Guest Lecture on "Autism"

The department of Psychology, IIS (Deemed to be) University, organized a seminar about autism on19 April, 2022. The speaker of the seminar was Ms. Garima Shrivastava.

She is the founder and governing body member of approach avoidance society and also Director of Technical and Training department of Approach Autism Society. She has been working in the field for the last 14 years.

Ms. Garima started off her lecture by defining the meaning of Autism. she said “autistic person is not mentally retarded they are special ones”. She talks about various symptoms for identifying that can be easily detected in autistic child like: less eye contact, communication impairment, less social interaction. She quoted real life experiences with these children. She discussed a case of a boy who had a lot of knowledge about light but he has the problem of communication impairment. She explained that these children have different – different special skills. She further explain concept of ‘types of autism spectrum disorder She went on further and threw light on the other various symptoms of autistic child like: missing of joint attention (finger point), not able to excess multiple instruction, perfectionist, hypo & hyper movement, and sensory issues as vestibular (rocking on chair), proprioceptive (touching, hearing). The speaker did not skip a chance to keep the audience on edge as she further clarified the two assessment techniques to diagnosis the autism which are:

DIAGNOSTIC ASSESSMENT- which helps in identifying the types of autism disorder by DSM 5 criteria.

FUNCTIONAL ASSESSMENT- is a continuous collaborative process that combines observing, asking meaningful questions, listening to family stories, and analyzing individual child skills and behaviors within naturally occurring everyday routines and activities across multiple situations and settings.  Ms. Garima said that “every autistic child shows different traits” Then Ms. Garima gave an open opportunity to the audience to freely ask any question or give suggestions or discuss their point of view related to autism disorder & autistic child. 

By the end of the session Ms. Garima shares different traits that help to identify

autism in one and half year child which are:

• Eye contact

• Do not follow instruction

• Matching skills

• Difficulty in problem solving

• Imitation

• low visual performance

The speaker as an ending provides internship opportunity for the audience to work with them in their NGOs on these children. It was truly a very enriching and interesting session wherein the audience got such a delightful opportunity to hear from such an eminent speaker as Ms. Garima Shrivastava.