve?

However, if the documentation created by a team consists of a very small number of very large documents that are published on a very occasional basis, the learning investment and subsequent overheads to author and maintain using DITA could well be considered to be too great. For such teams, a simple repository to hold shared documentation together would be a much more cost effective solution, and if they also needed a central documentation repository for other reasons, a CCMS would also be overkill and a simple repository would suffice (such as a SharePoint repository, or even a simple spreadsheet).

However, as the number of documents for a large number of products in several languages and in many output formats increases, the investment for the above-mentioned issues can pay back very quickly. (If one considers the two kinds of overhead – that of learning to use a CCMS, and that of not using a CCMS – then the first kind of overhead is paid out slowly, over a period of time, in the form of missed updates, of having to rework already published content, etc. The finding of the regulator in an audit that a change to safety-related information in a medical device has not been published in all affected documents (e.g. in version 2.3 of a document) is only one, extreme example of this).

As documentation managers we all know a few fellow documentation managers, and as a rule of thumb I’ve found them all to be pretty harried souls. The documentation manager with the spreadsheet is no exception. She used that poor spreadsheet to track 20 or so documents (or sets of documents) that between them contained about 30 topics. And, on top of that, she used the spreadsheet to track all of the subsequent changes to those topics — as they went through their various revisions, and were incorporated into the various sets of documents. It was a monumental task that she undertook on a regular basis, all alone. She was at her wit’s end, as I am sure you can imagine, and as much as she cajoled, begged, and generally exhorted her team to start to use the tool they had been given (a DITA-based system managed by a CCMS) to create their documents in a way that would facilitate the reuse of topics and their subsequent, easy updating — they simply weren’t having it. It was only after 6 long months or so that the tools were finally all sorted, the data had been all correctly migrated, and the team had been properly and sufficiently trained — that they started to use the system in the way that it was intended. But even then, it wasn’t the tooling that had been the problem — it had been their (mis-) use of that poor spreadsheet in the first place. She told me that the hardest part of the whole migration had been getting them to see that the spreadsheet had, all along, been the problem — not the solution to their documentation woes.

No software can fix a set of problems that are based upon a set of procedures, i.e. a culture. But the right software at the right time can fix all sorts of problems you were unaware you had related to your content.

I was talking to a parent a couple of months ago about her child’s morning routine and she described it as ‘Negotiating with a tiny, very principled diplomat’. This child liked to make sure that both of his socks were worn in the precise right order every morning and he also wanted to know in advance approximately how long things would take to happen. At times he needed as many as 2 or 3 warnings before he could transition from one activity to another. He described his breakfast time as ‘a whole production’. However, after a couple of months of his ABA he was able to get himself ready in the morning and have his breakfast without the same level of distress that he had been experiencing previously. This child had been able to develop strategies in order to be able to cope in a world that is not particularly set up to meet his needs.

I wanted to highlight for you a very powerful and enlightening conversation I recently had with a parent of a child with autism. In this conversation, I saw a parent struggle with misconceptions of what autism “therapy” is intended to do for a child with autism. The most common misconception of what autism “therapy” is intended to do for a child with autism is that “therapy” is intended to help the child with autism to better interact with neurotypical individuals in order to make their life easier. What most parents of children with autism actually want for their child is for their child to develop skills that will allow the child with autism to independently interact with the world at large even when the world is not designed to meet the individual needs of the child with autism. I shared an example of a child with autism who is in “therapy” and has been for several months, and after several months of “therapy” this child is able to move through the morning routine with less distress than he had been before.

So what does “autism therapy” actually cover?

As a term, “autism therapy” can be somewhat of a misnomer. The term tends to evoke images of adults with autism trying to change in some fundamental way. However, there are many different approaches of autism “therapy” that aim to support children with autism as they develop skills that will allow them to better navigate through the world around them. The approaches are often very different and often have different goals in mind. Some approaches focus on communication, some on behavior, and some on how a child’s autism affects their ability to process and deal with the input from their senses.

