The Wonderful World of Autism

Film - Alien to the World

2011-08-15T01:17:00.000-07:00

Alien to the World

Alien to the World is a film about my personal experiences with Aspergers Syndrome that I made for my Masters dissertation at Bangor University.

Thanks to everyone who helped me make this project a reality.

Robert Mann MA

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SUMMARY

"Autism is not a puzzle, nor a disease. Autism is a challenge." -Trisha van Berkel

A simple but apt description for not only the wider Autistic Spectrum but also the condition known as Aspergers Syndrome. A form of Autism that affects the social and functional abilities of those who have it, many do not realise the true effect it has on someone who has it.

'Alien to the World' is an attempt to rectify this, offering a glimpse into how one person is affected by the condition on a daily basis and how they struggle to cope with the things most people take for granted. This film offers a personal, and sometimes humorous, view of both what it is like to live with Aspergers Syndrome and how a person with Aspergers views a world which by and large does not accept them.

Alien to the World is based on the personal experiences of writer and director Robert Mann, himself diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, and features music by American musician Lindsey Nebeker, who has a diagnosis of Autism.

CREDITS

Written, Produced, Directed and Edited by Robert Mann
Cinematography by Robert Mann, Nick Williams and Mai Yasuhara
Additional Cinematography by Daivid Mann and Eli Wills
Cinematography Assistance by Nicholas Hintze and Eli Wills
Flash Animations by Robert Mann
Casting by Robert Mann

Robert/Narrator/Maximilian Drake/Masked Man 1 - Robert Mann
Jenny/Hostage - Lizzy Hawley
Alex Roberts - Zara Swanton
Jane Fisk - Eli Wills
Head of Police - Alexandra Coke
Himself - John Edward Green
Himself - Patrick Thomas
Themselves - The members of National Autistic Society Bangor Social Group
Robert's Dad/Cinema Customer - Daivid Mann
Alex Roberts' Boyfriend/Masked Man 2 - Nick Williams
Hostage Taker 1/Maximilian Drake's Employee - Vaibhav Dewan
Hostage Taker 2 - Robert Burstow
Hostage Taker 3 - Matt Ison
People In Bar - The Members of BUFFS
Friends - Lizzy Hawley, Eli Wills and others
Couple - Nick Williams and other

Soundtrack featuring original music by Lindsey Nebeker

Stock music, videos and images courtesy of iStockaudio, iStockvideo and iStockphoto

Creative work and Autistic Ambition Productions ident ©2010 Robert Mann

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If you want to know more about Lindsey Nebeker and her music you can visit these web pages:
http://www.myspace.com/lindseynebeker
http://www.reverbnation.com/lindseynebeker

The following videos can also be viewed on the Autistic Ambition Productions YouTube channel at: http://www.youtube.com/user/AutisticAmbition?feature=mhee#p/u

If you like what you see please also check out the Autistic Ambition Productions Facebook fanpage at: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Autistic-Ambition-Productions/211113208937459

...and the Autistic Ambition Productions Facebook group at: http://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/201522829904879/

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Introduction to Alien to the World

Alien to the World Part 1 of 6

Alien to the World Part 2 of 6

Alien to the World Part 3 of 6

Alien to the World Part 4 of 6

Alien to the World Part 5 of 6

Alien to the World Part 6 of 6

It is my hope that this film will help to raise awareness about the way Autistic people live their lives. Please feel free to post any comments about or reviews of my film. I welcome feedback.

Robert Mann MA

'Autism: The Misunderstood Child' Film Review

2010-10-31T01:30:00.000-07:00

Autism: The Misunderstood Child *****

“I just want to encourage others who feel hopeless, to instead feel hopeful.” These are the words of Kathy Winters, the woman who made this delightful short video entitled Autism: The Misunderstood Child, a dedication to her son Ayden who was diagnosed with Autism in January 2008. Yes, it is essentially just a collection of pictures but it is a collection of pictures that is full of heart, accompanied by a beautiful and inspirational piece of music, statistics and facts about Autism and a superb poem by Kathy that truly comes from the heart, detailing both the plight of her son’s Autism and the wonder that comes from it as well. This short film may only be a homemade video but it is a well made one and one that conveys plenty about what it is like living with Autism and what it truly means to love some who has the condition. Kathy says this of Ayden: “He is special, not because of his limitations, but because of his heart” – simple words that perfectly say why individuals with Autism truly are special. And the closing words – “It’s not hopeless if you love them and believe in their potential” – say so much. If everyone saw this video, perhaps there would be less ignorance in the world about what it means to have Autism.

