Author: Autism Today News.

© freshidea – stock.adobe.comThe growing incidence rate of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been well documented, particularly among children. With this increase, primary care physicians (PCPs), many of whom may not yet have treated a patient with ASD, must now prepare for an influx of adults with ASD transitioning from pediatric care into primary care practices. As these individuals age, the role of PCPs becomes increasingly important.However, many PCPs are challenged to meet the nuanced needs of adults with ASD due to gaps in resources, knowledge and access to up-to-date research. It’s essential to recognize that while groundbreaking research on…

Partial representation might be seen as far back as the birth of the neurodiversity movement. In 1993, at the International Conference on Autism in Toronto, Canada, an autistic person named Jim Sinclair took the stage to deliver a presentation. Sinclair’s speech, titled, “Don’t mourn for us,” is often credited with kicking off today’s self-advocacy movement. The speech began with the statement that “parents often report that learning their child is autistic was the most traumatic thing that ever happened to them,” and Sinclair went on to describe the “grief” parents felt as the loss of “the normal child” they hoped…

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – Central Kentucky came together today to walk for a cause.Every year, the autism community and its supporters come together to raise money for the Autism Society of the Bluegrass. This year, Team Brian came in first place. They raised $3,845 dollars.Brian Kiser has been coming to the walk since he was five years old. He’s now 17. For him, autism awareness is about breaking stigmas for neurodivergent people.“It’s not just autism but it also deals with a wide array of mental handicaps.” Kiser says.“But, we come together to tell the world that we should be focusing…

In short: Twelve-year-old Hussein Al Mansoory was last seen running from Auburn Memorial Park on Saturday morning.Police are concerned as Hussein lives with Down syndrome and autism and is non-verbal.Hussein’s family is “very distraught” at his disappearance, police say.NSW Police have concerns for a 12-year-old autistic boy living with Down syndrome who went missing in Sydney’s south-west on Saturday morning.Hussein Al Mansoory, who is also non-verbal, was last seen running from Auburn Memorial Park towards the intersection of Station Road and Rawson Street, Auburn, about 10:30am on Saturday. Police were alerted when he was unable to be found and officers from Auburn Police Area…

Following the initial success of Autism Inclusion Teachers (AITs) in public primary schools, the Malinauskas Labor Government will today introduce a new initiative to build autism inclusion in secondary schools. The pilot will trial three models of support particularly focused on supporting autistic students as they transition to high school. Outcomes from the trial will help shape the Department for Education’s future autism inclusion initiatives.It is estimated more than 2250 autistic students will transition from public primary schools to public secondary schools over the next three years.The transition to secondary school can present additional barriers for autistic students as they…

Listen to this story: Your browser doesn’t support the audio element Back 15 seconds Forward 15 seconds 0:00  /  Black people with autism have historically been underrepresented in research, a problem compounded by the fact that there are relatively few Black scientists setting research priorities for the field. Spectrum spoke with three Black scientists about why they got into autism research, what keeps them excited about their work and how the field could become more diverse going forward. Some common themes emerged, including the need to train more scientists from historically underrepresented groups, and to seek input from those communities…

How has the dialogue around research and treatment with respect to autism changed in recent years? I think the way that autism is defined, understood, approached and supported – or not supported – has been changing quite rapidly through the neurodiversity movement.  We’re still in a kind of acceleration phase – the neurodiversity movement  is a really big paradigm shift from the way that we traditionally understood autism in the past. The Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ Fifth Edition (DSM-5), published as a tool for taxonomy and diagnosis by the American Psychiatry Association, still grounds autism in a deficit-focused…

Within general education schools, the professional development of teachers has also improved, allowing them to better identify and employ teaching strategies for children with special needs, said industry players. Since 2005, teachers undergoing training have been provided with a basic understanding of supporting special needs students. A core group of teachers are also put through a specialised programme – known as the Teachers trained in Special Needs programme –  to support students with special needs. Mr Calvin Chew, who spent more than a decade at St Andrew’s Autism School as an educator, said that the move in 2019 to make…

I mean, how was I supposed to know, when we as a society don’t really talk about autism? And when we do, it’s generally stories of tragedy and stigma, or judging the validity of someone’s autism because they don’t look or behave a particular way. Even most information online about autism is shrouded in shame, with negative language and the belief that we need to be changed.Autism isn’t a bad thing: it’s a beautiful thing. And my diagnosis after regularly seeing a psychologist has changed my life because, finally, I understand. It feels like everything makes sense, especially when I…

Photo credit: Alibaba Group | Published on July 18, 2024 Alibaba Group recently introduced an artificial intelligence-powered tool to create picture books for autistic children, building a pathway for them to express their feelings and impressions of the world through art. Since launching online in June, more than 50,000 people have used the feature, which generates audio-enhanced artbooks from a prompt fed into Alibaba’s Qwen family of large language models (LLMs). The digital tool is an educational resource for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) – a developmental disorder affecting around one in 100 children globally, according to the World…