Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Health Chatter. Today's show will be on autism, which one way or the other is a hot topic in today's world. And we'll be talking a lot about it with a wonderful guest. I'll introduce her in a moment.
We've got a wonderful crew, which I always like to recognize, Maddy Levine-Wolf, who actually did the background research for this show, that all our listening audience can enjoy. tune into on our website, which I'll tell you in a second. So Manny Levine-Wolf, Aaron Collins, Deandra Howard, Matthew Campbell, Sheridan Nygaard are all second to none.
They've been with us since day one and have really, really helped us make this show successful on many, many fronts. So thank you guys. You're super duper. Barry Baines is our medical advisor and gives us a little bit of a medical twist.
Chapter 2: How does Ellie Wilson define autism and its characteristics?
For those of us who have public health backgrounds, he provides the medical twist background. And then there's my dear colleague, Clarence Jones. We've been doing this since day one, having a lot of fun, meeting a lot of people, discussing a lot of things, and hopefully providing useful information for you, the listening audience. So thank you, Clarence.
Human Partnership is our sponsor, great community health organization doing wonderful, wonderful things out in the community related to health. You should check them out at Human Partnership Alliance. And you can check us out at healthchatterpodcast.com for all of our shows that we've done since day one. So thanks for everybody being here. So today, autism. We have a wonderful guest with us.
Ellie Wilson is the executive director of the Autism Society of Minnesota, I'm sure. That she is connected with her colleagues in other states as well. We can talk about that.
Chapter 3: What misconceptions exist about autism and its diagnosis?
She's been working to support children, teens, adults with autism spectrum disorders for 20 years. Wow, you're going to have to tell us about how you got involved in this. Has done really, really well. wonderful things and you'll be able to see it all on our website.
Her specialty is fostering energized, healthy community partnerships to promote the evolution of our inclusive societal landscape for individuals on the spectrum, and we'll talk about that word too, or with other disabilities. It's really wonderful having you. And thank you so much for being on Health Chatter. So, all right, I'll kick it off.
And God knows where it'll go from here, but we've got a lot to talk about. Okay. We do. So, first of all, let's make sure, you know, since autism has kind of hit the scene lately, certainly it's out there. Let's start out with getting your true definition. on what autism is.
Great.
Chapter 4: What are the co-occurring conditions often found with autism?
Great place to start as there is much to cover. So let's get the ground rules. All right. An autism spectrum diagnosis is something that we call a neurodevelopmental disability.
And if you break those words down, neuro means something that affects your brain and developmental implies that this disorder is something that happens from the time you are born and affects the way your brain develops over time, a neurodevelopmental disability. There are several components of the autism diagnosis.
And the ones that I think people are most familiar with are that autistic people tend to have differences in how they communicate, how they sort of process information, particularly social and sensory information.
And also autistic people have a tendency to require or benefit from a lot of repetition and routine in their life in one form or another, whether that's an observable behavior that they do over and over again. or sort of a rigidity in how they like to sort of go through their days, weeks, months. Those are the basics of what is an autism diagnosis.
Most autism diagnoses are made by the time someone is about five years old. That's no coincidence that that's about the same time that children enter school. But frankly, autism can be diagnosed at any age. And oftentimes we do see some folks not necessarily get diagnosed until they're teenagers, young adults, or older adults.
But the point is, if you are assessed for autism, you have to be able to attest to the fact that the way you communicate and process information has been so since you were a young child. If it's something that onsets in your teenage years or young adult years, it's not autism.
Interesting. So in other words, you can't develop autism
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Chapter 5: How do societal perceptions impact individuals with autism?
autism. That's right. You're more or less born with it, correct?
Totally. You can't develop it in the middle of life and you also can't grow out of it. That's another big misconception is that autism is something that affects someone throughout their entire life. It's not something that goes away once you become an adult. And I think there can certainly be autistic people that
learn all kinds of great strategies and access resources they need to sort of manage their disability over time. There are certainly many cases of autism where you might not know from looking at somebody. You know, we're going to talk about the spectrum shortly. And that spectrum is really wide. So there are all kinds of sort of assumptions baked in and stereotypes to address.