Here is a list of some of the different types of Autism Therapy approaches and what they are designed to help a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder to achieve:

• Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA): One of the most researched approaches. ABA works by breaking skills into smaller, learnable steps and reinforcing progress consistently. It’s highly individualized and can target everything from communication to self-care to social skills.
• Speech-language therapy: Covers far more than just talking. Therapists also work on understanding language, using alternative communication tools, and navigating the back-and-forth rhythm of conversation.
• Occupational therapy (OT): Focused on the practical stuff, dressing, eating, handwriting, sensory processing. OT helps children build independence in the tasks that fill up a typical day.
• Social skills training: Often group-based, this helps children practice reading social cues, taking turns in conversation, and building peer relationships in a structured, lower-stakes environment.

Another key point that has to be made is even individual therapies can be worked on in isolation. However, it is even more powerful when all of a child’s therapists are working together as a team and the child’s therapists and family are working together as a team outside of sessions. So for example, a child who is practicing communication during speech sessions can apply that communication in ABA sessions as well as at home.

A note on ABA specifically, because this one gets complicated.

I want to note that when I talk about ABA I’m talking about an approach that was originally developed to help children with autism behave in a more typical fashion (i.e. typical for neurotypical children). ABA as it was originally developed was a very rigid approach, that focused on increasing compliance, and that often caused a great deal of pain and suffering for the children with autism and their families. As a result, many people with autism and their families have a very negative view of ABA, and many autistic adults speak out against ABA as well. This is well deserved, as ABA as originally developed was a very flawed approach.

My intention is to contrast what ABA used to be with what it is today, for the parent of a preschooler with autism seeking “help” for their child, the term ABA can be loaded and evoke strong feelings, mostly negative. For many years, the methods that had been developed for teaching children with autism were taught in a very rigid fashion and the child was expected to perform in a neurotypical fashion in order to receive a reaction from their therapist. This was a time when children were forced to engage in behaviors that caused them great distress in order to receive a variety of rewards. This is not to say that all ABA was practiced in this way, but that is how ABA was practiced in many settings was perceived by many to be this way. The autism community has for the most part been negative towards ABA and with good reason. As time has gone on, however, there has been a sea change in the way that ABA is practiced today and for the better. Many practitioners are now seeking out more individualized and relationship- based approaches to helping children with autism reach their full potential.

If you are looking for providers in the Southeast doing this type of work, I would recommend checking out the work that autism therapy in Raleigh does through their many locations around the Raleigh-Durham area.

I wanted to revisit a point I made a little while ago about using different methods to reach similar goals. In ABA, there are many ways to approach a single goal, and the most effective way is to use several different strategies in conjunction with each other and with the goals of other methods such as speech and OT.

Making it Real: How Therapy Helps with Everyday Skills (beyond clinical goals)

A child could be gaining clinical goals in a treatment setting but not be able to apply those skills in everyday life. These skills are learned in a variety of situations and in a variety of settings and would allow a child to cope with the unexpected and with change in a variety of situations. A child who has learned how to use these skills in a variety of settings and situations would be able to ask for help when needed in a variety of settings and situations. He or she would also be able to regulate his or her sensory processing needs in a variety of situations and in a variety of settings.

These are not abstract goals for us to work toward; these are goals that can be worked toward on a Tuesday. And we can work toward them.

This table does not accurately portray the many interrelationships of challenges that affect individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders and their families. For example, many individuals with Autism are extremely sensitive to sensory input which can be within the realm of Occupational Therapy, but can also have a huge impact on an individual’s ability to successfully complete tasks in a variety of settings and to participate in a variety of activities and communicate effectively with others. These are just a few examples of the wide variety of challenges that individuals with Autism and their families face on a daily basis. The best teams work as a team and communicate with each other on a regular basis in order to ensure that the entire team is supporting the child and the family in the most effective manner.

Getting Started with Therapy

1. Get a formal evaluation first. Therapy is most effective when it’s grounded in an accurate picture of your child’s specific strengths and needs—not a generic profile of “autism.”
2. Ask providers how they measure progress and how they involve families. You should be an active participant in this process, not a spectator in the waiting room.
3. Be patient with the timeline. Real skill-building is slow, unglamorous work. That’s not a failure. That’s how it goes.

No single program is right for every child. I get frustrated when families read of “the best” program for children with autism. No single program is right for every child. How programs are implemented is just as important as the program itself. A program can be excellent and not meet the needs of a particular child and family. Finding the right combination of approaches and working with a dedicated, compassionate team of professionals who are committed to supporting the child and family as a whole can make a huge difference. When a child has the right support, he or she can navigate the daily challenges of life. The entire family can grow and thrive.