💥It's World Autism Awareness Day!💥

Albus_Scope

As well as it being World Autism Acceptance Month, it's also World Autism Awareness Day (WAAD) It's a double whammy of all things autism, hooray!

The UN established World Autism Awareness Day way back in 2007 as a chance for organizations and people to promote the research, diagnosis, treatment, and acceptance of those affected by Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) It's also a chance to celebrate and commemorate the achievements of autistic people. 

What is Autism Spectrum Disorder?

The Oxford English Dictionary describes ASD as;

"a neurodevelopmental condition of variable severity with lifelong effects that can be recognized from early childhood, chiefly characterized by difficulties with social interaction and communication and by restricted or repetitive patterns of thought and behaviour."

So contrary to what many still think, ASD is nothing to do with mental health and is not an illness, learning disability, or disease, though 8/10 autistic people do experience mental health problems, which I'll cover another day. ASD means our brains are built and wired differently and it's thought to be genetic. It can manifest in numerous ways and scientists are only very recently discovering actual changes within the brain that may cause this slightly different way of thinking.

Autism is a spectrum, meaning it's not linear as first thought, so there's no "more autistic" or "less autistic", "good autistic" or "bad autistic", as each autistic person has a unique combination of characteristics broken down into the main categories of communication, behaviours, interests and sensory processing. Autistic people can be very different from each other. The presence (or visibility) of these characteristics can vary hugely between autistic folk. This can also change over time, in different situations or if the person is masking. Again, I'll cover masking another day. It is so important not to make assumptions about an autistic person’s skills, abilities or support needs, as each of us are different.

So that's a basic crash course on what autism is and what it isn't.

If there's anything specific regarding autism, ADHD, or neurodivergence in general you'd like to know more about, please let me know and I'll do my best to get something up this month. 😊

Fun Fact; WAAD is one of only seven official health-specific UN Days!

durhamjaide2001

Lucy_Scope

Thank you @Albus_Scope for this I learnt a lot

Albus_Scope

Glad you found it useful @Lucy_Scope luckily one of my hyperfixations ended up being learning as much as I could about neurodivergence. 😆