What is autism?
“Autism is a lifelong developmental disability which affects how people communicate and interact with the world. One in 100 people are on the autism spectrum and there are around 700,000 autistic adults and children in the UK.” ( National Autistic Society )
In writing this I hope to increase awareness and use the knowledge I find to make sense of my mother and her struggles to raise my brothers and me. Im sure there are other families which will identify with what I highlight.
I also hope to make professionals think about the way they deliver services and importantly deliver information. Often the lack of awareness and poor decisions made because of this impacts the lives of families that may not know that they have a partner or parent with high functioning autism. Diagnosis is difficult to get now but back in the 1940/50s many were misdiagnosed. When looking at getting a diagnosis the main evidence was a wide spectrum of severity and behaviours/social functioning.
‘Unbalanced social-communicative and restricted repetitive behavior’ subtypes of autism disorder exhibit different neural circuitry.(National library of Medicine. Commun Biol. 2021 May 14;4(1):574. doi: 10.1038/h behaviour on the autism spectrum.)
