Autism in the Media

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I wish it was simply a matter of having autistics portrayed more realistically in the media. The problem I have with neurotypicals is that they simply cannot understand autism even when they have had a good unbiased explanation. It is just as hard for us to understand them, too. We are indeed not from this planet, and do not really belong here. My current strategy is to maintain a low profile. The less they know about me the better, imo.

If you want to know the worst things people think you should check out AS Partners on Delphi. http://forums.delphiforums.com/ASPartne ... listMode=1
There's a hate site if ever there was one but it's interesting to listen to what people really think. Just don't post anything, whatever you do.

Beliefs are not great truthes, remember that.

You’re quite right. It’s a two-way street. It’s not enough for the media to do all the work, not when there are such insensitive clods in the world as the ones in the movie audience that day. Sadly there’s no cure for stupidity.

Like you, I feel I don’t belong on this earth either, and when I was in my 40’s I contemplated suicide. I could not work or live among the NTs, because they were always judging me, or touching me without my permission. They have no respect for personal space and can’t seem to mind their own business. I’m retired now so I very rarely have to spend any time among them, thank goodness.

uote="Claudius"]I wish it was simply a matter of having autistics portrayed more realistically in the media. The problem I have with neurotypicals is that they simply cannot understand autism even when they have had a good unbiased explanation. It is just as hard for us to understand them, too. We are indeed not from this planet, and do not really belong here. My current strategy is to maintain a low profile. The less they know about me the better, imo.[/quote]

The myths must be dispelled.

I'm waiting for the day they retract the belief that people "on the spectrum" lack empathy. This belief makes people believe that we are less. Some of us have extreme empathy. If I look at someone crying, it makes me cry 100% of the time. When someone gets hurt, I feel pain in the same place they have been injured. If someone looks over the edge, I get the feeling of falling. Your anxiety becomes my anxiety. Over time, I have learned to turn off *some* of what is too much to handle. It's quite possible that I am on a different end of "The Spectrum".

I am not neurotypical, but I can pass most of the time. I hide from the label of "being on the spectrum" because I refuse to allow people to think I am less than human. The only spectrum I belong to is the human spectrum. No two of us are simply a category. We are not "a" thing but many things. We are not sick, we have a different type of wellness. We can not be fixed as we are already perfectly what we were created to be.

I Love us. We are designed by God for a special purpose.

That bit about not having empathy rings a bell. When I told my siblings I had Asperger's, they both said they had seen a documentary that said AS lack empathy. Even though I explained that I did have empathy ad nauseam, they persist to this day to maintain I lack empathy.

The conventional wisdom not to tell anybody about your AS except your close relatives... no. Don't tell anybody. It never works like you think it should.

You're quite right about that. It's too easy for everything you convey after that point to be seen not for what it is, but what it is perceived to be under the lens of your non neurotypical image. In other words, you will be minimized as a human being and maximized as an autistic persona. What I have observed by watching other out of the closet persons on the spectrum is that sometimes people will even try to grant you perpetual child status. "You think that because <insert autistic reference>"

No one deserves that, which is why I feel labels are dangerous. No two people are alike, but you will be reduced to being perceived exactly like the only references they have experienced.

Make new friends, volunteer, be your best self, not someone else's. It takes time to erase the label, but it can be done. (((Hugs)))

You are extremely lucky to have been diagnosed at 9. I was born in 1976 and not diagnosed until 2010 when I was 33. There's a whole lost childhood and lost potential for the rest of my life that can never be recovered. There are no services or resources for autistic adults, and there was fcuk all when I was a kid. I was just labeled freak, gifted, and whatever other exclusionary term they could think of to throw at me.

I've seen the criticism of Atypical. And I've watched it with great interest. I think it's pretty great and gotten lots of undeserved flak from the online autism community. For one thing, it's making a real effort to address serious issues around dating and sexuality when this community studiously refuses to address the subject. It is including and speaking to me when no autism site, forum, hashtag, group, etc online will do so. Second, it is showing that we have the same normal human desires and needs as everyone else. We're no less sexual than anyone else, and the systemic pattern of desexualizing people with disabilities is entrenched and pernicious. Third, it begins to open a discussion on all the fatal problems with the dating system, and how we need to change it and teach/raise young people to navigate other people and get their needs met for the rest of their lives. This is barely being done anywhere in our society today.

There's a bizarre strain of autism "advocacy" that seems to think all autistic people are required to be either queer or asexual, or else we're somehow not legitimately autistic, and we have no right to exist, speak, be heard, be represented, or in any way treated as equals or participants in the community. My sense is very much that THIS is the real problem behind most of the autistic criticism of Atypical--it dares to portray an autistic person who is neither queer nor asexual. THAT is the horrible transgression so many people just can't stand. They don't want us to exist in real life, and they don't want our existence acknowledged on screen. Your sexuality is fine, whatever it is, but that doesn't mean everyone else has to share it. There is a reason why 40% of autistic adults never have romantic relationships, and a reason why our suicide rate is 28 times the norm. Real, ongoing portrayal of the major problems we face in life is progress. I can only hope the autism community online will someday be equally willing to address the topic. I'd far rather die than be unable to have love or sex.

