Department of Psychiatry, Tata Main Hospital in its endeavour to generating awareness about Autism and ensuring the special needs of autistic children are met, conducted a workshop on ‘Behavioral Treatments in Autism’ at Tata Main Hospital (TMH). School principals, teachers and parents of autistic children were also present on the occasion.
Dr Pratibha Karanth, an eminent name in the field of developmental disability, conducted the workshop. While delving on the future agenda, she also deliberated on the proposed plans to starting the programme on Autism in Ranchi and 20 other locations within India by the end of this year. She also talked about including Middle-East as one of the prospective location for expansion. The programme is funded by various trusts including Ratan Tata Trust. The aim for this year is to study and document autism in detail.
Ruchi Narendran, chief guest for the occasion said: “If a child walks a mile, parents need to walk five miles with them. It is important to focus on support groups of parents of autistic children.’ She further added that even if the disorder is detected early, there still exists a problem of rehabilitation. Therefore parents, children and society at large need to share the responsibility of educating and creating a conducive environment to enable healthy up-bringing of autistic children”.
‘Autism is known as a ‘spectrum disorder,’ because the severity of symptoms ranges from a mild learning and social disability to a severe impairment, with multiple problems and highly unusual behavior. It is a severely incapacitating life-long developmental disorder that typically occurs in the first three years of life. It causes impairment or disturbance in three main areas Social skills, communicative (verbal as well as non-verbal) skills and in their repetitive and restricted behaviors. Autistic individuals may show abnormal responses to sensations. Any one or more of the senses may be affected. All these difficulties manifest themselves in behaviour i.e. abnormal ways of relating to people, objects and events in the environment.