World Autism Acceptance Week shines a light on the often forgotten needs of those diagnosed with autism, a lifelong developmental disability.
Approximately 700,000 UK residents are diagnosed with the disorder and yet widespread support is still largely unavailable.
Dr Luke Beardon, 52, is a senior lecturer in autism at Sheffield Hallam University. Part of his job involves running The Autism Centre, which is dedicated to developing and sharing knowledge.
He said: “We’re a long way away as a society from genuinely understanding autism and subsequently making life safe for autistic people.
“I’m really trying to push the idea that if we continue to get the narrative wrong, it makes autistic people feel very unsafe, which is a horrible state to be in on a day to day basis.”
According to Dr Beardon, many sectors of society fail to take autism seriously enough. Several professions do not require additional training to work with autistic individuals, including teaching and psychotherapy.
He said: “There are enough autistic people out there that professionals need to have some level of qualification to engage with these individuals. It worries me that that doesn’t currently happen.”
The degree to which autism affects an individual is unique to them. To receive a formal diagnosis under the ICD-10, which is a manual used to classify medical conditions in the UK, two symptoms must be present: challenges with social interaction, and repetitive and restrictive behaviour.
Separate to this criteria, people can experience extreme anxiety and over- or under-sensitivity to sensory events.
World Autism Acceptance Week (27 March-3 April) aims to raise awareness of this range of symptoms and combat the high number of myths.
Dr Beardon said: “The biggest one, that’s potentially most damaging, is that autistic people lack empathy or are unfeeling in some way. It’s odd when lots of autistic people are hyper-empathisers, deeply empathic.
“Then there’s this myth that autistic people can be grouped together. You get it often in schools, where schools say: ‘yeah, we understand your child because we taught somebody last year who was autistic’. They’re completely different children – what’s that got to do with anything? The list could go on and on.
“This myth that autism is a disorder and that autistic people are somehow impaired or lesser human beings – I fight against that every day because in my view, it is categorically not true.”
He believes that this week is a strong starting point to increase knowledge about autism, but a lot more can be done.
“The reason I’ve got mixed feelings about it is because we should be striving to do this throughout the entire year rather than over one particular day, week or month,” he said.
“It’s good that we’re striving towards better autism understanding, but we should be striving towards that every single second of every single day.”