"Autism Awareness Training Program" was organized in cooperation with Üsküdar University Vocational School of Health Services (SHMYO) Occupational Health and Safety Program and Young Red Crescent Club. The event aimed to raise awareness about Autism Spectrum Disorder and emphasized the importance of early diagnosis and intervention.
Üsküdar University Young Red Crescent Club President Kübranur Baştekin and Occupational Health and Safety Program Head Dr. Lecturer Gamze Kağan made the opening speeches of the program. Gamze Kağan made the opening speeches.
The event, which was held in Beylerbeyi conference hall, was attended by Psychological Counselor Specialist. Psychologist Can Kamsız, Clinical Psychologist Meryem İntaş and Clinical Psychologist Murat Çelik attended the event. Üsküdar University Faculty of Health Sciences, Head of Occupational Health and Safety Department Dr. Lecturer. Prof. Dr. Rüştü Uçan also participated.
Young Red Crescent Club President Kübranur Baştekin: "We are trying to meet everything expected from a club"
Üsküdar University Young Red Crescent Club President Nurse Kübranur Baştekin talked about their activities. Baştekin; "As the President of the Red Crescent Club, I would like to tell you about the activities we do because when it comes to the Red Crescent Club, everyone thinks of blood collection activities. We do those too, but in addition to these activities, we go to children's love homes, we go to nursing homes. We spent a lot of time in the earthquake zone, we provided a lot of aid. Apart from that, we organize workshops, trainings, seminars and workshops. We try to meet everything expected from a club. If we are lucky, we will have a Syria project at the end of the year. In addition to the Syria project, we also want to organize an event in Hatay. We want to go to the regions affected by the earthquake in Hatay beforehand and organize both a festival and an aid distribution."
Uzm. Psychologist Can Kamsız: "Our aim is to raise awareness"
Providing information to the participants about the Psychological Counseling Unit, Psychological Counselor Specialist. Psychologist Can Kamsız; "I would like to tell you a little bit about the Psychological Counseling Unit. In the Psychological Counseling Unit, we are trying to serve our students together with our esteemed Clinical Psychologist Görkem Altıntaş Atasoy and Clinical Psychologist Hazal Erkan Arıman. These services include one-to-one counseling sessions, solution-oriented interviews, crisis intervention interviews, and when necessary, when there are processes that cannot be spent or continued in psychotherapy or solution-oriented sessions, we cooperate in the field of psychiatry at Üsküdar University NPISTANBUL Hospital and carry out consultations. Today, our aim is to raise awareness about Autism Spectrum Disorder, which is actually very important for us. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder and the reason we call it a spectrum is that each individual with autism is unique and their needs are different from each other."
Prof. Dr. Assist. Gamze Kağan: "When we talk to a deaf person by shouting, we act as if they will hear"
Occupational Health and Safety Program Head Dr. Lecturer. Gamze Kağan; "Today we organized an event based on Autism education awareness. We felt the need to do this program with our teacher Can Kamsız. I realized that I don't have much knowledge about these issues and that if I know, we can act more consciously and be instrumental in good things. As Can teacher said, 'a new language of communication'. When it comes to autism, it is a bit of our ignorance. We put it in the status of disability, so how to treat a disabled citizen? In fact, we also treat the disabled wrong. We treat a deaf person as if they can hear us when we shout at them. We thought about what we can do in order not to do these things, to be more conscious, more beneficial to our environment and to act without harming it. We organized this event by realizing that we need it in this regard."
Kln. Psk. Meryem İntaş: "One in 36 children seems to be diagnosed with autism"
Clinical Psychologist Meryem İntaş pointed out that early diagnosis and intervention is very important in autism; "I graduated from Istanbul University in 2000. I have been working in this field for 24 years and fifty percent of my time is spent with children with Autism Spectrum. When we ask the mothers, they say; 'I felt it was different when I was breastfeeding. You can recognize it from direct eye contact and physical relationship with you. The diagnosis is usually not made before the age of 3. Child psychiatrists and neurologists make this diagnosis. Until the age of 3, it is usually not diagnosed. It can usually disappear with education, perhaps without a diagnosis. Recently, Autism Spectrum Disorder has been confused with Reactive Attachment Disorder and screen exposure. In fact, its number seems to have increased. Currently, when we look at the literature, it seems that one in 36 children is diagnosed with autism. I think this is not a situation related to an increase in the number of children, but rather to the fact that such children reach the clinics and the awareness of the society in this sense increases. Previously, grandmothers and grandfathers used to perceive the characteristics of children and say, "It's nothing, don't try to stick something on the child. What were mothers doing about this? The father spoke late, the mother spoke late, and so on. Now that this awareness has been raised, they can reach clinics more quickly. In fact, I think in this sense, it is not as if the number of autism has increased, but the rate of coming to clinics has increased. With early intervention and early diagnosis, it can be ensured that such children can get rid of this diagnosis in the early period, perhaps without ever entering that diagnosis group."
Kln. Psk. Murat Celik "We are born equal but different from each other"
Clinical Psychologist Murat Çelik emphasized that people should treat a different individual with their own language of expression; "We are all human and different from each other. We are born equal but different from each other. These differences are our psychological and physiological characteristics. We were born with these physiological characteristics, do we need a label? Actually, of course, the way an individual with autism is treated should be the same as the way a normal individual is treated. I say normal because unfortunately the society we live in brings these concepts and we use these concepts. When your perspective on this changes, you can clearly understand and communicate with the other person. If we treat an individual with autism differently from the way you treat any other person, as if they have autism, then the spectrum between the two people there will continue. So we have to talk and treat a different individual with your own expression, open communication, empathy, not with their difference. Emotion cannot exist on its own because neurologically, between the ages of 3-6, our brains make ten billion neurological connections. Until the age of 6, no matter how much of these connections we use, the brain cuts the part we cannot use with scissors and discards it. In other words, if you have not learned or heard a foreign language from your family or anywhere between the ages of 3 and 6, you have difficulty learning it after the age of 6. Does this difficulty make us different? No, everyone's characteristics have to be different from each other, but if this difference restricts and hinders the social life of the individual, what we need to do here is to understand him, listen to him and communicate with him compassionately."
The program ended after taking a group photo.