I wrote recently about my experiences of growing up going to a special school, and about how that meant I came into contact with young people with a wide range of disabilities. That includes kids with autism. While, to my knowledge, none of the young people in my class was on the autistic spectrum, many of the kids at school were quite profoundly autistic, and my experiences there have done a great deal to inform my conception of what autism is. It is a profoundly debilitating condition, as severe and serious as any other disability. The young people at school who had it were profoundly disabled and could barely do anything for their selves.

The problem is, as I started to explain here, these days the term seems to be being used more and more flippantly. This morning, for instance, I was on the tube up to Stratford when I overheard a teenager describe someone as “Obviously on the spectrum”. I must admit it immediately caught my ear: the statement was made so flippantly and casually that it could almost have been a joke, as if Autism is now nothing more than a mere social trend. People have apparently began to pin such labels upon one another at will, probably thinking they sound clever for doing so but obviously having no understanding of what being autistic really entails. Yet in so doing the terms they use so casually loose all meaning. When I think back to the young people I saw at school, barely able to do anything for them selves, I can’t help finding it sickening to hear such terms now being used in this way, as if being autistic just means you have a few personal quirks, and is no more significant than someone’s hair colour.