Do you want help with dating? Let's start with that. I am a female, married with children.

Some of us are making our own media over on Wattpad. A keyword search of autism and aspergers yields stories featuring the neurodiverse. We are told to "write what we know," so my MC is high functioning Aspergers.

Voted "Most Eccentric" by my high school classmates. Community Psychologist, open about my diagnosis and opposed to its removal from the DSM and ICD.

If it were available, yes. But it's not, at least in the US. What we need is social skill training for dating for autistic people. Americans won't offer this. I'm definitely not interested in one person's subjective, self-serving, judgemental opinions--what we usually get. https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/dat ... -1.3389380

When I grew up, (born in the 1940s) there were no descriptions of autism in the media. The first time I ever saw the word in the media was about 50 years later, a court case where a mother tried for murder was convicted but discharged on the basis that her daughter "had autism" and this was considered to exculpate the parent, "who had suffered enough". At that time, as I read it, I did not know that I was also the mother of an autistic child, and autistic myself. I didn't know that autism affected my maternal and paternal relatives. All I knew was that autism was grounds for killing a person unlucky enough to "have" it, and the judge's comments were widely publicised with the implication that the dead victim was in some way not really a human life, and that we who had normal children were very fortunate.

The second time I heard the word autism was when my son came to me in tears, 21 years ago, having just been told that his infant son had been diagnosed "with autism". I was very shocked and immediately thought of the murder victim.

My son is the father of 3 adult children. The youngest is the 21 year old, and his autism is overt; his two older sisters were never diagnosed, because they both were "covert" presences on the spectrum - the eldest BAP (like her Dad) and the middle child Asperger's (like me), the third my very-autie-out-there grandson. We were always able to support the first two ourselves in positive ways and build close bonds, no doubt because of our own innate understanding (even though we didn't know we had that innate understanding then) of how they perceived and experienced the world; we were a bit baffled with the youngest until we realised what a profound visual (not verbal) and kinesthetic learner he was. A psychologist picked the profound visual learning talent up when he was in infancy. That information changed our lives and his. We developed a new understanding and gained knowledge that helped us guide and support him through an education system that never understood and was uninterested in trying to. He, like his older sisters, is a significant achiever now, in his case in a very competitive sporting field perfectly suited to his own individual aptitudes and ability.

When this particular grandson (I have two others, the children of my NT daughter, twins who are both on the spectrum) was still in infancy, I told my two closest female (both NT) friends about my grandson's diagnosis. From that day, to my great dismay, one looked at and treated him as if he were some kind of noxious insect, a look on her face that I never could see without feeling pain, nor have I forgotten it, and because that treatment is absorbed by children, I made sure that when he stayed with me, he was never exposed to the look in her eyes, nor her presence, because children are great absorbers of silent attitudes and toxic glances. Those fearful hateful suspicious glances are part of the dehumanisation process that is the most toxic influence in the lives of AS children.

My other close female adult friend never met him but rushed to sympathise and said he must be put into an institution for the sake of my son's marriage. Knowing what a dear child he was, I was deeply hurt and shocked by her response, though I found it easier to forgive her ignorance and response than the other "looking at him as a noxious insect" friend, because I knew that the comment about protecting my son's marriage was based on the same information and impression formented by the same famous court report that I had once read. It was big news here at the time, the only time that a parent had been convicted and discharged sympathetically for murdering their child by a New Zealand court. Now such murderers are sentenced, though these are rare events here (much rarer than the USA) and the sentences may still be relatively lenient.

So autism depictions in the media have always been a significant issue for me, and that toxic judgment long ago had long lasting impacts on me and on the public generally, which I believe still linger in New Zealand, though there has been what I would call "door opening" progress.

In 1989, New Zealand enacted a piece of legislation that required broadcasters to provide fair and balanced coverage. A couple of years ago I began to refer to it and discuss it with broadcasters whenever they presented distorted representations of autism, and at last in the past year their coverage has been far more informed. Instead of talking about autism, autistic people have been elevated to central focus, speaking about their lives and treatment by others in documentaries where they tell their own story (recently) and there has been a marked shift in media coverage generally. The media has learned a lot, and it was the media who had to learn "how to listen", not autistic people.

I will do my best to locate a recent stunning example of this changed media coverage and post a link to it. It is an extraordinary self-told life story by a middle aged AS man which showed on Television New Zealand in prime time this year.

It is possible for change to occur, but we have to make the effort first to educate those who are disseminating myths, which I chose to do by lobbying broadcasters directly. I think it is more that we have to be proactive in educating them than just listening to what they may sincerely but wrongly believe.

I see it as a three stage process. First, their knowledge changes; Second, their attitudes start to shift after that. The third stage is that they begin to see us as human beings, and not as "the other". The third stage is, I think, the largest shift and the hardest for them to transverse. The changes take time, the shift from lobbying to incipient partnership, but change can be achieved.

..

The documentary cited above is:
I Am Living With Asperger's - David RS Greer

Date shown: Tuesday 19 June 2018 Television New Zealand (TV1)

The promo read: "This week's episode of I AM documents the life of David RS Greer and his journey through life through the lens of someone with the Asperger's syndrome".