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This is a follow up to my previous post which contains the full film of Autism: The Misunderstood Child and can be found here: http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/10/short-film-autism-misunderstood-child.html

Review by Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Short Film: 'Autism: The Misunderstood Child'

2010-10-31T01:22:00.001-07:00

The original source for this video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ5JXeGghkc

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Autism: The Misunderstood Child is a very sweet short video that I came across made by a woman as a dedication to her Autistic son. It is both honest and insightful.

A full review of this video will follow shortly.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Feelings of Girls and Women with Autism' Film Review

2010-10-08T01:46:00.000-07:00

Feelings of Girls and Women with Autism *****

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)

Short Film: 'Feelings of Girls and Women with Autism'

2010-10-08T01:29:00.000-07:00

The original source for this video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNFLe2FLKj4

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Feelings of Girls and Women with Autism is a delightful short video that effectively conveys the feelings, emotions and difficulties experienced by females diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders. It is a very beautiful and emotive piece of work that conveys its messages quite eloquently.

A full review for this film will follow shortly.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'I Love Somebody with Autism' Film Review

2010-10-03T01:07:00.000-07:00

I Love Somebody with Autism *****

“Open your eyes. And experience the magic. I will get there when you believe.” These are the words that open I Love Somebody with Autism, another delightful homemade movie about Autism, this time relating more specifically to one person with the condition – a young boy called Jonathan, whose imagination is very much the subject of this film. The film is essentially just a sequence of images set against the rather delightful music of Mariah Carey’s When You Believe but there is something really magical about the way it has been put together. The film isn’t so much trying to put a wider message across as show how gifted and artistic Jonathan is, the film consisting of drawings that he has done (even opening with his own versions of movie studio idents for Disney, Paramount and THX) intermingled with some photos of himself making some of his artistic creations. There is real passion on display in the images and the film successfully puts across that Autism isn’t all bad for Jonathan, presenting him with gifts as well as difficulties. The film is very well edited and put together and the chosen music is a perfect accompanying piece. Simply put, I Love Somebody with Autism is a delightful short film and one that, while being about Jonathan, is relevant to anyone with Autism as such gifts and abilities can be found in any individual diagnosed with the condition and a greater recognition of the positives that come from Autism as opposed to all the negatives is something that the world could really do with developing.

The closing words from the film that appear below say everything that needs to said. Jonathan isn’t viewed as a burden by his family but rather a unique individual who should be treasured not excluded.

“To our dearest Jonathan.

We are so proud of you despite your disability you’re among the luckiest special child with gifted artistic hands & an excellent photography memory.

You will have difficulty expressing yourself but your work of art speaks for you...
I know someday your prayers will be heard because you are Blessed and God loves you dearly.
We all wish you a HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

We Love You,

Papa, Mama, Joan & Joshua.”

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This is a follow up to my previous post which contains the full film of I Love Somebody with Autism and can be found here:
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/10/short-film-i-love-somebody-with-autism.html

Review by Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Short Film: 'I Love Somebody with Autism'

2010-10-03T00:45:00.000-07:00

The original source for this video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPoKVsw1I9Y

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I Love Somebody with Autism is a delightful homemade movie about a young boy called Jonathan who has Autism and whose gifts make up for the difficulties the condition creates for him to an extent. The movie is a compilation of images that he has drawn set to music.

A full review of this film will follow shortly.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Aspie Eyes: The beautiful eyes of Asperger's Syndrome' Film Review

2010-09-26T01:06:00.000-07:00

Aspie Eyes: The beautiful eyes of Asperger’s Syndrome *****

“Those of us with Asperger's syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism, often are accused of being “stoned”, or flirtatious, or are told our eyes are beautiful, innocent, or child-like. This video represents the eyes of Asperger's syndrome, wonderful and beautiful. Such a depth to these eyes, and I believe these eyes are indicative of our inner selves. This is a project which I have taken somewhere around 6 months to complete. After endless hours of collecting the photos, editing them, and working them into this video, the end result has surprised even me. I feel so close to all of you who contributed. Thanks so much to all of you who participated in this project and made it possible. After viewing this video, I think it is evident that there is “something about those aspie eyes”. You are all beautiful!”

