Autism in the Media

Post Reply New Topic

After watching the most recent The Office special, I think David Brent might well have been meant to be the autistic character.

I don't think so. Though I think it's good to portray autistic people as capable of romantic and sexual desires, I think the criticism was more that the autistic character came across as creepy and inappropriate in some times, and his girlfriend was controlling of him sometimes (e.g. telling him he could only talk about his special interest three times a day), rather than portraying a healthy relationship between an autistic and NT. Apart from that, from what I saw, the portrayal of autism seemed overly stereotyped, with inappropriate comments and such, rather than being a more subtle and nuanced portrayal.

Yeah, that is EXACTLY the kind of thing that happens to autistic people who venture into the cruel dating world. It needs to be shown, it needs to be discussed, it needs to be prevented. If that had been available when I was a teen, I might have had a romantic relationship by now. The autism community online still refuses to touch these issues.

No one is refusing. Can you put into concrete terms exact what you think is needed? I have often imagined what a program that could help adults would look like. Maybe a camp etc where social skills can be modeled. I truly want you and all of us to learn to how to be happy.

I am going to give you a mini guide. I don't know you, so I can't offer any specific advice on things you may need to work on, but I can give you a general guideline. I do not know your areas of difficulty. If you feel that somehow something went wrong and you don't know what it was ( and you don't want it to be in a public forum) you can message me and maybe I can help you.

Have faith that God created you for a purpose and he has a plan for your life. You are loved, your life has meaning and God does not mean for you to be alone. Pray and ask God to show you the way. I am going to pray for you too.

To meet people, you need to find something you really care about and volunteer regularly. This also helps you with your self esteem. You are not just some helpless guy who has nothing to offer. You are someone who has a lot to offer. If you are willing to give, you will receive, that's just how life works. The more you are around and become familiar with people, the more likely you are to feel at ease and figure out if you have a connection.

Get a part time job if you can. This is another way to meet people and build your self esteem.

Get a dog that you can take for walks and have as a companion.

Find things to be thankful for. Are you healthy? There's one. You have shelter? There's another, etc. I believe that gratitude attracts all the beautiful things to you and envy repels them.

1. You should have amazing hygiene and make it your signature. Always look your best, wear clean clothes, have your hair brushed, teeth brushed, clean fingernails. You should be someone that is physically pleasant to be around.
1 B. Don't allow yourself to ever be a slob in your home. Being a slob is a frame of mind.
2. Learn to make eye contact. Yes, it can be learned. Practice it.
3. Learn to listen to what the person is saying and respond to what the person is saying. Keep your conversation on track.
4. Learn to ask questions to find out what you have in common. Stop yourself from droning on about something the other person is not interested in. (Looking away, no longer speaking, fidgeting- these are the signs)
5. Learn to go of some of your rigidity. You can never expect a person to be just like you. Thinking you are right and being right are often subjective. Some things are not a choice with autistic people but some are also just bad habits that become even worse when you spend too much time alone.
6. Do not focus on sex as being your prime objective or you are never going to get it. Sex is not about you. The more you are obsessed about this as a prime focus, the farther away it's going to get. Really, you should be married before you have sex, so you should be thinking more about finding someone with whom you can fall in love. In the meantime, maybe you can read about how to be a good lover. I think that is actually the noble thing to do.
7. Learn chivalry. Can you remember to open a door etc? Do you know how to cook? ( If not, learn and taking classes is another way you can meet people) Do you remember birthdays? Are video games etc more important to you than a girl? She will hit the road if that is the case.

I am sorry if this is not exactly what you had in mind, but I don't have something concrete to address.

This article addresses a lot of what's being discussed here and struck a chord with me. https://aeon.co/essays/the-autistic-vie ... cal-cliche

It's horrifying to realize that NT people tend to assume that we feel neither emotions nor even physical pain, or that we are incapable of empathy or seeing things from another's point of view. If anything I would say most of my social issues stem from feeling too much and needing to avoid overstimulation so that I can remain functional.

For crying out loud, I even study the emotional lives of my fish by watching their behavior and interactions with each other. Incidentally fish are also assumed to have no emotional lives and to be insensitive to pain, both of which I have discovered to be completely untrue. Like us, they have ways of expressing themselves that most people fail to recognize because they either don't care or don't pay attention. There's a book on that subject if anyone is curious. It's called What a Fish Knows by Jonathan Balcombe.

