Symptoms of autism spectrum disorders or autism persist into adulthood and therapy should therefore continue in some severe cases.
Supporting people with ASD
Early support can help reduce the signs of autism, improve functioning and improve quality of life. Support, adapted to the person’s age, is useful at all ages of life.
This often involves multidisciplinary, coordinated support, taking account of the individual’s specific characteristics.
These interventions are the subject of recommendations of good clinical practice by the High Health Authority:
- Educational, developmental and behavioural interventions: aim to teach children or adults socially appropriate behaviours, make appropriate demands and structure time and space to develop social inclusion, self-awareness and learning skills and reduce behavioural disorders. They can be used simultaneously in integrative approaches.
- Communication coaching: aims to improve communication, whether through language or by learning alternative means of communication (Enhanced and alternative communication)
- Psycho-motor and sensorimotor support: aims to work on the equidistance, motor coordination, posture, sensory features, etc. Support in occupational therapy can make it possible to set up adapted facilities.
- Cognitive psychological guidance: aims to work on cognitive (cognitive remediation) or social (social skills training, social cognitive remediation) difficulties and to better understand one’s difficulties in adapting to them (therapeutic education) in an individual or group setting.
- Social assistance: enabling appropriate assistance to be provided
- Support by associations and/or peers (associations, mutual aid groups, help from peer health mediators)
- Support for close relatives (parents, siblings, possibly spouses in adulthood): can be set up by speaking groups, awareness-raising or training sessions, therapeutic education, etc.
- Support for training and employment: Aims to help the person with autism to train and find a job suited to his or her profile, and to adapt the workstation to enable him or her to remain in good condition
- Medical assistance for any associated disorders (psychiatric and/or non-psychiatric). It should be noted that there are no drugs specifically aimed at reducing the signs of autism. On the other hand, the presence of one or more associated disorders may require drug treatment. In the case of behavioural disorders, drug prescribing should not be done as a first step (functional analysis of behaviour and searching for a somatic cause being a priority), but may in some cases reduce problem behaviours. The requirement must then be reassessed regularly.
