Autism-World

People Social anxiety(SA) and High-functioning Autism(SA) have many symptoms in common. For example, they are both shy, and they natually avoid eye contact, and, they are all not good at communication, social activities make them nervous, too.

Although the two groups have several similarties, however, Autism and Social anxiety, are still two very different things. First of all, autism comes at many different levels, Asperger’s Syndrome, PDD-NOS, Williams Syndrome, etc. Autism is a complex developmental disorder. People are born into this way. At least, for now, nobody has found a cure for it. But Social anxiety can be cured. They look the same at the ” social awkwardness” part, whereas, their “social awkwardness” are not triggered by one reason. For Autistic children, they have problems of understanding jokes, physical languages. But it doesn’t mean they don’t like to make friends. Sometimes they want to, but don’t know how. For people with Social anxiety, they will have the social skills intact but will be too anxious to implement them.

Think of a guitar player, and social skills being guitar skills. The person with social anxiety would know how to play the guitar. They’d just be afraid to. The autistic person would play the guitar wrong, or not play it at all.

Social anxiety disorder is an anxiety disorder characterized by intense fear in social situations causing considerable distress and impaired ability to function in at least some parts of daily life. It is a rather extreme form of social phobia (SP), although the latter is sometimes treated synonymously.

Many autistic people don’t have social phobia at all. Autism and social phobia are commonly found together, but they are completely different things.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2011 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Autism research.