But the point is, you have it from the time you're born and you have it until you die. So...
Chapter 6: What role do community resources play in supporting autistic individuals?
Is it defined as a medical issue?
It is included in what we call the diagnostic and statistical manual. So someone who is trained in psychiatry in medicine is qualified to diagnose autism alongside any number of other developmental disorders, intellectual disabilities, mental health conditions. It's all under the purview of that DSM, which is the guidebook that helps people make those diagnoses.
And you have it, you start getting it or you have it at a younger age and then you just, you learn how to cope with autism. Is that the idea? Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, people learn to cope in different ways at different ages. And of course, new stressors or circumstances can be introduced to an autistic person's life at any time. So I don't mean to imply that the trajectory is linear. What I mean to say is that
You know, the ways in which an autistic person presents can be quite obvious and earn a diagnosis at a very young age. Sometimes the presentation of autism can be obscured, not only by a person's individual profile skills, but frankly, by a number of biases that I would love to talk to you about, as a matter of fact.
Clarence, hit it.
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Chapter 7: How can families better understand and support their autistic children?
Yeah.
Thank you. I'm really glad that we're having this conversation. In certain parts of our community, there are people that are very upset about autism, and they think it came from vaccinations. But what you just said is that a person is born with it. And can you talk a little bit more about that?
Because, again, as I said, there's been a lot of conversation in our community about, you know, it's only because of the vaccination that we have that their children have autism.
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about cause for a minute to the greatest extent we can. And we want to be really responsible about knowing the limitations of this part of the conversation. But many, many people, especially because the prevalence of autism continues to sort of grow and therefore present a public health phenomenon.
I think there are many, many people on a societal and on an individual basis that are hungry to know why does autism happen?
and there are things that we actually do understand about this let's start at the basics which is even though autism is technically a medical diagnosis and something that certainly can be diagnosed by a medical provider it's different from many other disabilities because there is no like single gene or characteristic let's say in your blood that we can test for many other disability profiles have
you know, sort of crystal clear biological evidence where we can say, yes, we've confirmed that you have this genetic difference or this, you know, characteristic of your profile that earns you a diagnosis. In autism, we're really looking at people's behavior. And behavior, of course, is a lot more complex of a thing to measure.
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Chapter 8: What are the future directions for autism advocacy and support?
That being said, we do know, we are certain that autism does have a hereditary component. And we can study the heritability of autism without necessarily being able to single out one specific autism gene. We are quite certain that there is no one autism gene. But what we do see are very clear patterns of autism and other neurodiversities, let's call them, across generations of families.
And we also know for certain that if you have one autistic child, there's some likelihood that you have another autistic or otherwise neurodivergent child. So we do believe there are genetic components And that's part of why we understand that autism is part of your life from the time you're born, because you already got those genes inside you by the time you're born.
Now, others are looking at things like vaccines. And here's what's really interesting about vaccines. Much of the sort of child vaccine schedule, the cadence at which children are given routine vaccines in order to prevent communicable illness,
They are scattered throughout a time in a child's development when there also are a lot of other important milestones happening, whether that's the first time a child speaks, whether it's the time that they start to show signs of other types of social interactions. And there's some pretty obvious confusion that happens around the time where parents and
Even misinformed members of the sort of general provider landscape are misattributing those behavioral differences to a time that someone is vaccinated. And you know, guys, the theory has been disproved about a thousand times. And so at the end of the day, we don't. reject the curiosity.
We understand that people really want to know and want to investigate, but we also are beating a dead horse when it comes to the issue of vaccination specifically.
Good point. So I've got a couple of things, you know, I'm kind of checking in on our, a little bit of our background here, but let me preface it by saying this was interesting about, oh God, maybe it was six months or so ago. I was watching the show Survivor
Hmm.
Okay. I don't know if this, this rings a bell with you, Ellie.
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