Autism
Autism is a difficulty affecting a significant number of people which manifests in different ways and to different degrees. Needless to say there is considerable controversy surrounding both diagnosis and provision. It is a life-long condition but its manifestations and consequences vary over time as individuals develop and demands on them change.
Central to the concept of autism is a combination of difficulty in communication, understanding of other people and the presence of obsessive or repetitive behaviours. This is described as "The Triad" of impairments, affects people with learning difficulties and originally described by Kamer in the 1940s and developed by Wing in the 1970s. In the 1940s Asperger was describing a similar condition which affected people of mainstream range of ability. It is only quite recently that those two lines of thinking about the condition have been seen as part of the same continuum, which are now usually referred to as "Autistic Spectrum Disorders".