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Autism in sentence

246 examples of Autism in a sentence

Why were cases of autism so hard to find before the 1990s?
For most of the 20th century, clinicians told one story about what autism is and how it was discovered, but that story turned out to be wrong, and the consequences of it are having a devastating impact on global public health.
There was a second, more accurate story of autism which had been lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the clinical literature.
Based on the patients who were brought to his clinic, Kanner speculated that autism is very rare.
That's actually not surprising, because Kanner's criteria for diagnosing autism were incredibly selective.
For example, he discouraged giving the diagnosis to children who had seizures but now we know that epilepsy is very common in autism.
He once bragged that he had turned nine out of 10 kids referred to his office as autistic by other clinicians without giving them an autism diagnosis.
He classified autism as a form of infantile psychosis caused by cold and unaffectionate parents.
As a result, autism became a source of shame and stigma for families, and two generations of autistic children were shipped off to institutions for their own good, becoming invisible to the world at large.
Amazingly, it wasn't until the 1970s that researchers began to test Kanner's theory that autism was rare.
They undertook a study of autism prevalence in the general population.
What they saw made clear that Kanner's model was way too narrow, while the reality of autism was much more colorful and diverse.
The paper offered an alternate story of autism.
Instead of blaming parents for causing autism, Asperger framed it as a lifelong, polygenetic disability that requires compassionate forms of support and accommodations over the course of one's whole life.
Crucially, Asperger viewed autism as a diverse continuum that spans an astonishing range of giftedness and disability.
He believed that autism and autistic traits are common and always have been, seeing aspects of this continuum in familiar archetypes from pop culture like the socially awkward scientist and the absent-minded professor.
He went so far as to say, it seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential.
Lorna and Judith realized that Kanner had been as wrong about autism being rare as he had been about parents causing it.
Over the next several years, they quietly worked with the American Psychiatric Association to broaden the criteria for diagnosis to reflect the diversity of what they called "the autism spectrum."
Before "Rain Man" came out in 1988, only a tiny, ingrown circle of experts knew what autism looked like, but after Dustin Hoffman's unforgettable performance as Raymond Babbitt earned "Rain Man" four Academy Awards, pediatricians, psychologists, teachers and parents all over the world knew what autism looked like.
Coincidentally, at the same time, the first easy-to-use clinical tests for diagnosing autism were introduced.
The combination of "Rain Man," the changes to the criteria, and the introduction of these tests created a network effect, a perfect storm of autism awareness.
Then Andrew Wakefield came along to blame the spike in diagnoses on vaccines, a simple, powerful, and seductively believable story that was as wrong as Kanner's theory that autism was rare.
[Seventy] years later, we're still catching up to Asperger, who believed that the "cure" for the most disabling aspects of autism is to be found in understanding teachers, accommodating employers, supportive communities, and parents who have faith in their children's potential.
I have Asperger's, a high-functioning form of autism that impairs the basic social skills one is expected to display.
And so, many people with autism are being overlooked every day, and they're being taken advantage of.
So my dream for people with autism is to change that, to remove the roadblocks that prevent them from succeeding.
My goal is to shift people's perspective of autism and people with higher-functioning Asperger's because there is a lot they can do.
Unfortunately, speakers can also manipulate people with false information that the audience thinks is true, such as the debunked but still widely believed claim that vaccines cause autism.
In fact, deficits in mind-reading and self-control abilities are associated with serious developmental problems, such as ADHD and autism.
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