Autism Spectrum Disorders

Autism Spectrum Disorders has in the past posed some challenges to the human race with regard to addressing the plight of the victims   . This disorder is a cause of severe pervasive mode of thinking impairment, individual feelings, language problems and an adverse relationship to other people.

This disorder is primarily diagnosed at the early stages in childhood and progresses throughout the rest of the life of the affected individual. It is a complex disability in the developmental stages of a person brought about by neurological disorder with severe effects on the normal brain functioning.

The normal brain development is impacted specifically with regard to the areas responsible for social interaction as well as communication skills. This is a real crisis in the health sector due to the fact that for every 150 children below the age of eight years, one of them is a victim of this disorder (Uta, 1991).

Social welfare history

In this society, autistic and families with autistic children were initially faced with three typical challenges namely lack of financial, emotional and educational support. The families of the children who are victims of autistic disorder were confronted by tremendous financial as well as emotional burdens they also receive little support with regard to the education of these children.

The families have therefore to endure a significant financial burden relative to the families with upright children. This arises from the requirement of cutting down the schedules of work or an entire quitting of the job due to the requirement of the duty of caring for these children (Charles, 1992).

Further more, there is a very high chance that the families of the children with ASD are prone to delayed or even unattended health-care requirements of their children. They are exposed to insufficiencies and obstacles with regard to the access of the medical care needed by their children.

According to Anthony, no difference was noted with regard too the access to usual care, a nurse or a personal provider in normal circumstances. However on the emergency of a special problem for autistic children families, the primary contact point becomes beyond reach and the access to referrals is denied (Anthony, 1998).

These families are therefore subjected to particularly enormous as well as stressful emotional situations and financial demands. To complicate the matter, majority of the insurance firms are adamant when it comes to the coverage of the demands of an autistic child.

This is because of their perception of the situation as being a form of developmental disorder rather than a disease. It therefore applies that the parents of these children are required to pay large amounts of money from their pocket to access the services of occupation therapy and the speech therapy for their children.

The education of the autistic children is also faced with a milliard of problems because the schools are ready to offer a half day session for these children. Therefore the majority of the parents of autistic children opt that they stay at home altogether (Simon, 1995).

The history of this disorder dates back to around 1911 in Swiss. ‘Early infantile autism’ was later coined in 1943 with the much milder Asperger syndrome coming much later. These are the disorders that were put under the description of the five pervasive types of developmental disorders which are currently termed as the autism spectrum disorders, i.e., ASD (Judy & Sean, 1993).