The media doesn't know what it doesn't know; in terms of autism, it may even be prepared to listen (possibly) but the conversation has to be started by approaches (I think) from trained autistic self advocates, people on the AS spectrum who are au fait with the principles of self advocacy for the benefit of marginalised and misunderstood groups.

One of the many reasons that change has not progressed much is that the sector of highly accomplished and verbal
AS people are afraid of coming out of the AS closet.

I don't think that we need to focus on listening so much at this stage. We have heard ourselves being talked about all our lives, and talked at, and talked to, but rarely talked WITH.

There are some good links on autistic self advocacy on the net; ASAN has also been interested in this issue.

The overall point behind this post is that change won't just spontaneously happen, though most AS people seem to be wanting it to happen like that, progress is stuck at an accusatory level eg "why don't they change, how dare they depict AS like that" etc etc. Yet rarely are these statements of hurt and outrage followed up by any focused action that aims to provide dialogue with the goal of improving the media coverage.

Listening is always important, Alex, of course it is; however learning to be listened to is possibly the leap AS people have to make though if widespread change is ever going to be kick-started into a new era.

Threads like this tend to justifiably attract complaints of past coverage, though little in the way of proactive impulses to improve media coverage. Complaining alone is not enough to achieve better, sustained and fair representation in the media, or any other institution.

Lone voices on blogs, valuable as they are for other AS readers, (I have one) are not effective in bringing about institutional change. The old maxim of building bridges rather than walls is at the heart of self advocacy, but I am losing faith that the current younger generation of AS people have yet developed the skills or the wills to take up the advocacy challenge in a trained and considered way. I hope that I will be soundly proved wrong in this pessimist view by their future actions and achievements.

The link above cites some books that were actually written by AS people and feature AS characters. That's a start.

Hopefully as the stigma eases artists and other highly talented people will let that be known more often. Of course, that would help ease the stigma....

So, maybe a bit late on this one (damn you spam box!! !) but, uh... @Alex, is there a particular format you had in mind to share stories? Video/text/pictures/Imgur post/etc.? I'm game. Didn't see anything listed in the article though, only reasoning why it's important (don't need to convince ME though ). I'm an open book!! !

Still married to Witchscat, and still have the DeLorean and our two black cats. Got our own house and living solo, I'm just busy with 3D printing circles and my (new-ish) bipolar too, so haven't posted here in a looooooong while.

EDIT:
HA oh wow, that other silver car in my avatar's background has been gone for ages. I have a Kia Optima now. Didn't know that pic was still around!

Bumping this thread as I see it as one of the most pressing issues facing AS people as a distinct group in society.

I have given it a lot of thought, and hope that this thread will find a readership far beyond Wrong Planet.

The AS community has and continues to experience stereotypical, biased (by both omission and commision) coverage which continues to contribute to the daily aggressions AS people experience - bullying at school and in the workplace, access to employment, competent and respectful medical treatment, and the burnout which is the consequence of ongoing daily discriminations. We alone can probably not effectively lobby to change this alone, though it is important that we do what we can, each according to their situation and ability. We are the primary stakeholders in the vexed situation of autism and the media.

However wider efforts are needed too, so that ALL stakeholders can begin to work with mutual understanding and co-operation.

The media is an exremely powerful instrument and determinator of a group’s inclusion into the mental map of a society, or, on the contrary, it can contribute to the group’s exclusion and disempowerment. Currently the latter is what the media is doing, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes out of agendas, sometimes because of the prevalence of myths disseminated by professionals and researchers - such as the foolish but frequent assertion that all AS people are mentally handicapped.

In general, the scope and the agenda of the typical AS media portrayals coincide with mainstream society’s learned stereotypes about the group - stereotypes generated by NT people with vested interests as in the example of Simon Baron-Cohen, whose career and self-promotion have been extremely damaging to AS people, and another example from a former time is Bettelheim and other self-promoting psychoanalysts. This kind of thing is now mostly appearing from careerist researchers who want to make themselves a big name at the expense of AS people, claiming all sorts of research breakthroughs which are mostly nonsense ie lacking credible substantiation.

