• Question: Do you think autism is understood enough by the public and less of a taboo than it was a few years ago?

    Asked by anon-183910 to Owen, Lorna on 6 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Lorna Camus

      Lorna Camus answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      Hi Sarah, great question!
      I think we are slowly increasing awareness of what autism is, however I don’t believe autism is understood enough by the public.
      There are still lots of misconceptions about what autism is or what causes it (we know for example that vaccines do not cause autism, but this is still believed by a lot of people).
      You can see more common myths about autism here: https://www.autistica.org.uk/what-is-autism/autism-myths-and-causes

Comments

  • Photo: Nathan

    Nathan commented on :

    Hi,

    I don’t think it’s understood well by the public – but I expect that gradually change as psychology becomes an ever more popular school subject.

    As you may know, some people make a distinction between between Autism and Asperger’s syndrome, but the DSM (the American list of possible disorders) decided that Asperger’s is just high functioning autism and merged them together. Personally I agree this may be well be the case, but is unhelpful, as people with Aspergers have radically different support needs.

    You may also like to look up the term ‘neural-typical’ (NT), a term used to refer to non-autistic people. For example, relative to autists, they are predisposed to lying.