- Mia Sansom

Aspie Eyes: The beautiful eyes of Asperger’s Syndrome is something rather different to the kind of stuff that I normally review but has a certain magical quality and relatability to me personally that I felt almost compelled to comment on it. The above quote by Mia Sansom, the woman who made the film, explains what her purpose was in making what is not so much a film but in some ways more an art project, albeit one that serves a greater purpose than that of art alone, coming with a message that many can learn from.

“The eyes in this video represent Asperger’s Syndrome or high-functioning Autism. Many say that these eyes have a certain innocence, beauty or magic about them. You decide...” These words start off this short video, which consists of images of the eyes of individuals with either Asperger’s Syndrome or high-functioning Autism accompanied by an enchanting piece of music – a piece of music that really does make this video seem magical. Again, I am not in a position to offer the most objective review of the film given that I have Asperger’s Syndrome myself but I am in a unique position to offer an Aspie perspective on this film and in this regard I must say that I found it to be absolutely delightful. You may wonder what purpose exactly could a film that is just four and a half minutes of photos of people’s eyes offer. Apparently, quite a lot, as these eyes convey more emotion and create a greater sense of magic than what you might find in a full length movie at times. People with Autism Spectrum Disorders are sometimes accused of being emotionless robots (for lack of a better term) and not having feelings but this is far from the truth and this film really helps to show this. Simply looking into the eyes shown in this film reveals a sense of loneliness and isolation but also a certain magic and wonder, something that many with an Autism Spectrum Disorder might be able to relate to and that I certainly can. Additionally, there is a perception that people with Asperger’s are all the same and this film also helps to disprove this as the eyes shown here are as diverse as you could ever expect to see. In reality, those people with Asperger’s Syndrome and Autism are probably the most unique individuals who you will ever encounter, there perhaps being far more diversity between different individuals with Autism than between neurotypical individuals in many cases. There is a real eloquence in which this video simply and effectively puts across the emotion, the uniqueness and the enchantment of Asperger’s Syndrome. Simply put, Aspie Eyes: The beautiful eyes of Asperger’s Syndrome is an enchanting video that really does feel quite magical and as well as being quite beautiful also has something to say about Asperger’s Syndrome, something that anyone with Asperger’s should be able to relate to and that anyone without could probably learn from. The video ends with the words “Aspie Eyes...Diversity is Beautiful.” I couldn’t put it better myself.

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This is a follow up to my previous post which contains the the full film of Aspie Eyes: The beautiful eyes of Asperger's Syndrome and can be found here: http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/09/short-film-aspie-eyes-beautiful-eyes-of.html

Review by Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Short Film: 'Aspie Eyes: The beautiful eyes of Asperger's Syndrome'

2010-09-26T00:57:00.001-07:00

The original source for this video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqGhDPhaRrc

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Aspie Eyes: The beautiful eyes of Asperger's Syndrome is another delightful video about Autism that I have come across while scouring the internet. It shows images of the eyes of Aspereger's Syndrome accompanied by some very enchanting music. That may not sound like much, believe me, there really is something quite special about this video.

A full review for this film will follow shortly.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Taste on Autism' Film Review

2010-09-25T02:08:00.000-07:00

Taste on Autism *****

Taste on Autism is an 8 minute animated short film by Ben Htoo that was created for his individual Major Project for Raffles Design Institute in December 2009. It tells the story of an Autistic boy and a neurotypical girl who first meet as children. The girl immediately takes a liking to the boy but when she tries to get his attention by touching him, unaware that he is Autistic, he responds angrily, prompting her to run off. Many years later, they encounter each other again. He is a customer at a burger restaurant and she is a waitress there. Another incident prompts another angry response. When she learns that he is Autistic, however, she develops a whole new understanding of him and gets him a job working at the restaurant. Still, he seems to be a very sad individual and only when she asks him to go with her to a special learning centre for Autistic people do things change. He learns to cope with his Autism in ways he never could before and a romance begins between the two, him being truly happy for the first time in his life as a result of their relationship, the new found friendships with others around him and a whole new confidence that was missing in his life before. Eventually, he becomes truly independent although the ending is also tinged with sadness.

