Overview and learning content

The challenge

As a healthcare professional, you will be seeing autistic people in your service, whether they have a diagnosis of autism or not. Many of these individuals struggle to get the right health information, healthcare, and support. This can often be made worse by a lack of skills and knowledge about how to help them. In turn, this can lead to health inequalities and poorer health outcomes (including early death) for autistic people.

The historical view

1940s

Autism as a condition was first described in the early 1940s by Leo Kanner in the US, and Hans Asperger in Austria.

They both described children who struggled to interact with others, needed to follow rules and routines, and showed repetitive behaviour.

Autism was seen as being extremely rare and all studies were conducted on children.

Autism gradually became more well known, but unfortunately it was blamed on unfeeling parents. As a result, many autistic people were confined to institutions in terrible conditions.

1970s

In the 70s, understanding of autism began to change when the diagnostic criteria were expanded due to the work of researchers like Lorna Wing, describing the symptoms of autism as a 'triad of impairments' and recognising autism as a spectrum condition.

More people were able to get an autism diagnosis, but the voices of autistic people were still not heard until very recently.

2000s

As late as the 2000s, researchers were still writing about autistic people in an extremely de-humanising way, some going so far as to claim autism is incompatible with any sense of self.

The current view

Things have started to change.

Autistic people are now speaking up about their own experience of their condition and challenging preconceptions.

While previous autism researchers concentrated on the social aspects of autism as these were easier for them to observe, now aspects like sensory differences, movement differences and problems with focus are beginning to get attention.

It is becoming clear that difficulties in communication and understanding between autistic and non-autistic people are actually a two-way challenge.

There has been a shift from attempting to change people with autism towards trying to change their environments, which is generally more effective.

Experiencing autism

Understanding autism is difficult

Autism awareness is simple - it's knowing that autism exists.

Understanding autism is more difficult as it involves knowledge and putting that knowledge into practice.

The world does not make sense

Imagine waking up and people all around you behaving in a way that makes no sense to you, speaking in words and phrases that you don't understand, and bombarding you with information but giving you no time to think about it.

Now you are beginning to understand the challenges that people with autism face every day.

This training is designed to help you help people with autism navigate a world that is not designed for them.

There are several things that people often assume when they think about autism and autistic people can you identify what is myth or reality?

Autism is a kind of learning disability