There has to be other kinds of change before there can be change in the media coverage itself. To combat such institutionalised disempowerment of an out group, the issues to consider in the first instance are:


1) How can AS people have access to influencing media content
2) The options for roles minority communities can play in challenging stereotypical coverage effectively.

We all know the impacts on each of us personally, and it is important to air them as has been done in this thread thus far.

But what of the bigger picture? What actions, strategies, planning, consultations and dialogues would advance the two issues above?

Perhaps as a first step, what needs to be established is how far apart - the distance in understanding - is between the primary and secondary stakeholders. Focus groups could be used as one step towards this, an initial step that can be built on in later consultative processes.

I very firmly believe that when there is a will, people will initiate a way. I would love to see more commitment to action.

Example
Guest editorial: Is there a path to end the autism by epidemic? By J.B. Handley co founder of Generation Rescue for the Pilot-Independent

B19, I wrote an essay about my late-in-life Asperger's syndrome disclosure (I was diagnosed with autism as a kid but didn't find out until I was 41). I discussed my differences from my peers, other co-morbid conditions that arose from trying to cope with it without help or support, what I have been learning about it and the *good* things as well as the bad, such as special talents and a unique perspective.

This is being shared with a group of 70,000 doctors.

I hope it makes a difference in the way that they see us. Hearing it straight from an Aspie and realizing that, "Hey, these people can be intelligent and articulate... maybe there really is someone in there to whom we should be listening," could change some attitudes. I made sure to mention that some of us are non-verbal but that doesn't mean our brains aren't working. Don't assume that we're a bunch of ambulatory vegetables (paraphrasing there, but you get the point). Also, not always being able to express pain doesn't mean we don't feel it.

It's a start. I hope.

You are a stunning example of proactivity rather than reactivity. Things will never change unless there is the shift from offended reactivity to positive proactivity.

I think your example is one kind of initiative, educational, and that is sorely needed. I also think other kinds of initiatives are needed, like focus group research, to measure:

1) the width and breadth of the current gap between public perception and media perception of AS
2) the extent of mythical beliefs the media currently holds about AS.

That information would provide a foundation for a next step - a tailored approach for follow-up educational interviews with media personnel with power to change things, and journalists' professional organisations.

..
On another matter....
We get a lot of requests here on WP for surveys and research but nearly all of it is for the primary benefit of the researchers who regard us as passive (ie reactive) subjects to be sorted into their predetermined boxes. This is really starting to concern and annoy me. I believe that we need to claim our own agency and only participate in research designs in ways that actually benefit US, and if researchers aren't prepared to be inclusive of AS people, why are we co-operating with them, when years of doing this here in the past has resulted in little and pitiful benefit...

Research can be qualitative, inclusive and a shared product. It takes a more skilled researcher to manage the challenges well. We don't ever seem to get those here...

An excellent article Alex and thank you for sharing. That article touched me in a couple of ways and one is that I used to be a Journalist before my obvious social deficits caught up with me and I had to leave the profession. Believe me I know what it is like to be a news reporter and have your editor tell you to write a story with a certain kind of slant that you really have no say in and it has to come out a certain way or else the article won't be printed. Such is the power of the media and the editors therein.

And of course I had the nickname "Rain Man" growing up because I loved to divulge huge amounts of information about several topics but usually about computer science which is one of my obsessions.

It is funny though that when I saw the movie Rain Man in the 80s I felt a strange connection to the character which I couldn't explain, which was beautifully played by Dustin Hoffman. At that time I was not yet diagnosed with Autism but I had suspected even at that young age.

Quite often the media does tend to take an unrealistic if not accurate approach or perspective towards autistic people within the media forum. I mean often whenever I've seen mass shootings involving a lone gunmen whom tended to be eccentric in one way or another, frequently it's speculated said individual must be autistic. Few people in my own life actually know I'm autistic as, I don't care for negative connotations nor inferrences.

I find that there's not much good on TV period so I don't even bother to watch anything. With that being said I don't know to where I can say whether or not there's a positive or negative representation of autistic people.

I think that autistic media representation has improved over the past 30 years and beyond. I was in high school during the days of Rain Man and it was tough. People underestimated my abilities and I was told a few times that I didn't have a future. We now have characters who hold jobs that I would give my two eye teeth to be able to have the brains to study for and hold down. There were also characters from the 60s such as Boo Radley and Sgt. Schultz.