As an individual with Autism myself I am perhaps not best qualified to provide a truly objective review of Taste on Autism. What I can do, however, is provide an Autistic perspective on the film. While the film occasionally perpetuates the image of Autistic people as being angry and dismissive, it also offers some insight into why this is the case, making clear the fact that certain things that many take for granted, such as unwanted physical contact, can be very upsetting for individuals with Autism and that a negative reaction that many result is not reflective of the individual being angry or unpleasant, rather just a misunderstanding of the rules of social interaction that most take for granted. Ben Htoo seems to have some understanding of Autism as the film is very respectful and honest in the way it portrays its central character and his difficulties. The man is not unpleasant, he is just lonely and all it takes for him to feel happy is acceptance and understanding of who he is and what makes him special. The story is both inspirational and sweet, being the very kind of thing that really could happen and for me it really did inspire feelings of happiness and even a tinge of sadness at the end, and I am sure it will for you too, whether you have Autism yourself or not.
There is an almost magical quality to the film with the music, provided courtesy of Associated Production Music and Walt Disney Records (you may well have heard it before elsewhere), having a very enchanting essence, capturing the mood perfectly and emphasising the emotion that is being portrayed quite effectively through the visuals. The animation is simplistic but quite beautiful and works well with the story that is being told and the decision to portray much of what is going on visually rather than through dialogue – there is no dialogue at all – is an inspired one, with the images being utilized portraying what is going on in a simplistic yet effective way that individuals with Autism should easily understand and relate to, bypassing the awkward aspects of interaction that those with Autism find so hard to understand. This is a particularly good touch. Simply put, Taste on Autism is a perfect representation of Autism. It shows that those of us with Autism are people with feelings and that all we really want is to be accepted by the world that seems so alien to us. A truly magical and enchanting short film, this not only portrays Autism in a positive light but is also a very well made piece of animation and a very enjoyable one to watch, whether you are Autistic yourself or not. At a short running time of only 8 minutes, it won’t take up much of your time to watch and you may just feel a bit more enlightened about Autism for doing so.

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This is a follow up to my previous post which contains the full film of Taste on Autism and can be found here: http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/09/short-film-taste-on-autism.html

Review by Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Short Film: 'Taste on Autism'

2010-09-25T01:58:00.000-07:00

The original source for this video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n80_S1Gn7UM

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Taste on Autism is the first of many delightful videos I have found about Autism while scouring the web and that I will be aiming to post on here in the near future. It is an 8 minute short animated film that is basically about a romance between a woman and a man diagnosed with Autism. A truly delightful film.

A full review for this film will follow shortly.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Reality Checked': Behind the scenes of 'Reality Check'

2010-08-02T02:01:00.000-07:00

Reality Checked - Behind the scenes of Reality Check from Jack Green on Vimeo.

Almost a month ago I posted a film called Reality Check on my blog, which featured a segment about a character with Autism.

Reality Checked goes behind the scenes of that film, featuring interviews with all the major players behind the film, me included, and provides a few views about the film's presentation of Autism.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Dustbin Baby' nominated for Emmy award

2010-08-01T00:37:00.000-07:00

'Dustbin Baby' nominated for Emmy award

Article from The National Autistic Society

Dustbin Baby, a BBC drama featuring a teenager with Asperger syndrome, has been nominated for an International Emmy Award.

Adapted from the novel by Jacqueline Wilson, Dustbin Baby starred 14-year-old Lizzy Clarke, who was the first actress ever to play the part of someone with Asperger syndrome on TV while actually having the condition herself. Lizzy performed alongside Juliet Stevenson and Dakota Blue Richards.

Dustbin Baby told the story of teenager April (played by Dakota Blue Richards) who sets out to discover where she came from and, along the way, discovers where she belongs, having been abandoned in a dustbin as a baby. April goes back to the world she left behind - one of foster and care homes - and remembers and revisits the people who shaped her life, including the character played by Lizzy.

The 37th International Emmy Awards will take place Monday, November 23, 2009 in New York, hosted by Graham Norton. Dustbin Baby is nominated in the Children and Young people category - we'll let you know if they take home the award on the night.

The original source for this article was on the National Autistic Society website - http://www.autism.org.uk/ - but, due to the site being rebuilt recently, a direct link to the article is currently unavailable.

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This post is a follow up to my other recent posts which can be found here:

http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/07/mother-of-british-teen-actress-with.html
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/07/dream-comes-true-for-lizzy.html
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/07/fame-for-actress-with-asperger-syndrome.html

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Mother of British teen actress with Asperger's says disabled actors should play disabled characters

2010-07-31T00:31:00.000-07:00

Mother of British teen actress with Asperger's says disabled actors should play disabled characters

Article from The Observer - November 15, 2009

By AMELIA HILL

The mother of the first actress with Asperger's syndrome to play a fictional character with the condition has launched a campaign to stop actors "playing disabled".

