Symptoms Of High Functioning Autism

The main symptoms of autism are of the social and communicative nature, even though there are many more unusual behaviors and associated symptoms related to this psychological condition. Sufferers of autism tend never to share their own enjoyment with others and never share in the enjoyment of others. Even in their infant stage, when people make gestures and smiles at them, they never respond with that communal smile like babies often do. For a specialist in the profession, this is enough for an initial diagnosis, although some people think it is inconclusive.

Autistic children make poor eye contact if at all, and rarely ever imitate sounds made to them. And in addition to that, they do not make gestures of their own or respond to those of others. An autism patient will rarely ever point at anyone or anything, and like a stubborn cat, they would rather look everywhere else than at the object you are pointing to. They do not make friends very well, and neither connect with their parents, siblings or caregivers because they are not expressive of their own feelings and they are not sensitive to that of others.

Most children with autism have significant delays in their ability to learn to speak, and there are several cases in which the patient actually never learns to speak at all. Plus, the fact that they don’t make gestures often also contributes to their inability to replace their ominously missing speech with signs and gesticulations. If they do speak, many times they tend to just repeat what you have spoken to them back at you in what you may think of as a parrot syndrome.

As a matter of fact, they could repeat whole parts of a movie, play or event to you verbatim as though they had some amazing ability, but then they could refuse to talk about anything else. Autistic patients tend to misuse pronouns, often using the second person in conversation to refer to themselves, and as they age, they rarely ever lose this symptom even if other characteristics improve their perceptibly.

People who suffer from autism have a limited number of interests at best, but those interests are intense enough to cause them to implode emotionally if you interrupt them. It is not often that you may notice this pattern in a child before they turn five years old, but it becomes more obvious as they approach maturity. They could pick on a specific toy and play with the same thing all day long every day, while not even playing in the same way most other kids would.

It is common to find a patient with autism sitting staring at a wall for long hours or just lining up their toys; they could repeat body movements all the time, and when in distress they could harm themselves by biting or knocking their heads against a wall.

Autistic patients tend to be extra sensitive the certain specific stimuli like sounds, sights, smells, or textures. They could hate the smell of new clothes bad enough to never want to touch them, or dread the sound of falling rain enough to freak out screaming when they hear it. Often they appear to be mentally retarded, but this has been proven to be non-generic; however, they do tend to have intellectual abilities that have been professionally put down as the savant syndrome.

For the most part, autism is treatable but not curable. Sufferers of the condition tend to live out the whole of their lives with little improvement, if any, and more often than not they require the presence of a caregiver for as long as they live. Some autism patients with high functioning autism are actually able to live and work on their own, with minimal support from family, friends, and the society, and even take on jobs in various practices. Others who are unfortunate enough not to have their symptoms lessen with time and have to be sustained all through life.