Living with AUTISM
Autism. Little understood by many because most people with the condition do not look disabled. Very often parents of a child with autism are judged either as having ‘naughty kids’ or as ‘bad parents’. Sue Thompson paints a picture of what her family face day-in day-out.
T
he National Autistic Society defines Autism as ‘A lifelong developmental disability that affects how a person
communicates with, and relates to, other people’.
It also affects how they make sense of the world around them and they may experience over or under-sensitivity to sounds, touch, tastes, smells, light or colours. Those with autism share three common areas of difficulty: difficulty with social communication, difficulty with interaction and difficulty with social imagination.
Autism is a spectrum condition, and some people are able to live fairly independent lives while others may have accompanying learning disabilities and need a lifetime of specialist support.
My son is now twelve and as well as autism has the addition of severe learning
difficulties and will now need a lifetime of specialist support. I still have people asking me, “Will he get better?” But my son will never get better, there is no cure, there is no little miracle that’s going to make him normal, this disability is with him and with us for life.
I accepted our path many years ago. AlI I want to do now is help others and maybe bring a little bit of understanding about what we live through every day of the year. It is hard to create awareness of Autism and until someone lives with it day in day out it is very difficult to understand.
Life was okay to start with, we were sailing along, my hubby had just got back from a tour of Afghanistan but then a note came through the letterbox informing us that most of the RAF personnel would be gone from our current unit within months.
We took this notification in our stride and started to prepare our son (step-son to my hubby but irrelevant!) but this is when the issues began and I found myself continually repeating myself to every individual in an official capacity that we came into contact with. I tried to explain over and over how my son would find this difficult and very challenging to cope with but there was just no knowledge or understanding or any seeming willingness to try to understand.
Autism needs structure, routine, and in my son’s case, visual diaries each and every day of the week. The settled life we had was about to be turned upside down and no one could understand why my son was finding the transition so difficult. We had so many hurdles to cross trying to communicate with the relevant people who just did not have any idea of what we were saying and I found it equally difficult to penetrate ‘the system’. Anyone and everything is done internally and
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Envoy Autumn 2011
www.raf-ff.org.uk
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