Lizzy Clark (pictured) was 14 when the BBC asked her to play the part of Poppy, a teenage girl with Asperger's, in the television film Dustbin Baby, starring Dakota Blue Richards and Juliet Stevenson. Based on Jacqueline Wilson's novel of the same name, the film has been shortlisted for an International Emmy, a British Academy children's award and the Bafta Kids' Vote awards. The award ceremonies will take place next week.

Lizzy's mother, Nicola Clark, has said that employing actors who are not mentally disabled to play characters with neurological impairments should stop. It is the "blacking-up of the 21st century", she said. "We need to break down these barriers. They're unacceptable and indefensible in a modern-day society, especially when there are so many good, disabled actors who are both ready, eager and able to take on these parts."

Lizzy, who had never acted professionally before her part in Dustbin Baby, said: "My Asperger's made some things on the film set difficult at first, like dealing with the sudden noise of the storyboard, but I was soon so focused on acting that I didn't notice anything else.

"It is not just mentally disabled actors who lose out when non-disabled people are employed to act them. Audiences think they are getting an authentic portrayal of a mentally disabled person, but they're not. It's not like putting on a different accent or learning what it was like to be raised in a different era. You can't understand what it is like to have a mental disability unless you've really lived with it. When non-disabled people try to portray us, they tend to fall back on stereotypes that have done our community so much harm in the past."

According to Independent Television Commission research, 79% of viewers would not mind if a disabled person read the evening news. Six in 10 say that disabled people should appear in a wider variety of roles, including as presenters. There are, however, signs that the tide is slowly turning in favour of Clark's "Don't play me – pay me!" campaign. EastEnders recently introduced David Proud, who was born with spina bifida, as Adam Best, the first character in the show to use a wheelchair in real life.

The move is part of a series of measures by the BBC intended to raise the profile of disabled actors and performers. Next week it will start a nationwide search for disabled actors and performers for drama, comedy and children's shows. It will also launch an online directory of disabled talent, with the support of the acting union Equity and Spotlight, the casting directory. "Innovations like this are promising, but I would question whether disabled actors will be used in greater numbers simply because their contact details have been made easier for directors and producers to find," said Clark. "Society regards people with mental disabilities with such extreme stigma, and attributes them with such insulting and misleading stereotypes, that most casting directors would not even consider employing someone with a mental disability."

Clark is setting up a forum for all mentally disabled actors, where they can be encouraged and supported. The forum will also generate publicity through public events and debates.

In another sign that Clark has launched her campaign at a turning point, Channel 4 will next week launch Cast Offs, a comedy drama about the making of a Survivor-type reality TV programme featuring physically disabled characters. Created by Jack Thorne, who has written for Shameless and Skins, Tony Roche, who has written for The Thick Of It, and Alex Bulmer, the programme features thalidomide victims, dwarfism and the face-disfiguring cherubism, a rare genetic disorder.

Clark wants to see a similar commitment to how mental disability is portrayed. "At the moment mentally disabled actors only appear on our screens in plot lines revolving entirely around their disability, and generally only in scenarios where they need to be rescued from something to do with their disability by a non-disabled protagonist… We want to see disabled actors playing parts where the least interesting thing about them is their disability."

Clark expects a long battle. She points to the decision by the British Board of Film Classification to warn viewers that the comedy Special People featured disabled people. "Giving the film a 'disability theme', as though we have to be warned away from disabled people, was bizarre," said the film's director, Justin Edgar.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

The original source(s) for this article can be found here:
http://media-dis-n-dat.blogspot.com/2009/11/mother-of-british-teen-actress-with.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/nov/15/disabled-actors-television-campaign

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This post is a follow up to my other recent posts which can be found here:
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/07/dream-comes-true-for-lizzy.html
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/07/fame-for-actress-with-asperger-syndrome.html

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Dream comes true for Lizzy

2010-07-29T07:25:00.000-07:00

Dream comes true for Lizzy

Article from Shrewsbury Chronicle - September 18, 2008

A 14-year-old autistic girl from Shrewsbury is trailblazing the way for other sufferers after winning the role of a character with the condition in a television adaptation of a popular children’s book.

