Autism – Awareness and Acceptance
There is a lot of talk this month about autism awareness and acceptance. Some people get very excited about this and some people get quite upset about it; it seems to depend on how old the person with autism is and how severely impaired, if at all, they are. For much of the confusion we have to thank the psychiatrists who keep broadening the definition of autism and their lack of using one of the standard ratings scales to tell people just how autistic they actually are (like on a scale of 1 to 100, not 1 to 3). The result is a widespread misunderstanding of what the word autism means. Nowadays it means very little. I think that bubbles better represent autism than pieces of a puzzle. People with any difference, from mild to severe, tend to live in their own little bubble; but bubbles do have a nasty habit of bursting and then a different reality may present itself. Also, if you live in a bubble you generally only hear people with similar opinions to...