I remember my psychology professor a few years back talking about the stigma attached to people with mental health conditions.  We stigmatize them and label them.  However, we do not do the same for a person with a physical health condition.  As a result, the person with cancer is “a person who suffers from cancer”, but the person with schizophrenia is “a schizophrenic”.  I think the same applies for people with Autism.

I have heard people refer to individuals with autism as “autistic” or “an autistic”.  Recently, I was reading an American magazine devoted to disabilities which also referred to people with autism as “autistics”.  When referring to an individual with autism, the politically correct terminology, at least here in Canada, is “a person with autism”.  Placing a label like “autistic” does such an injustice to that person as a human being.  It makes the suggestion that their entire entity as a human being is “autistic”.  However, this is not the case at all.  Individuals with autism have behaviours and/or other challenges that are affected by the disorder.  For some individuals, their speech or social skills are affected, so they have to work at these skills a bit harder than the average person.  It does not mean that everything they do and think is “autistic”!

In fact, it is hard to even define the term “autistic” since every individual with autism is different and has different challenges.  One of the key phrases often taught in workshops about autism is “if you’ve seen one person with autism, then you’ve seen ONE person with autism”, meaning, each person with autism is so different that it’s hard to generalize.  So, if you’ve seen one person with autism, it doesn’t mean that you know what another person with autism is like. 

People with autism have the unfortunate responsibility of educating others about their disorder, and advocating for themselves.  For children, it’s often their parents or guardians who have these duties.  Although many people have heard of autism, most of them don’t know much about the disorder.  Fortunately, due to media attention, government efforts about awareness, and parent groups, more and more people are learning about the disorder.  There is still more work to be done, and hats off to those organizations, agencies, health professionals, and parents, in particular, who have made it their mission in life to raise awareness about autism.

Sophie Dedman

Challenging Minds Director