The Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders

Diagnostics is the process of finding the strengths and weaknesses of a person, his or her abilities and disabilities.
Diagnostic investigation eventually must lead to advice for care at home, at school, at work, for spending leisure time and making it through the day. Diagnostics should not be confined to making a diagnosis, a classification.

People with ASD have, from early youth, a disorder in processing information. They do have sensory perceptions but they lack the overall view and relationship. Their eyesight and sense of hearing, feeling, taste and smell are fine, but they cannot associate their senses properly. They mostly select a detail and ascribe a very literal meaning to it.

They observe the world as if it were as loose particles. They often stick to small unimportant details without surveying the connection and the whole. They often fail to understand the meaning of a specific event or make wrong associations so they cannot react well. In a world obscure to them, they search for order and safety by clinging to fixed habits and patterns. When changes are abrupt they can easily be seized by panic.

Among other things, these problems in processing information can be recognized by the following characteristics:

• dealing with stimuli in a different way and, as a result, reacting differently to situations
• reacting over-sensitively to sensory stimuli from the environment such as sounds, smells, visual details and touch stimuli
• not (or differently) associating various events, thus experiencing the world as a jumble of impressions
• not being able to apply knowledge and experience acquired in a specific situation to another comparable situation (generalization problems)
• not being able, or with difficulty, to make a distinction between important and unimportant information
• receiving all information from outside with equal loudness (irrelevant side issues as well)
• not being able to cut oneself off from noise or background noises
• observing the surroundings in details and insufficiently surveying the whole
• digesting language literally and with difficulty looking beyond the observation itself
• rigid, black and white and little flexibility in thinking
• lack of imagination, fantasy and imaginative powers
• having trouble in projecting themselves in the thoughts and feelings of others
• difficulty recognizing and expressing emotions, or doing so in other ways
• failing to have insight in social situations and understanding insufficiently the social conduct of others, resulting in insufficient gearing
• sticking to familiar habits and patterns for need of safety
• showing a restricted field of interest and patterns of behavior
• having difficulties coping with changes or sudden events
• violently acting emotionally to obviously trifling affairs and having the tendency to get stuck in them.

Although there are many concerns about labeling a young child with an ASD, the earlier the diagnosis of ASD is made, the sooner the necessary interventions can begin. Evidence over the last 15 years indicates that intensive early intervention in optimal educational settings for at least two years during the preschool years results in improved outcomes in most young children with ASD.

In evaluating a child, clinicians rely on behavioral characteristics to make a diagnosis.

Some of the characteristic behaviors of ASD may be apparent in the first few months of a child’s life, or they may appear at any time during the early years. For the diagnosis, problems in at least one of the areas of communication, socialization, or restricted behavior must be present before the age of 3.
What You Should Know About Autism Spectrum Disorders
The Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders
Detecting Autism
Autism Diagnose
Autism Checklist