The Invisible Disability

As previously mentioned the main difficulty for you as a family including your child is the fact that you cannot see the disability. People struggle to understand what they cannot see and this is when you get the comments such as ‘She is just being naughty’ or ‘You need to be stricter’. I’m sure you have tried every approach under the sun and nothing seems to work. The difficulty is that we are using techniques or interventions that were designed for the neuro-typical brain and not the autistic brain. A phrase I often say to parents is ‘Super nanny does not work with autistic kids’. I have showed you a brain scan in the picture which depicts an autistic person’s brain on the left and a neuro-typical brain on the right. Now I’m no neurologist but you can clearly see a difference in different areas of the brain. Some areas appear thicker and fiberess whilst the other area is a lot less dense. Now each individual with autism will have different variations on their scans but you can clearly see it is a brain difference and not brain damage. I often describe the differences by saying think of neuro-typicals as PC’s and individuals with autism as Apple Mac’s. To the uninitiated they look identical but if you know your tech you know they are slightly different. If you don’t get that reference think of VHS and Betamax or a more extreme example is think of neuro-typicals as dogs and individuals with autism as cats. This is more extreme example but someone actually wrote a book called All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome http://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Cats-Have-Aspergers-Syndrome/dp/1843104814 The difficulty that you have if you have Autism or Asperger Syndrome is that society is built for the PC and the dog i.e. Parenting is designed for the PC and the dog, education is built for the PC and the dog, employment is built for the PC and the dog

Even our criminal justice system is built for the PC and the dog. But what if you are not a PC or a dog and the answer is ‘drum roll please’ you are made to fit into a world that doesn’t get you. Claire Sainsbury in her book Martian in the playground http://www.amazon.co.uk/Martian-Playground-Understanding-Schoolchild-Aspergers/dp/1849200009 explores this very issue. Some of your children may exhibit challenging behaviour which means they are a tiger but essentially they are still a cat, only bigger.