Autism as a disABILITY | Adam Harris | TEDxDCU

I want to take you on a journey if you can imagine in the morning being placed on a spaceship and blasted into outer space and suddenly arriving in a planet not built for you a planet where you're no less capable than anybody else but when you step off your spaceship keen to explore your instantly overwhelmed by your surroundings every noise every smell every texture isn't just something that's not pleasant it's something that you actually can't bear it's something that's totally unfamiliar it's something that you're not able to negotiate and then you meet your first alien and at this point you're quite anxious you're very aware of your surroundings but you still want to be able to communicate with this idea but straightaway you can't tell by their posture if they're angry or if they come in peace you can't tell by their facial expression if they're being friendly or if they're being arrogant and you can't understand by their language if they're joking or they want to be taken literally the alien can see that you're having great difficulty but he doesn't seem to be showing much sympathy and he doesn't seem to be trying to match your efforts to be understood and then you go to your first alien school or your first alien workplace and at this stage you're highly anxious and you again are no less intelligent or capable than anybody else and yet you cannot learn in the same way because you do not speak the language of this world you're living in a world that has not been built for you and when you're anxious all the time and when you're in this constant state of worry and uncertainty all you can do to try and cope in this world is to apply a routine is to apply a structure and to focus on the things that you're able to succeed now you're probably at this point wondering who I am and who do I think I am to try and explain what autism is and I'm not a person from a medical background but at the age of five I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome which is a condition on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum and I was very fortunate to benefit from early intervention I was diagnosed at a young age and spent the first three years of my education in special school from there I went to mainstream school with the support of an SNA before finally completing my leaving search without supportive and SNA and along the way I experienced what it is like to live in a world that isn't built for you to want to make friends but to not understand the social situations to hear the colorful language that we use in Ireland the local figures of speech and not be sure if they're meant to be taken literally or if they're a joke and when simple things like opening a bag of crisps would cause me huge frustration because of the smell and by the time I was 16 I had a turning point in my life I was lucky to be able to strive to socialise in a very normal whatever that is wait and I decided that I had an obligation to try and do something to give back to the autism community in Ireland and one of the things I discovered as I traveled around the country and spoke to many people with the condition is that they too felt like they were living in a world that wasn't built for them where society did not understand them to that end I created a website called as I am DYI which is Ireland's online support service for people with autism and is working to engage the public in seeing autism in a different way more about that later now at this point you're probably saying well this is fine this is what autism is but it's not really anything to do with me but a precent prevalence study conducted by this very University found that approximately 1 in 100 of the Irish population are affected by autism now if we consider that and you consider all the friends you have all the people your colleagues and work all the people you come into daily contact with if you work it out statistically everybody knows somebody with autism everybody will come across it at some stage in their life and just as if you're a business person and you go to France or you go to Spain on business you need to learn to speak that language I have had to learn to speak your language people with autism have had to learn neurotypical language and now it is the obligation of the neurotypical community to learn autism language now before this talk when I said the word autism and whatever your involvement might be you might have thought of two things the first one might have been money you would say well I'm a taxpayer and we fund autism services or we fund diagnosis and maybe we don't do that enough which is true maybe we should fund it more but again I'll make a 5 euro donation - as I am to autism in general and that's my obligation completed or maybe you would have said well autism that's really a matter for scientists surely scientists are the people who need to look into this who need to explore it you need to say what can we do to support people with autism what can we do to detect this earlier what can we do to help people with autism reach their potential again very true we need research we need support we need efforts but this work has been happening for the last 20 30 40 50 years and why are people with autism people with high-functioning autism still uncomfortable to talk about their condition why do parents still report that when they go to the supermarket and their child's having a bad day because the sensory environment that they still feel they're looked at by others like they're a bad parent and really we've been doing all this very positive work financially in terms of research over the last number of years but all this while there's been a missing piece of the puzzle and that missing piece of the puzzle is you we as a society have not done enough to try and learn about a condition that affects such a large part of the Irish population and if you don't believe me if you think well