Adriana Bălșanu

Presentation: Differential diagnosis in teenagers/adults with autism. Challenges of social integration!  

Abstract:

Adolescents and adults that ask for a psychological evaluation in order to get to know themselves better and to find the cause of the difficulties encountered on a social level, are met more and more frequently in the offices of the clinical psychologists. Specialists are facing a new phenomenon, namely, apparently functional people, with an appropriate conversational language, with appropriate social norms, respectively with appropriate social responses, who only manage to complete their studies with a lot of support. After completing their studies, they have difficulty staying in the workforce, finding social motivation and making no effort to improve their life quality. Most of the autistic people know the theory and relate with it perfectly, they know and describe their difficulties in an assumed manner, but they fail to live authentically in age-appropriate social environments, which raises great problems of independence.