Childhood autism is a holistic developmental disorder, called childhood autism not because it only affects children and passes in adulthood, but because the first symptoms occur before the age of three, up to four times more often in boys than in girls.
So-called “normal” people (the inverted commas should be much larger, and a footnote would also be useful, that they are called so most readily by themselves) take it for granted that everyone reasons as they do. If it is otherwise, the most normal thing in the world is abnormal. Taking a statistical approach to the perception of reality, however, it can be assumed that most of them watch a film and read it roughly in the way the director has planned, have a conversation that contains a certain amount of understatement, jokes and suggestions, and realise that when someone says: “No, nothing happened”, he may mean the exact opposite. People with autism have serious problems with such activities.
Some sources report that the number of autistic children is increasing dramatically and that autism is almost a modern epidemic – until now it was thought to affect a few children per 10,000 births, now, for example, in the United States one in 160 children is diagnosed with autism. Alicja Rutkowska-Suchorska, MD, PhD, a specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry, explains that it is not the cases of autism that are more numerous, but the diagnostic requirements are different, as modern research includes the proportion of children meeting the criteria for so-called holistic developmental disorders, which include not only autism, but also Asperger’s syndrome and a number of other, rarer syndromes. He adds, however, that there is indeed a growing awareness among parents and autistic children are more likely than in the past to reach a doctor and be correctly diagnosed and treated.
What is autism?
The name ‘holistic disorder’ is no accident. Autism strikes at the ability to communicate, verbal and non-verbal, at the ability and need to establish interpersonal relationships and significantly limits the range of interests. In practice, it looks as if autistic children are kind of closed in their own world, they do not feel the need to contact other people, even their parents, sometimes, for example, they do not allow themselves to be hugged, they are not interested in the world they live in, toys, books, television, they have no need to speak, to find out, to acquire knowledge. They live among self-initiated schematic behaviours, incomprehensible to those around them. However, this is not their conscious decision or evidence of extreme mental limitation.
Infinite duplication
People with autism perceive reality in their own way, for which the functioning of the brain is partly responsible. Abnormalities in its functioning mean that something that is unproblematic for us turns out to be unpleasant or unreadable for them, so they avoid it. They may have senses that are too acute or, on the contrary, not sensitive enough. Just this one piece of information is enough to understand the strange behaviour of autistics: staring at light or hiding from it, rubbing their body with their fingers, making objects move in a particular way. Some people are very struck by the light, so they run away from it, others are too weakly affected by it, so they seek it out. Some people do not feel average intensity of touch, so they need to stimulate themselves more, while for others a nice hug is, by definition, both incomprehensible, because they have difficulty interpreting the gestures, and painful, because their skin is hypersensitive. Still others like to put objects into a spinning motion because it is comfortable for them to follow it, so they focus on the spinning and thus create a situation in which they feel comfortable. So-called stereotypical behaviour, such as arranging objects in equal rows, always in the same order, also serves this purpose. Autistic people are united by their attachment to rituals, their desire to keep their surroundings as constant and unchanging as possible. Living in ‘Groundhog Day’ they would be delighted. Sometimes they react hysterically or aggressively to even the slightest change, even a new tablecloth, because it shatters their safe and predictable world order. Immutability helps to order and endure stimuli that, due to their intensity, can be tiresome. It allows us to adapt to our own needs a reality whose rules are incomprehensible. It’s a bit like landing one day on a strange planet, where everything is different from Earth: different colours, different light, different sounds, different material structures, different language, and on top of that, the natives have a facial expression that is completely illegible to us. The desire to create even a microscopic substitute for home, a world that is understandable and familiar, would be completely natural for us, the desire for isolation probably too. And would our ability to perceive reality be worse as a result? No. Exactly. Just different.
With or without a word
The first worrying sign given by a child is a disturbance in communication, even if it is only babbling. If the babbling does not appear until the child is 16 months old or disappears at some point, it must not be ignored.
There are autistics who never begin to speak and those who use sign or picture language. In other cases, children have an enormous vocabulary and yet it is impossible or very difficult to communicate with them. This is because most of them do not use speech to communicate, to make contact, to convey their thoughts or feelings and do not try to get this information from others. The context of speech, emotional colouring, subtext, irony, facial expressions and gestures are not available to them. Therefore, the words spoken to them are like an unopened letter that goes back to the sender – autistics lack the tools with which to read the signals that are obvious to us. They take everything literally; they cannot lie, manipulate or make things up. They are characterised by the phenomenon of echolalia, i.e. the automatic repetition of words spoken by someone or heard on television or the radio. Sometimes autistics deliver long monologues, recite, for example, a detailed plan of the city, with all the names of streets, crossroads and roundabouts, or meticulously present the construction of some machine. Vocally, the speech also deviates from the generally accepted norm; utterances can be dispassionate and monotonous, too fast or slow, or spoken in an unnaturally high tone. All of this is due to the fact that the words are not directed to someone for a purpose, they are not intended to have an effect, they are not taken into account as a factor that has power, hiding, for example, in the melody or volume of the voice. Of course, there is the phenomenon of high-functioning autism, in which speech serves an actual communication purpose.
However, it is by no means the case that since people with autism do not speak, they do not think, or since they are not interested in what the other person feels, they themselves do not feel! Again, we come up against the notion of the ‘norm’. It seems to us that emotions should be read in a certain way and equally predictably expressed. The lack of evident communication of emotions disqualifies the ability to feel them from the outset, and this is a huge error in reasoning!
Autism undergoes therapy, primarily behavioural. Kids practice with their caregivers behaviours that are appropriate to situations they may encounter in everyday life. They are made comfortable enough to make the transition from their inner world to the reality around them smooth and painless. Work is done to shift their attention from sometimes hours-long ritualistic behaviour, such as spinning a ball, to activities that require interaction.
It is worth finding out what autism is all about and why autistics behave the way they do. Also, on a general level, for each of us, as an individual coexisting with six billion other individuals, it will be useful to know that people are not the same, do not think and feel in the same way, do not react in the same way and do not always understand the reactions of others. Sometimes you need to stop pulling someone into your world and instead look into their own unique globe.
Source
- https://www.medonet.pl/magazyny/autyzm,autyzm-dzieciecy–czyli-dlaczego-wiadomosc-wraca-do-nadawcy,artykul,1622741.html