What is autism?

CATHARINA HARTMAN: Chances are that your answer to the question was not very sociable or can’t connect with people. Difficulties in social situations are indeed one of the most important characteristic of autism. People with autism find social situations difficult. For example, they don’t know how to start a conversation, or they don’t know how to respond to others. If this occurs often in many situations, then the person might have autism. Yet, not everybody who is socially clumsy has autism. You will learn a lot more about autism in the next module. First of all, let’s take a look at a big misconception about autism. People think that someone with autism isn’t interested in social interaction. But that is not true at all.

A conversation with someone with autism might go differently than you are used to. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not interested. Autism isn’t very common. But maybe you have autism, or maybe someone you know has autism, or maybe you don’t know this disorder at all and you’re just interested. This is what you will learn in the next module– what is autism? What’s it like to have autism? Why isn’t autism called autism? How do you develop autism? And how do you get rid of autism? At the end of this module, you’ll know all the answers to these questions. But let’s start with explaining what autism is.