Lizzy Clark, from Copthorne, has always wanted to act, but after being bullied at school lost her confidence. She is now over the moon after being selected for a part in a television adaptation of a Jacqueline Wilson novel, Dustbin Baby, which starts filming tomorrow.

Nicky Clark, Lizzy’s mum, discovered the opportunity on the national autism website which she browses regularly because both Lizzy and her sister Emily, 11, suffer from autism which is a brain development disorder.

“We saw the audition on the website and they were looking for a girl between 12 and 15,” she said.

“Lizzy had never done a professional audition before so I made a short film raising awareness of autism and I sent a link through to the director. We had a call and she was invited to London. She didn’t think she’d done very well and was really nervous about it, but I thought she’d done fantastically well.

“They said they were delighted with her, it’s really exciting and great for Lizzy. She’s always wanted to act but has been bullied at school and lost her confidence.

“It’s a UK first that someone with autism is actually playing someone with autism, it’s such a fantastic outcome and it’s very good for her self-esteem.”

A spokesperson for Adcote School where Lizzy goes said: “We’re all really pleased she’s been given the part, we’re all thrilled for her and think it’s very good they’ve chosen someone like Lizzy.”

© 2010 Shrewsbury Chronicle

The original source for this article can be found here:
http://www.shrewsburychronicle.com/2008/09/18/dream-comes-true-for-lizzie/

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This post is a follow up to my other recent post which can be found here:
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/07/fame-for-actress-with-asperger-syndrome.html

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Fame for actress with Asperger syndrome

2010-07-28T01:02:00.000-07:00

Fame for actress with Asperger syndrome

Article from BBC Shropshire - September 16, 2008

A Shrewsbury teenager appeared alongside Dakota Blue Richards in BBC One's 2008 adaptation of Jacqueline Wilson's Dustbin Baby. Lizzy Clark plays a girl with Asperger Syndrome - even more remarkable given that she also has the condition.

Fourteen-year-old Lizzy played the part of Poppy, a teenager with Asperger syndrome, in the BBC TV adaptation of Jacqueline Wilson's children's book Dustbin Baby. It was Lizzy's first professional acting role.

Lizzy also suffers from Asperger syndrome, offering her a unique take on her new character.

The syndrome is a relatively mild form of autism. Lizzy said that because it's subtle, people don't see her as autistic: "They see me as someone who's a bit strange and not very easy to get on with, although I do have lots of friends who love me and support me."

In Dustbin Baby, the local teenager appeared alongside household names like Juliet Stevenson, and star of The Golden Compass, Dakota Blue Richards. Jacqueline Wilson, president of the Shrewsbury Bookfest, is one of the UK's most popular children's authors and Lizzy is a big fan.

It was Lizzy's mother, Nicky, who saw an advert for the role on an autism website: "I think it's incredibly positive that the BBC chose to find an actress who has the same condition as the character."

Being on set was the best experience of Lizzy's life. She said: "At first it was a bit intimidating," being with such big stars as Juliet Stevenson and Dakota Blue Richards, but after a while, she said you, "stop noticing the cameras".

Nicky Clark says getting the role has been a huge boost to Lizzy's self-esteem. She said: "It was lovely for Lizzy; it was lovely for people with autism... to show that anything is achievable."

The original source for this article can be found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/shropshire/content/articles/2008/09/16/aspergers_actress_feature.shtml

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Another success story showing that a person with Asperger's Syndrome can achieve great things in life, Lizzy Clark really is an inspiration to both those with the condition and their parents. She shows that while many things may be out of reach for us Aspies, if we focus on trying to achive the one thing that we love doing and that we are truly great at we can not only find a great job and/or career but also find a place in the world where we truly feel that we belong.

Having seen Dustbin Baby myself I can honestly say that Lizzy Clark really does have a terrific talent for acting. The idea of having someone with Aspergers Syndrome play a character with the condition is an inspired one as it allows the actor to draw from their real life experiences for the part and Lizzy's portrayal of Poppy really captures the essence of a character who may seem a bit odd and may not fully understand the world around her but makes up for it with heart and a refreshingly innocent attitude.

I wish Lizzy Clark all the best and hope that she continues to do well as an actress.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

How do autistic children survive as adults?

2010-07-25T01:00:00.000-07:00

How do autistic children survive as adults?

