What It’s Like to Get an Autism Diagnosis After Years of Being Called Difficult, Dramatic and Lazy
During the first thirty years of her life, comedy script writer Sara Gibbs had been labeled a lot of things – a cry baby, a scaredy cat, a spoiled brat, a weirdo, a show off – but more than anything else, she’d been called a Drama Queen. Little did Sara know that, at the age of thirty, she would be given one more label that would change her life’s trajectory forever. That one day, sitting next to her husband in a clinical psychologist’s office, she would learn that she had never been a drama queen, or a weirdo, or a cry baby, but she had always been autistic. Read more ›
Whether you know it or not, you know somebody who is autistic.
Parenting a neurodivergent child can be exhausting. The stress, the worry, the ongoing lists of extra things to monitor and manage can seem endless. Often it feels like there’s no spare moment to do anything other than be on constant guard for what is coming or might be coming. 
Eating disorders have a devastating effect on the lives of those affected and are associated with the highest mortality rates of all mental illnesses. While they can affect anyone, there is a higher incidence of people with autism who have eating disorders compared to the general population. 
Learning disruptions have been an unfortunate but all-too-frequent sight during the pandemic. But not every student felt those effects evenly as schools shifted between remote and in-person options. 
Training community members to help families 
Being social and making friends isn’t always easy. Relationships have many subtleties. But people with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, struggle more than most. For them, communicating with others can be very difficult. 
A digital app successfully detected one of the telltale characteristics of autism in young children, suggesting the technology could one day become an inexpensive and scalable early screening tool, researchers at Duke University report. 
“Twice exceptional” (2e) is the term used to describe intellectually gifted children with great potential for academic achievement who also have a learning disability or neurological challenge, like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD or ADD). 
