I am a man living with Aspergers Syndrome, a form of Autism. And with this comes a range of difficulties, feelings and emotions. Yet, the nature of Autism is such that no two individuals diagnosed with it will ever be completely the same and thus I am unable to fully appreciate how the condition affects others who have it. This is particularly true of the opposite sex. It has been established that females with the condition experience a very different set of problems resulting from it, problems that I am not fully able to understand, and also that many women can slip through the cracks, going completely undetected – hence a key reason why so many fewer women are diagnosed than men. After watching this short video, Feelings of Girls and Women with Autism, however, I am much closer to such an understanding than I was before.
“This video describes the feelings often faced by girls with Asperger Syndrome”
- Laura Paxton
Just like other short videos on Autism that I have reviewed, this film features a succession of still images – intercut with text segments – set to music and just like every one of the others it also manages to put across a unique (uniqueness is something that is very much synonymous with Autism) perspective and the manner in which it paints the struggle of girls and women with Autism proves very effective, the imagery (both photos and artwork that illustrate the points being made) used being both hauntingly beautiful and heartbreakingly sad at the same time, the words used to describe the feelings being very eloquent and poetic, and the musical accompaniment being suitably enchanting and appropriate to the mood the film is trying to create. While the film is very short it successfully says a lot about key feelings being experienced by females with Autism – the lack of understanding of social cues, the desire to have friends and fit in, the feeling of loneliness, the fantasy worlds that girls with the condition often lose themselves in, the “special interests” they comfort themselves with, the “social vortex” they get lost in, the way they imitate others in an effort to fit in, the fact that the condition can affect anyone regardless of culture and the stress and exhaustion that can result from the condition – and if you watch this beautifully made video you are sure to have a greatly improved understanding of the difficulties faced by girls and women with Autism with afterwards. I certainly did.
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This is a follow up to my previous post which included the full film of Feelings of Girls and Women with Autism and can be found here:
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/10/short-film-feelings-of-girls-and-women.html
Review by Robert Mann BA (Hons)
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