Laila Al-Misawi, who lives in Oujda, eastern Morocco, told “Sky News Arabia”: “Family members discovered that their son had autism after they noticed excessive introversion and a tendency towards isolation from the outside world, as well as difficulties in verbal and kinesthetic communication.”
Umm Saad tells how the doctor’s diagnosis of her son’s condition prompted her to try to understand this disorder and to enroll in training courses in order to acquire techniques for training autistic children and develop her son’s skills, in addition to benefiting from treatment classes, which helped her son adapt in his surroundings.
Umm Saad pointed to the extent of the suffering endured by families of autistic children, whether due to the high costs of treatment or the difficulty of integrating their children into school or other challenges.
Saad’s family is considered one of the thousands of Moroccan families that suffer great hardship for their children in order to extricate them from their isolation and help them integrate into society like their peers of children.
The importance of early diagnosis
The symptoms of autism spectrum disorder begin to appear, according to specialists, in the early years, among the most prominent of which is the child’s tendency towards isolation. Symptoms develop in autism spectrum patients at the level of difficulty in social communication and interaction with others, in addition to the delay in speech and the repetition of stereotyped behaviors.
The psychologist and director of the Center for Autistic Persons in Tetouan (North), Adel Senhaji, says that the discovery of autism disorder at an early age is a conducive factor for the affected child to respond better to treatment, and contributes to improving his abilities and ability to integrate into his surroundings and within society.
In a statement to “Sky News Arabia”, Senhaji stresses the importance of sensitizing mothers and fathers to this disease, and introducing its symptoms within society in order to differentiate between it and a number of similar disorders, considering that this would help families discover the strike of their children in the early stages.
The psychologist also stresses that treating a child with autism requires that he be presented to specialists in various paramedical fields, including speech therapy, behavioral therapy, psychomotor psychology and special education.
Disability specialists call for giving more importance to children with this type of behavioral disorders, by providing rehabilitation programs and establishing special centers to provide all the necessary needs for this category.
According to the standard adopted by the World Health Organization, which states that one child out of 100 children worldwide is affected, Afaf Affan Aji, head of the coalition of associations working in the field of autism in Morocco, says that there are about 400,000 people with autism in Morocco.
In a statement to “Sky News Arabia”, Iji considers that despite the important strides Morocco has made in order to introduce autism in the Kingdom, people with this disease still suffer from its consequences, in light of the great shortage of specialists at the medical and semi-medical levels.
The spokeswoman added that a number of families suffer in silence due to the high costs of treatment and the failure of their homes to respect specific standards for embracing and taking good care of the autistic child, in addition to challenges related to the child’s integration into his school environment and the inadequacy of educational curricula to cope with the needs of this group.
Aji stresses the importance of providing school life facilities for children with autism in order to reduce the burden on families, many of whom are unable to allocate facilities for their children.
government program
In 2019, Morocco launched a vocational rehabilitation program to take care of people with autism, which aims to provide highly qualified national expertise in the field of caring for people with autism, and to rehabilitate the frameworks of health and social institutions working in this field.
In addition to improving the quality of services provided to people with autism, the program also seeks to enable members of families concerned with autism to have a good understanding of treatment programs and the most effective way to deal with their children in this field.
This program comes to fill the obvious shortcoming recorded by the Ministry of Family and Solidarity in the level of services provided to persons with autism, as it recommended the rehabilitation and improvement of care and rehabilitation programs, and the inclusion of training in the field of autism among the priorities of public policy.
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