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Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Public awareness a key to addressing autism

by

20140402

The ex­perts are es­ti­mat­ing that a rel­a­tive­ly high num­ber of peo­ple, need­less­ly com­mit­ted to psy­chi­atric in­sti­tu­tions and care over the years, had ac­tu­al­ly been af­fect­ed by the now man­age­able con­di­tion known as autism.

The key to ad­e­quate­ly ad­dress­ing the sit­u­a­tion is ear­ly de­tec­tion and the wider avail­abil­i­ty of trained teach­ers and spe­cial­ists to guide prop­er treat­ment and care.

Grow­ing recog­ni­tion of the con­di­tion and the re­quired ther­a­pies has helped re­verse the trend some­what with­in re­cent years. But, not enough, sug­gests autism ex­pert, Meghan Lee-Wa­ter­man.

"In a coun­try like T&T there is a great need to pro­mote autism aware­ness as there is a vast lack of un­der­stand­ing about this neu­ro­log­i­cal con­di­tion which af­fects chil­dren of any and every eth­nic back­ground," she told the T&T Guardian.

Speech-lan­guage ther­a­pist, Na­di­ta Ma­haraj, says the cur­rent es­ti­mate of 8,000 and 10,000 af­fect­ed na­tion­als means that the con­di­tion can "no longer be viewed from a mi­nor­i­ty per­spec­tive."

"These num­bers steadi­ly rise from year to year," she said, "as seen in the most re­cent in­ter­na­tion­al sta­tis­tics from the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol (CDC) of the USA in­di­cat­ing that cur­rent­ly one in 68 Amer­i­can chil­dren are on the autis­tic spec­trum."

Lee-Wa­ter­man be­lieves achiev­ing high­er lev­els of pub­lic aware­ness holds the key to more mean­ing­ful in­ter­ven­tions. "With bet­ter aware­ness comes the in­creased chance to help those di­ag­nosed and to strive to as­sist them to be­come as in­de­pen­dent as pos­si­ble," she said.

She is of the view that "the more aware the teach­ers in a school are, the bet­ter able they are to deal with a child dis­play­ing mal­adap­tive or chal­leng­ing be­hav­iours."

Ac­cord­ing to Lee-Wa­ter­man ed­u­cat­ing the ed­u­ca­tors rep­re­sents a most im­por­tant "first start."

"Far too many teach­ers in T&T are un­trained and gen­er­al­ly un­aware of how to deal with spe­cial needs chil­dren," she said in an in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian. "The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion must put in­to place suf­fi­cient pro­grammes to ed­u­cate teach­ers on spe­cial ed­u­ca­tion, not just in terms of aca­d­e­mics but holis­ti­cal­ly with re­spect to prac­ti­cal life skills, so­cial skills (and) emo­tion­al reg­u­la­tion."

She laments the fact that she has of­fered her ser­vices as an ed­u­ca­tion­al ad­vis­er, spe­cial­is­ing in autism, to the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion and has so far re­ceived no re­sponse. Such an of­fer, she claims, has al­so been made by a num­ber of child psy­chol­o­gists, speech ther­a­pists and oc­cu­pa­tion­al ther­a­pists with the same re­sult.

Autism is a spec­trum span­ning from very mild cas­es all the way to quite se­vere cas­es. Ac­cord­ing to Lee-Wa­ter­man, the milder forms of autism may go un­di­ag­nosed and peo­ple are some­times brand­ed as "strange" or "weird" due to a lack of so­cial skills.

It is al­so some­times de­scribed as the "in­vis­i­ble con­di­tion" as there are no dis­tinc­tive phys­i­cal traits such as Down Syn­drome, for ex­am­ple.

"Many times so­ci­ety can be un­for­giv­ing to dif­fer­ent­ly-abled peo­ple," Lee-Wa­ter­man said. "Of­ten I have been out with a group of chil­dren with autism and dealt with stares and com­ments about a child's be­hav­iour for flap­ping or jump­ing or cov­er­ing their ears."

Such re­spons­es, she says, can on­ly ad­dressed by ag­gres­sive­ly deal­ing with a deficit in lev­els of pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion and aware­ness. The soon­er achieved, she says, the bet­ter.

Around the world, April is be­ing recog­nised as Autism Aware­ness Month.


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