April is Autism Awareness Month
By Christie (Mitchell) Atkins - FF/S
April is Autism Awareness Month. My keen interest in autism is two-fold. Over the last 25 years as an educator, I have observed a dramatic increase in the number of students receiving a diagnosis on the autism spectrum. Many reputable autism and general health organizations estimate that from 1:110 to 1:91 children currently are being diagnosed on the spectrum. The disorder is more prevalent in males than females. More than four times as many males as females suffer from autism.
One of those males is my 19-year-old son, which is the other reason why I am passionate about autism education. As the mother of a young adult with autism, it is important to me to try to inform people about the disease and to do whatever I can to help improve the quality of life for those families in our autism community.
As more and more children are being diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), everyone will know a family directly impacted by the illness, and many who never expect it will have a son, daughter, sister, brother, or cousin with autism. Autism affects more than just the person afflicted with the disease. When one member of a family has autism, managing the autism immediately and completely becomes the focus of the family’s life. In this blog, I hope I can examine a few of the basic concepts regarding autism and clear up some misconceptions.
First, autism is a neurological condition. Some people with autism also suffer from mental retardation. Many do not. The Georgia autism community experienced great progress a few years ago when our state legislature redefined autism as a medical condition rather than a mental health condition for insurance purposes. A person may receive a diagnosis of an ASD if he or she has certain deficiencies in communication, behaviors, and social skills. Based upon one’s evaluated deficits, a child with an ASD will probably receive a more specific diagnosis under the autism umbrella, such as Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, Asperger’s Syndrome, Rhett’s Syndrome, Classic Autism, or “Pervasive Developmental Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified” (PDD-NOS).
Individuals with autism usually have co-morbid (simultaneous) conditions in the gastrointestinal and immunological systems of the body. Once these medical conditions are treated, autism symptoms have been known to decrease. Some have said that a more appropriate name for the condition is “autisms” because, like the many cancers that can attack our bodies, the many “autisms” can be triggered by a variety of environmental factors. Autism manifests itself differently in each victim. Most likely, a genetic predisposition is in place that “loads the gun” for most of our children, but any of a number of insults to the body can pull the trigger.
One of the most agonizing issues that many autistic children have to cope with is Sensory Integration Dysfunction. The brain inhibited by autism has little to no ability to triage or to regulate input from the five senses. Students with autism may be taking in the sound of the classroom lights buzzing, the voice of the teacher, the audio from a video being shown down the corridor, and the roar of an airplane overhead with the same intensity. Whereas a ceiling fan might bring great comfort to most students returning to a classroom from recess, the breeze created by the fan might cause excruciating pain to the child on the spectrum. A certain color may be comforting and reassuring to one child, while the same color causes tremendous eye discomfort to another. Many individuals with autism are also mono-channeled. That is, they cannot input information from more than one sense at a time. A teacher shouldn’t be offended if her ASD student cannot look her in the eye and listen to her direction at the same time.
Extreme high anxiety is another condition which complicates getting through what to most of us think of as a typical day. Most neurotypical people have pet peeves and idiosyncrasies that, when compounded, can cause a spike in the level of frustration. This state of anxiety is the norm more than the exception for many ASD kids. The ability to decompress in a reasonable amount of time is impaired. A child might melt down due to what appears a minor glitch in the day, when in reality, to the child that minor glitch was the last straw.
If you know a family with a child on the autism spectrum, or if you have a student with ASD in your classroom, please take advantage of the information being made available especially this month to gain a better understanding of those who lived in the unique world of autism.
