Product Description
Challenging the stereotypes that surround the condition that is called "autism", this book goes beyond the outsider's view of the symptoms by presenting the many different faces of autism and autism-related conditions from the insider's perspective. Based on her own experiences of autism, the author looks at the misinterpretations and assumptions that have grown up around the condition, and offers her own experience of the daily problems and frustrations that the autistic person faces, and an overview of the current techniques, therapies and treatments for autism. She illustrates what autism means in her life, and shows how the experience of having to learn in different ways to others is a positive experience that opens up new ways of thinking.
From the Author
What Donna says about writing Text Books
I'm not an expert. I'm a social philosopher. As a sociologist, teacher and researcher, I try to avoid talking about pathology and look at processes. I take a stance closer to that of social psychology and raise the issues and perspectives that scientists then explore. My text books have become foundation texts in special education and psychology courses and have changed the treatment, education and educational environments of people on the autistic spectrum quite dramatically over the last ten years. My works are unapologetically controversial and about far more than autism spectrum conditions. I have written about sensory perceptual disorders and differences, cognitive and information processing differences, anxiety disorders, sensing and intuition, about identity, personality and co-dependency, about communication disorders and differences, about condition versus culture and most importantly about the person, individuality, daring and humility. I do not claim at any!
time that autism is any one thing, quite the contrary, I claim it is very diverse and far more like a fruit salad, the combinations of which differ from person to person as do the multitude of underlying causes and the wholistic means of addressing them. My books are read far outside of the autism world alone and as autism is merely normal processes with the volume turned way up, many of the issues I write about give non-autistic people surprising insights into themselves.
About the Author
Donna Williams was born in Australia in 1963 and raised in a working-class inner-city area in Australia. She grew up hearing words such as 'deaf', 'disturbed', 'crazy' and 'spastic', and like many able people with autism born in the 1960s and earlier, she wasn't formally diagnosed with autism until adulthood. As well as writing, composing, painting and sculpting, she lectures and runs workshops on autism all around the world. Donna is also the author of four autobiographies - Nobody Nowhere, Somebody Somewhere, Like Colour to the Blind and Everyday Heaven - along with several other books on autism, Autism and Sensing, Exposure Anxiety, The Jumbled Jigsaw (forthcoming) and a collection of her poetry, Not Just Anything: A Collection of Thoughts on Paper. These books are also published by and available from Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Her first international best-selling autobiography, Nobody Nowhere, is currently under option by a Hollywood film company. After 13 years in the UK, she now lives back in Australia with her husband Chris.
