It can be hard to understand what a person with autism goes through on a daily basis. Thankfully, now you can.
To honour Autism Acceptance Day on April 2, the National Autistic Society released a PSA video titled “Make it Stop.” The video follows a 12-year-old girl with autism over the course of her day and demonstrates the struggles she faces.
One of the main struggles she has to deal with is the ability to process information. Throughout the video, the girl encounters several people who don’t understand her situation and continuously feed her information without giving her sufficient time.
As the video states, its goal is to make people “understand autism, the person, and the change you can make.”
The young girl, Holly, who stars in the video was not only chosen because she can act, but also because she experiences the same thing. For the first time, she was able to speak about her autism and show this video to her classmates so that they too can hopefully understand, according to Mashable.
Last year, the National Autistic Society and Don’t Panic, an advertising company, launched a campaign called “Too Much Information” to “change perception of autism forever.” The launch of the campaign included a video called “Can you make it to the end?” which gave viewers a first-person perspective of the struggles that a young boy with autism faces.
Their latest “Make it Stop” video is a continuation of this campaign.
According to Don’t Panic, the campaign achieved great success in the U.K. and was able to bring in over 25,000 signatures for a petition calling for the Parliamentary in the U.K. to “close the autism employment gap and get more autistic people into work.”
In an article published by the Chicago Tribune in 2012, they reported on a study that revealed that “more than one-third of young adults with an autism spectrum disorder had not gotten a job or gone into higher education since high school.” They estimated that about one in 88 kids in the U.S. have autism spectrum disorder.
At least one per cent of the world’s population has autism, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, yet many people still don’t understand the disorder, or have misconceptions of it.
Hopefully now, with the help of NAS’s new PSA video and campaign, more people will be able to understand and be aware of the difficulties faced by people with autism everywhere.
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