The major issue with having an autism diagnosis is that there is a belief amongst many that this classification pigeon holes the individual into a little tiny niche where now all is understood. Wrong
The present classification for Autism is so broad that an Autism diagnosis can actually limit your potential because most people can no longer point to any single issue that exemplifies autism.
Autistic Individuals are now either high functioning or low functioning, they are either socially adept or they are not etc. but even this is not realistically the case. Amongst autistic individuals instead of taking a string and saying you are here on the scale you realistically take a cube and point to a single space inside that cube and say this is where you exist on the scale. What it means is that instead of a single point of reference there is many including behavioural, social, verbal, intelligence and even more.
Most people want to pigeon hole autistics similar into a single type and because there are a few high functioning individuals who have achieved good positions they are considered to be the “normal” amongst autistics (the belief being that all autistics therefore can achieve these positions or functionalities) when the reality is these are the exceptions (the rare few who are impact slightly by their autism but still able to hold a solid decent paying position and function fairly close to human normal to the human perception).
The reality is that the vast majority of autistic individuals will be at best able to function with assisted care at best and more likely will live with their parents till the parents die of old age, simply because they could never function properly on their own. What is to become of these autistic individuals when their parent dies? Most people never think that far as to realize that there is absolutely no programs in place to handle these individuals when the time comes. And more then that most people do not realize that they can not simply be plugged into a siblings life and care because the requirements for their care is likely beyond the capabilities of those siblings to adjust to.
Remember most parents of autistic children have made adjustments to their lives since their children were in their infancy. There are programs to involve them in while they are still pre school and the school system has programs till they graduate (depending on your jurisdiction) and many parents make extreme sacrifices in their careers for the rest of their lives to be able to care for their children, and to ask a sibling to take on these sacrifices is extremely difficult because their lives are not adjusted in that direction already.
Add to this that depending on their place in the spectrum there is likely to be some level of behavioural issues including violence and you have a situation where it is likely that when reaching middle age an autistic individual will have little options in places to go and like many others with other mental deficiencies in today’s society they are likely to end up on the street or in trouble with the law simply because there are no options in place and no planning in place to help them adjust to life past the point their parents can care for them.
While i would never trade my son for a “normal” child as i find him an absolute joy at the same time i feel it is incumbent on me to extend my life to the longest possible simply because i fear for what life will hold for him once I have gone.
An autistic child can be at the same time the greatest joy and the greatest worry in any individual parents life.
0 comments:
Post a Comment