Show news for a region of your choice (mostly Austraian news).

A rich new lens

By bobb |

Jessica Horner

Being diagnosed as autistic as an adult made these people want to make a change. Now they’re flipping the switch on the negative perceptions of autism.

ABC Riverina

“I am a broken person, trying to put the pieces back together in the (perhaps vain) hope that maybe the repaired version will be more beautiful than the scars that pain left behind …”

'It's absolutely disgraceful': Perth boy faces two-year wait for autism assessment

By bobb |

A Perth mother says she has been pushed to the edge of despair after being told she will have to wait at least two years to get an autism assessment for her 10-year-old son.

"When I got the letter telling me about the wait time I just burst into tears," Tanya Wheat said.

"It is absolutely disgraceful, we can't wait two years, my son needs support now."

Autism research at the crossroads

By bobb |

Brady Huggett

In April of 2021, Emilie Wigdor finished up a paper titled “The female protective effect against autism spectrum disorder” and put it on the pre-print server medRxiv. Wigdor is a Ph.D. student in human genetics at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom, and the paper had taken three years to complete. It was also the first paper on which she was first author. She was proud of that, and she took to Twitter to promote the work in an 11-part thread.

6 Early Signs of Autism Spectrum Disorder in Children

By bobb |

Ugo Uche

How to recognize early signs of autism.

Key points

  • Difficulty with social interaction is the most prominent sign of autism, yet it's easy to miss in early childhood.
  • A lack of eye contact is directly related to social deficiencies.
  • Children with autism often aren't interested in the games or play that most neurotypical children engage in.

Autism is a condition that tends to be rather difficult to diagnose. There is a saying that if you've met a child with autism, well, you've met one child with autism, because each one is vastly different. This is why it's defined as a spectrum of signs and symptoms that fall under the umbrella of the same category.