Drawings of stick figures by autistic children in Burkina Faso

Our study aims to address the lack of information on childhood autism in Burkina Faso. It focuses on examining the level of intellectual development, body image formation and emotional life of Burkinabe children with autism spectrum disorder. Royer's stick figure drawing test was used to examine our hypothesis that there is a certain similarity between the stick figures drawn by Burkinabé children with autism and those drawn by children with autism described in the scientific literature, particularly children with autism in Europe. Indeed, the distinctive feature of this test is that it allows for both a normative approach (focusing on the details of the drawing) and a qualitative approach (focusing on the symbolism of the graphic representations) to children's stick-figure drawings. We therefore adopted a psychoanalytic approach within psychopathology to interpret the graphic representations collected from the children. The cases studied are, respectively, the Alpha case, the Brahim case, the Clément case and the Julie case.