Vortrag

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The image in society of autism is very inaccurate and also one-sided. Basically, there are two imaginations, one of them based on the film “Rainman”. People who can hardly communicate and speak, can’t find their way in everyday life but can calculate better than every calculator or can see at the first side how many matches are spread out on the table.

The second imagination of autism is the extreme form of autism. People can hardly express themselves, have stereotypical movements like upper body rocking and they are nearly a nursing case.

Both descriptions can be real, but they are rare.

For most of the autistic people these two descriptions don’t hold true, not to that extent and not in this form. Sure, there are autistic people who can’t speak, sure every autistic person has problems with communication and sure there are autistic people who have areas of interests and skills which are out of the ordinary. However, “special talents” as Rainman shows they are a rarity, whereas you can see special interests more often. The diversity of interests of many autistic people is much smaller than normal but many of the autistic people deal with their topics of interests more intensely than other people would do it. That it`s for the big knowledge that many autistic people have about their topics, often it’s much more than you need for everyday live and much more than other people normally have.

To the second description is to be said that we talk in this case about people who have a very high level of autism. In this case it is forgotten that the intensity of autism can be very different, and it isn’t said that autistic people need help in every situation in their live only because they have autism. There are a lot of autistic people who need only a little bit of special help or can live without any special help. How much help a person with autism need is up to this person and their skills.

For the diagnosis (especially in adulthood) it isn’t that interesting what the person has done, how much help this person needs, or which interests this person has. The question is more than that which abnormalities were there in the development of this person in infancy and later on, the communication behaviour, social behaviour and evidence of changes in perception and diversity of interests.

Autism isn’t only a big spectrum related to the intensity but also to the particularities of autistic people. Autism affects people contradictorily and seem mutually exclusive. For example, physical contact. Autism is connected with problems to be in physical contact, it’s rejected. But there are also Autistic people who want to have physical contact, some of them search for it/ look for it or demand physical contact in their own way. The same you can find also when we talk about hypersensitivity to different perceptions, some have a pain in their eyes when they see flickering lights and other people like it and can’t get enough flickering lights. Some autistic people hardly feel it if someone toughed them and the others feel been touched when the hand is still 10 cm away of his/her own body. These examples show only extremes. These symptoms differ in their gradation and severity depending on the autistic person and the current situation of the autistic person.

Now I tried to explain Autism. Perhaps your question now is what the differences between autistic people and non-autistic people are. I will try to answer this question in another text. But I will say some immediately about that: Most of the particularities of autistic people differ not in their kind but in the form and frequency of needs, skills and disabilities which also influences the thinking of autistic people.