Your Health Care

Autism - New Danger?

The trend for more kids to have autism makes the society worry if this is a new threat to the health of the young nation coming with it.

Surely autism is not something that was noticed just a while ago, many parents are trying to focus public’s attention on this problem and demand from the scientific society to find explanations and solutions to this problem. As any big problem autism created many trends in explaining the problem and its reasons.

For example, ultra sound diagnosis at early stages of pregnancy are rumored to create a possible effect of autism on the kids. Gender “curse” as out of 5 kids diagnozed autism statistically there are 4 boys and 1 girl, and so on and so forth. Add to this cases when some kids have been thought to be autistic, whereas in reality they just head the hearing problems and could not interact socially.

These informational puzzles create a real mess in the heads of people instead of showing them the way out.

To clear the picture and shift away the scary stigma from autism. Let’s have a look at 3 major theories that try to explain autism.

Theory of Mind

Within the framework of this theory every human being is capable of understanding what thoughts or ideas trigger people to do some actions. This gives us a pocibility to “foresee” these actions and act adequately. For example, you are at the cross roads waiting for the greet traffic light, you know that a person next to you is standing and also waiting for the same light to cross the street. Hence, you can “foresee” that when the light is green, he or she will start crossing the street. No big magic. But having that in mind you would not put let’s say a suitcase right in front of this person, because you know that when the light gets green he/she will go forward and will need to step over it.

Still, let’s be frank - we can only suppose that we know what is inside the mind of another person, based on our experience and logics. In reality the mind of another person is a black box for us.

Autistic people cannot make predictions of what another person will do in standard situations. This makes them not well adopted to many routine situations in life. But still, maybe they are not that incorrect being unable to foresee the actions of other people?

Executive Function

Whenever we do something routine, we are a little above the thing. We see our actions as the line of things to do that will give us some results. Autistic children tend to get dissolved in the process - they just do and do and do and this doing become everything for them. Perhaps, it is possible to say that they do just for doing instead of trying to find sense why they are doing so.

That is why a typical picture of a kid with autism is a kid that “got stuck” on the same action - line of toys, one and the same symbol on the paper, etc.

But then let’s put up a question to ourselves. Are we really better because we do something for a purpose? No. We are just different. Which makes the issue of standards pretty lame with autism.

Central Coherence

We see ourself as part of the bigger picture: I go to the office because I need to do a job because I need money because I need to have food, clothes and place to live, because, because, because. Once again, we can say that people who do not have autism can for a split of a second get above the situation like they show in the movies of zooming out picture and end up with the whole globe seen from the satellite.

Kids with autism do not do like this. They are living exactly in this very moment. Yes type of living causes them many problems in our society where we expect others to understand what is going on.

Summary.

The idea behind this post was simple. Try to show how different theories understand autism and show that autism is an issue of other standards of social behavior - different from our. But as you can see, even logically we can make a conslusion - autism is not a stigma, they are not stupid of absent minded. They are just different in some issues.

Maybe this is the key to the problem?

= = = = = = = = = = =

For more information about autism please consult autism informational portal or grab this autism RSS feed.

= = = = = = = = = = =