A friendly definition of autism?

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From what I've been learning about autism, it seems it's a bit different for everyone.

Autism isn't a disorder, but rather it's almost like the brain is running on a different operating system to the 'typical' brain. Some commands have the same prompt and some don't. It's all part of being unique.

We were very careful not to frame autism as a disorder when we first talked to my son about it...later, this kind of came back to bite us, because aspects of his autism are disabling.

We now try to frame autism as a neurological difference that can have disabling features. My son needed to learn that his problems with pragmatics were something he needed to compensate for if he wanted to communicate accurately: hard to tell him he has to learn something everybody else does naturally without describing it as a disability. I've seen my own son and other autistic teens (and, frankly, my parents) make their pragmatic challenges the fault of the rest of the world instead of working towards understanding how to communicate.

Don't get me wrong: I am NOT asking my son not to be different, I am simply asking him to learn to compensate in a similar way that someone learns a foreign language in that country doesn't stop them from using or knowing their birth language.

That said, I recommend again the book All Cats Have Asperger's Syndrome - it frames the neurology in a very neutral way and was how we introduced my son to autism. It's written in very simple language and should be pretty easy to translate.

I lost track of this thread, sorry about that.

I like to separate the autism from the disabilities. I'm not going into great detail now, but I consider autism a word we chose to describe a very heterogenous group of people with overlapping qualities, behaviour and communication. Some of them have disabilities, some of them don't.

, that's my take on it too. Great analogy.
I hope the people around you are trying to understand his 'native language' too, though.


I can and I will. Plenty of things in the DSM to argue with. I'll bring up the whole 'homosexuality was considered a disorder in the DSM' if I have to .

Different way of sensing, learning and thinking, and different view of the world.