Autism: learning to love difference

Presenter Louis Theroux has an engaging knack of introducing his television audience to a topic without getting in the way. In being careful to avoid any impression that he knows anything about the issue being presented, he skilfully leaves us with no more than our own interpretation.

The result, his BBC2 Extreme Love: Autism documentary was a programme that effectively dismantled any remaining myth that people with autism are just like the hero in Rain Man. Not that such a manifestation does not exist but more that autism exists across a baffling spectrum, several offered to the viewer simply, graphically.

The span of behaviours, intellect, ability or barriers to communication, puzzling outbursts of agonising aggression; each was offered through the characters presented. The children and young people filmed were puzzling, beguiling, humorous, skilful, inquisitive and, occasionally, with an insight into their own condition that introduced us to that most complex of challenges to our notions of disablism: that the personality and condition are intertwined to such an extent that to excise the one from the other would be to deny the personhood of the individual. That autism is a different experience of the world is undeniable.

The hopes, fears, sense of loss and stresses pervading the lives of the parents portrayed seem universal and hardly mitigated by the featured school, complete with its shopping mall.

Years ago I attended a seminar from which I recall just one phrase, the sociologist delivering it explained that “a personal crisis occurs when your personal narrative is no longer comprehendible to you”. I was reminded of the phrase while watching Extreme Love: Autism.

Some parents talked of a cure; others demonstrated the astonishing, humbling inner reserves that those who try to support parents witness every day.

Improving options and futures for young people with autism by devising decent, relevant services is the absolute duty of any civilised society, one may even assert that no society can claim to be civilised if it has not done so. Restoring a comprehendible personal narrative is, for some perhaps, beyond the reach of even the most dedicated professional.

Andy Lusk is director of autism services at Ambitious about Autism. Follow Ambitious about Autism on Twitter https://twitter.com/#/ambitiousautism