I saw the movie a few years ago and strongly relate to the patients in the movie. My movement disorder (parkinsonlike/"autistic catatonia") takes very, very similar forms in many ways. I figured out the part about stopping when the floor pattern changed before the guy in the movie did, because I used to do that when I could walk more, and I still have trouble crossing other kinds of boundaries. Obviously my condition isn't usually as severe as theirs (severity fluctuates, and I've spent long periods of time unable to move at all), but it sure seems to affect similar systems in my brain.
Some resources on movement differences in autism, starting with the journal article that resulted in my accurate diagnosis of the problem after years of misdiagnosis:
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/176/4/357
http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/?pageId=468
http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1060/1225
http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/index.php?pageId=464
http://www.sandiego.edu/soles/documents ... rences.pdf
Also, I found that even though (when I move quasi-normally) there can be little sign outwardly of the fact that I am struggling a great deal to move, my galvanic skin response (when testing a device at MIT for other reasons) showed very obvious increases in physiological stress levels whenever I did something as "simple" as wiggle my toes. And yet, for automatic movements (such as rocking) or "triggered" movements (such as typing when a keyboard is put in front of me), that stress level did not rise the same way. So it basically showed how difficult it is for me to move even on my best days/moments, something I never dreamed would be confirmable by an objective test. (We discovered it by mistake, when someone asked me why my stress level kept rising and I said "because I'm moving" and they said "It's not supposed to do that..." and then we tested a bunch of things.) And it showed the difference between purely voluntary movement and triggered/automatic movements, which the people in the movie also had to a more extreme degree. With the movement disorder I have, the gap between voluntary and triggered movements has basically been slowly widening over the years. It doesn't just affect physical movement, but also memory, thinking, writing/language, and other forms of "cognitive movement", which is why also more and more I'm unable to do things like recall something without a memory cue, or write something that doesn't just happen automatically or get triggered (like if I set out to write something I'm just setting myself up for endless frustration, but if something triggers the words to come out of my fingers, such as now, I can be rather eloquent).
I got a chance to briefly meet the doctor depicted in the movie and talk about strategies I use to trigger movements in my daily life. He told me that I resemble a lot of his patients with real Parkinson's (instead of just in the parkinsonian family, which is what I have) in that respect: they often have rather elaborate ways they set up their physical environment so that motion can be triggered so they don't just freeze up. Additionally my cat is very adept in finding ways to trigger movement by fairly complex nudging and head-bumping (she's technically a service animal because of this), and when I freeze completely she will walk up and down around my body and bump different body parts in a certain order until I can move again. (People never entirely believe me on this until I witness it, and yet there are dogs ("Parkinson pups") trained to do the exact same thing. I guess people are just less willing to believe that cats can learn some of the things that dogs can learn.)
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"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams
07 Nov 2010, 9:13 am
