Being autistic does not mean you have an illness or disease. It means your brain works in a different way from other people. It's something you're born with or first appears when you're very young. If you're autistic, you're autistic your whole life. Autism is not a medical condition with treatments or a "cure". But some people need support to help them with certain things. It affects how people communicate and interact with the world. One in 100 people are on the autism spectrum and there are around 700,000 autistic adults and children in the UK.  

Autistic people may act in a different way to other people

Autistic people may:

• find it hard to communicate and interact with other people
• find it hard to understand how other people think or feel
• find things like bright lights or loud noises overwhelming, stressful or uncomfortable
• get anxious or upset about unfamiliar situations and social events
• take longer to understand information
• do or think the same things over and over