It can be accessed through a process of going to Television New Zealand's "TVNZ On Demand" page, then you have to register there and log in to view past programmes. It is free and they don't contact you, TVNZ is a reputable state broadcaster funded by the NZ government.

This made me cry reading it. I am so sorry. We are worthy of life. We belong to the earth.

God made us as we are. We have made amazing contributions to humanity. I wish someone would make a documentary about the contributions to humanity made by non neurotypical people. We have Tesla, Einstein, and many other great minds who have changed the way masses experienced life itself.

We have a lot of non neurotypical people in my family too, on both sides. None of us sought a diagnosis because we all managed to fit in. We were just US. We are inventors, musicians. I have a non NT daughter who can play literally any instrument within minutes of picking it up. I have an non NT son who could speak and read at 1 year of age. The list goes on. We have bionic senses, hear electricity, feel EMF, changes in air pressure, elevation, have synesthesia. We are not linear thinkers and have had to learn to express ourselves in a linear fashion because the mass of humans are linear thinkers. We make eye contact, deep eye contact with our familiars, but we are not comfortable with making eye contact with angry people. Most of us are meeker than most. I always remember that the Bible says The meek shall inherit the earth. That's a lot of us, really. I have theories that many of us were born with too much empathy and shut off some things to cope. I have tooooooo much empathy. I say too much, but what I mean is much much more than average.

Recently, a lot of children in my family have been "diagnosed". I quietly observe the inner panic they are experiencing. They don't yet realize that they are already surrounded by non NT people that they didn't quite know are different, because it's familiar to us. It's not even something that has occurred to us to talk about. Some of us have struggled and then overcome. I consider that a blessing because...we have always been around people like us who have learned to cope and have modeled that behavior. For example, I have a son that I had to teach to give people an arm's length of personal space. We are quite cozy people. lol I let all my children sleep with me until they got too big. For us, there is an innate feeling of physical closeness that feels like love. It's a feeling that just is and has no judgement. I can describe it, but I don't know if I can make you understand it. It's a feeling that emanates from your chest and circulates between you and another person. Anyway, my daughters all have their own bedroom but they still all sleep together in the living room like a basket of kittens. I home schooled my kids to save them a bit of grief and they are better off for it because by the time they are adults, they will still have intact self esteem and have already have been taught social skills.

Well, I deviated from my point a little, but I am reeling it in. lol My cousin's daughter was recently diagnosed with autism. (Also "diagnosed" this year: my sister's daughter, another cousin's son, my nieces daughter) I think that people in the middle of the spectrum should have to be "diagnosed" as mediocre. ^_^ She was very worried and so I reached out to her. I just said "It's going to be ok, she will find her way." Then I told her that being a little different runs in our family, and then right after, I perceived that this made her even more worried. She has another little girl and is probably now worried that her other daughter will have it too. I wanted to name off all the people in my family who I believe are not neurotypical, but I didn't.

In closing (You're welcome lol) I don't believe that being plotted somewhere on the spectrum of humans is very helpful at all. Instead, just loving everyone and working on individual issues and enhancing strengths is the answer. I have often thought that a school that mostly focuses on social skills would be far more helpful than a label slapped on a person. It's a cop out really. There is no label that could ever adequately fully describe a person and it serves in most cases to isolate and ignore all the other attributes while dismissing what would actually be healing for the person. Bless You Friend. Let's be part of a change that heals our people.

^ oh dear, you're going to make me cry

Unless Mr. MacPhisto signed a release for the psychologist to do what he did. Sometimes it's a condition of employment. As an example, my insurance policy at work offered 100% Disability coverage if I would authorize 100% release of my medical records to the insce company, back to my birth. I didn't sign. But it was just a dinky little paper among the things you sign to get a job.

Without such a release, I agree - sue that psychologist right out of practice. You could begin by calling whatever Psychologist's Association he belongs to and ask if there have been any complaints.

I'm a person with Autism who was diagnosed late in life. They didn't have a term for me growing up when my mom took me to Drs because I was different. I was called hyper-active because I liked to hop around on one foot or roll my body into a ball and roll around the living room. I was ignored and push outside social groups even inside my own home because they found me odd and irritating. I struggled my entire life to figure out why people reacted to me negatively and tried so hard not to do things I thought caused the reaction. I felt so very alone, like a freak, like an alien, and hated myself for not being "normal" like my sister. I had to develop coping mechanisms to be able to even try live in this world.

The first glimmer of recognition, I had that maybe I wasn't just a failure at being like everyone else was the TV show The Big Bang Theory. They never diagnosed Sheldon as Autistic but I recognized in him, a person who has struggled with many of the same things I have throughout my life. This led to me researching people who had similar traits and then to a therapist where I was diagnosed.

I now find myself looking for autistic characters, people who I can relate too. I just wish that the entertainment industry represented the entire spectrum more effectively. I have faced both at work and my personally life people who state I can't be autistic because I don' t match the image they have of Autism. Maybe if people from all parts of the spectrum become mainstream, it will be easier to gain acceptance.