ok maybe I need to learn a few more facts about autism just in case I happen to meet someone but really my behavior doesn't really impact on somebody with autism really how I go about my life on a day to day basis doesn't need to change but if you don't believe me have a look at these statistics fifty percent of people with autism buddies in school up to eighty percent of people with autism some of them with degrees and master's degrees long-term unemployed a huge problem with isolation with stigma and with false perceptions indeed it is common for a person with autism to say that they were discussed their condition only when they do people understand it as a hearing impairment or an intellectual disability they don't understand what autism actually means they have this vague idea of what disability is generally and this has led to a self-harm rate in our community which is over four times the average rate now if you consider that race for a moment and of course the big challenge of this in addition is that it is invisible when I walked onto stage here today you didn't know I was going to speak about a spur just you didn't probably know I had the condition indeed if we're talking about autism or ask for just you probably instantly got a stereotype in your head you saw a Rain Man or you saw a Roy Crocker from Coronation Street or you saw Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory but you didn't really understand how broad a condition autism is and how the only way we can truly be inclusive of people with autism is to be radical and by being radical is to actually treat everyone as though they have autism to realize the people with autism think differently the people with autism find sensory processing difficult the people with autism find some social situations difficult has anybody here ever not forgotten a word has anybody here ever not been uncomfortable in a social situation has anybody here never and found a smell uncomfortable by being inclusive of people with autism we benefit society as a whole but of course there is a bigger question here as well how many times in society do we so quickly turn to words like weirdo like strange like odd like bad parent because this is an invisible condition and I know as an autism advocate who would know a huge amount of people with high-functioning autism who might not discuss their condition that often in schools or in the workplace or even if they go about their lives in the community usually they're just seen as weird as strange as difficult not people who legitimately just need a little extra support and it's only to education and increasing our own knowledge that we can support these people but we can give people a break that we can make an effort to communicate with a significant part of our population that every day has to change their behavior so much just to be able to cope but times are changing things are getting better and over the last number of years we have started to see two people coming forward to speak about their condition for the first time and a massive aspect of that is that people have started to talk about the positives in even in live time I've been on the stage here I try to dispel all the myths I've tried to move you away from all the negative thinking around autism but I haven't even really got an opportunity to talk about the fact the people with autism think differently the people with autism have special interests the people with autism have a great sense of fair play and justice because of the black and white thinking so linked to the autism spectrum by making a decision to include people with autism we don't just benefit those with the condition we radically improve our society by bringing in people who think outside the box isn't that innovation isn't that the definition of a good economy now a big positive aspect of the empowerment movement for those with autism in recent years has been the fact of the rise of social media for a lot of people with autism the idea of attending a local support group meeting or standing up here on this stage to tell you about their experiences would be too difficult would be something they'd be very uncomfortable with if you're a person with a parent of somebody who has autism it can be very difficult to find the hour or two in the month to get to your local parent support group meeting to talk about the condition because of the huge demands on the time of parents with children with disabilities but what social media has done has is open up a new world of possibilities for people to communicate their frustrations and that's why I established as I am je so people had a place to go so that if you were like I was 15 and frustrated and feeling isolated and not knowing where to turn that you could realize there's so many more of you out there but you could realize as a mother of a person with autism that you could speak to somebody else whose child was maybe two or three years older and realized that there is hope on the horizon so people with autism are speaking up people with autism are in our society Susan Boyle Daryl Hannah even in Irish history such names like James Joyce and Eamon de Valera associated with the condition but now the big challenge is society has to decide to listen and I'm not here today to ask for society's charity towards people with autism I'm here today to say to you if you are a business person one in 100 of your customers have autism if you are a teacher one in 100 of your students have autism if you are a politician one in 100 of your citizens have autism and it is an obligation of our society support those people not just to benefit those with autism to benefit our society as a whole thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 40,592

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Ireland, Education, Activism, Disability, Education reform, Research, Society

Id: aPm4cK8FCVw

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2015