Autism

Martin is six years old. He does not speak. When his mother serves him the pudding with the blue spoon, he screams for half an hour at a time. If she puts the red spoon next to the dessert, he eagerly eats it all. Martin has no friends. Other children scare him because they are loud and react unpredictably for him. Instead, he spends hours playing with his Lego figures. If someone disturbs him, his world collapses again and he screams and lashes out. Martin is autistic.

It is impossible to describe "THE autistic". Martin's story is one possible version of autism. Maybe you know the biographical movie "You don't walk alone". Here is described the life of autistic Mary Temple Grandin, who has a special sense of cattle. Today, despite her autism, she is a lecturer in animal science and runs her own business. Or do you know the series "Big Bang Theory". Here Sheldon Cooper is supposed to mime an autistic person. However, with his giftedness in physics, he is an exception among autistic people. His inability to understand social rules, on the other hand, is typical.

People come into the world as autistic. The disorder has clear genetic components, although the exact causes are still being researched. Autistic children usually become conspicuous in their first three years of life. Some of them are capable of independence in adulthood. However, many need care throughout their lives. Due to the wide range of severity of the disorder, it is also referred to as the "autistic spectrum". Common to all affected persons is that they prefer constant structures and processes. Changes are undesirable or even threatening.

In psychology, the following three symptom areas are distinguished in autism:

Autistic people have great problems in dealing with other people. They understand their counterpart poorly, because they can not interpret facial expressions and gestures. For them, it is the same whether someone is crying or laughing. Only with a lot of practice and after long therapy can some of them learn to "read" the emotional world of their fellow human beings.

Accordingly, autistic people find it difficult to build relationships. They usually prefer to be alone. It is not possible for them to communicate their own feelings or interests. Breaking through this isolation is one of the greatest difficulties for the caregivers of autistic people.

Typical for autistic children is that they learn to speak late and then rather poorly. Half of all those affected never learn to speak. Then other ways of communication have to be exhausted. When autistic people learn to speak, they often appear stiff in conversation. Their words as well as their non-verbal signals do not match what their counterpart expects from them. Many autistic people learn to speak only in phrases or use the same expression in a variety of contexts. It can happen, for example, that an autistic person always says "wants ice cream" when he wants to agree.

Autistic people live in an order of their own. They are meticulous about going through certain rituals over and over again. This gives them security in a seemingly chaotic world. As a result, they cling to habits almost in a panic, even if they are completely inappropriate, elaborate, or disruptive. For example, they always have to climb a staircase in the same pattern. Structures and details are important to autistic people. They can spend hours on an object, parts or functions of it, for example opening and closing screw caps. One reason for such behavior is rapid overload. Autistic people's perception is highly sensitive. They pick up even completely irrelevant information. For example, when you enter the living room, they notice that the sofa cushion is 10 cm further to the right than usual.

As mentioned above, there is no one prototype of autistic person. The communication skills of those affected can vary from barely present to almost unremarkable. On an intellectual level, most autistic individuals are considered mentally retarded. However, it is the case that in autistic individuals, certain areas of intelligence are better developed than others. Their good performance in areas such as mathematics or memory distinguishes them quite significantly from people with an intellectual disability. Some autistic people even have remarkable insular talents.

Asperger's syndrome is also a disorder from the autistic spectrum. However, it is typical for those affected that their language is developed normally. They also score in the normal range on intelligence tests. Nevertheless, they are disturbed in their ability to build relationships and show stereotypical behaviors.

Autistic people come in all age groups. If you look at the numbers, there seems to be more and more autistic people overall over the last decades. In the 1960s, for example, only 2 to 5 out of 10,000 people were diagnosed. Today, it applies to 116 out of 10,000 people. That is 1.16%. Paradoxically, the increasing number of cases is not due to a more frequent occurrence of the disorder. Rather, the diagnosis is more common today than it was a few decades ago. On the one hand, this is due to better education about the disorder. On the other hand, the diagnostic criteria have changed to include more people today. Incidentally, men are four times as likely to be affected by autism as women.

Nowadays, the diagnosis of "autism" is usually made before the third birthday. Then therapy should also be started immediately. Autism is not curable, but early support measures in particular help the affected person in his development. The success of therapy depends, of course, on the severity of the disorder. After all, 5 to 17% of autistic people manage to cope with their lives in adulthood largely on their own.

In dealing with autistic people, working with images, role models and rewards has proven to be extremely effective. However, the parents of autistic children must integrate the therapeutic measures into the child's everyday life. They thus bear a great responsibility as well as burden.

This makes it all the more important to educate the public about the idiosyncrasies of autistic people. Nothing is worse for parents than a screaming fit of their autistic child in public, while the bystanders go on about what went wrong with the upbringing. Because of the dismissive to sometimes hostile behavior of ignorant people, some families no longer dare to go outside with their child at all. This is a fruitful state of affairs that can be avoided through education such as that provided in the form of this article.

Autistic people are extraordinary people. Their idiosyncrasies are as varied as they are surprising. Some show only behavioral abnormalities and problems in social situations. Others cannot speak, completely shut themselves off from the outside world, and never become independent throughout their lives. Today's diagnostic criteria for profound developmental disorder apply to about 1 in 100 people. Treatment for autism is primarily about practicing skills to cope with everyday life. Families with autistic children suffer particularly from stigmatization by their environment.