Health

Autism is a Gift More Than a Disability

Your mindset about autism must change. Autism is a Gift More Than a Disability. Once considered an extremely rare condition, the diagnosis of autism has spiralled over the last decades.

Today, it is believed that about one in every hundred children is autistic.

Autism is a neural disorder characterized by weakened social communication and interaction levels, and repetitive, restricted behaviour.

Basically, autism impacts the way the brain processes information.

Autism is a unique condition that is yet to be fully understood.

Indeed, every child on the autism spectrum is different, unique in how they are affected by the condition.

Rather than a fixed condition, autism is considered a spectrum with every individual being on completely different levels of this spectrum.

Autism is challenging…

Autism has for long been considered a disability, and there are a ton of reasons supporting this stand.

Most autistic individuals are socially awkward, dealing with people and reacting to their environments in radically different ways from “normal” persons.

They may find it hard to pay attention during a conversation, struggle with sudden changes in their environment, get nervous over the littlest of things, and struggle with expressing themselves.

For many, the result is social stigma and bullying, even as we further try to understand them.

But autism is a gift

As challenging as it may be, it is becoming increasingly clear that autism is for all intents and purposes a gift.

As increasingly more and more persons are being diagnosed with the condition, some have postulated that it has always been a regular part of life.

Silberman, a psychiatrist, notes that “Autism has been part of the human condition for millennia. It’s just that we haven’t recognized it.”

Asperger’s syndrome, one of three autism different autistic personalities, is also known as “high-functioning” autism.

This form of autism, which is present in most autistic patients to varying degrees, leaves individuals with an IQ that is sometimes above normal. Indeed, some of the world’s most intelligent inventors have been noted to have a touch of Asperger’s, including Bill Gates – who is noted to be socially awkward, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Daniel Tammet, an autistic from birth, set the European record for reciting Pi from memory, going on for over five hours, and reciting up to 22,514 decimal places.

At 25, he had sold over a million copies of his two memoirs and other books on neuroscience and maths. Another autistic patient, Luke Jackson, who is particularly good on the computer, notes “One unusual thing about me is that I have what some people would call a disability – but I call a gift – Asperger’s Syndrome.”

Create the awareness about autism, stop the discrimination, sho love, learn to understand it, help manage and deal with the stigmatization. Let us all draw the positive and benefits from it. Autism is a Gift More Than a Disability. If you want to know more about Autism, start reading now.

By Wisdom Eli Kojo Hammond