Autism is a disorder of neural development, whereby the person with autism, or we called autistic person is characterized by severe deficits in social interaction and communication. They have very limited social life and activities in comparison with a normal person. Some of the behaviour such as; they avoid making eye contact with others, have difficulty communicating with speech or with gesture, tend to play or hold the same object such as ball, pencil or balloon, like to spin objects, indicates needs by gesture and resist change in their routine.
Based on the statistic, the rate of autistic has increased. In 1990, the rate was for every 10,000 children, 4 are diagnosed with autism. However in 2008, for every 150 children, one child is diagnosed with autism. In 2011, there are about 47,000 people with autism in the country.I believe the number could be more, taking into consideration on the rural areas and the lack of awareness of our society on the symptoms/characteristics of autism. As a parent of a child with autism, I shared the difficulties in getting my son to a proper school that specialized in special education for autistic children. I recalled 10 years ago, when the doctor told us that he is autistic. It was such an alien word to us; we have zero knowledge about it. Back then, information on autism was very limited. The hospital did provide a list of personal therapists and a handful of centres that provide early intervention programmes for children with autism. So we went through the list, notably
I was quite saddened with the fact that these centres operates separately and do not share collaboration with other centres as well. Each centre has different structure of administration and educational programmes. Moreover, these centres do not have proper building like our school buildings. We were given limited options of which centres to choose from, we do not know which one is better than the others, there are not such ratings; it is just word of mouth from other parents, we are not sure how will our child develop and what to achieve given the years ahead. So it was very frustrating as we do not have a proper standard guide on the best way possible to set our child for his development path. I'm sure many parents like me shared quite the same experience. Hence after years of trials and errors, currently I think NASOM is the best school in Malaysia that provide programme for autistic children; I found their trainers/teachers are very well experience and caring towards their students. They operate as a non-profit organization; they have good administrative structure and their programmes/trainings that cover from children to adulthood.
With the announcement from our first lady, I am hoping the plan to set up a school similar to the famous Ivymount School concept will become a reality. This is the hope for every parent like me and also the hope for the people suffering from autism. With that, I am sure the standard of education programme of autism would be also increased, the methods and trainings would be improved and diversified, more resources and information would be shared and provided to the related parties. Hence this would able to equip our children and young adults to achieve their highest level of development, potential and independence to live life to the fullest and play their role in the society.