Article from The Sunday Times Magazine - August 16, 2009

By CAROLINE SCOTT

Peter Griffin is 29, he has an IQ of 159, a degree in astrophysics, and a gallows humour about his Asperger’s syndrome, an autistic-spectrum disorder that makes social interaction so difficult that his longest — indeed his only — stretch of paid work has been a Saturday job in Tesco, which he has had since he was 16. He is so wired after his shift that he is awake until 4am and it takes him the rest of the week to recover: “At the end of a day trying to be ‘normal’, acting the part, wearing the mask and reining myself in, I’m like a pressure cooker.”

Very few people outside his family seem to understand Peter’s needs. At 11, an educational psychologist said, “I’m happy to tell you that Peter is among the top 2% of the population,” which, since Peter was unable to get anything down on paper, made his parents feel worse rather than better. “His teacher used to say, ‘If only I could find the starter button.’” At secondary school, homework involved standing next to his mother, Ann, who would say, “Why? What? When?”, then quickly type what he said. “He knew all the answers. But his thinking was, ‘Why are they asking?’ It made no sense to him.”

Peter’s contextual memory is so bad he doesn’t remember this, but Ann, who works full time at a local college, vividly recalls the late-night battles. Peter couldn’t stand the crossing of the boundaries between school and home: “They are two separate entities and I didn’t like the lines being blurred,” he says. Because he didn’t conform, he was labelled uncooperative and lazy. Only his maths teacher seemed to get him. He told his parents: “Peter is Peter. We should encourage him to be himself, not change him.”

But being Peter has not been easy. Asperger’s was not recognised or routinely diagnosed until the early 1990s. Peter says he thought he was going mad. Ann remembers ringing round, trying to get some support for him, and being told it was her problem. She needed to let go. Then, when the Griffins’ youngest child, Stephen, started school, Ann went in to see his teacher and watched aghast as Stephen collected hundreds of rubbers and lined them up under a chair. “I said, ‘Do you think he’s like Peter?’ And his teacher said, ‘I think he’s much worse.’ ” Stephen’s severe autism was diagnosed at eight, at which point the penny dropped and Peter, then 19, got his diagnosis.

“Michael, our second boy, is what we call neuro-typical,” says Ann. “He was sociable, able, all the things Peter and Stephen weren’t. He was our touchstone. We kept saying, ‘Thank God for Michael, because we know we’re not bad parents.’ ”

Stephen Griffin is clear-skinned and luminously good-looking, an 18-year-old with the guilelessness of an eight-year-old. His passion is racing cars. He can tell you the name of every Formula One champion back to 1950, yet he doesn’t understand that a bus that takes him one way will also bring him back. The rest of us assume an awful lot about the world, based on knowledge we have gathered and processed. People on the autistic spectrum assume nothing: just because a traffic light turned from red to green last time, it doesn’t mean it will do so again. It makes every step a perilous one.

With his mother’s help, Stephen got a handful of GCSEs — Ann took two weeks off work and together they learnt about the Chinese revolution and the life of plants. But since his statement of special needs ended at 16, he has had no transitional support. Apart from taking an animal-care course at college — the idea being that through caring for animals, he would learn about taking care of himself — he has been stuck at home, watching racing on TV. He has a normal IQ but is profoundly autistic. If you say, “Would you like to work in a shop?”, he will say “No”, because he has no way of knowing if he’d like it. And anyway, one shop is not the same as another.

Support for Stephen has been patchy and fairly pointless. “I want to help him move towards work,” says Ann. “But the courses available to him seemed designed purely to keep him out of his bedroom for a year.”

Last year, as part of its I Exist campaign, the National Autistic Society (NAS) commissioned the largest ever UK survey on the experiences of adults with autism and their families. It identified a fundamental problem: nobody — not government nor health authorities nor primary care trusts — knows how many autistic adults there are in England. No wonder, then, that so many don’t have access to the services they need. The National Audit Office, crunching the figures it has on children, estimates that there are half a million people with autistic-spectrum disorders in the UK, of whom around 400,000 are adults, ranging from the mildly affected to those who will need lifelong care. A recent study suggests that autistic adults cost the economy around £25.5 billion a year, 36% of which is accounted for by lost employment. The government is now committed to developing a national adult-autism strategy, which includes the appointment of a full-time autism specialist within the Department of Health, and training for social and healthcare professionals. Every parent has his or her own professional horror story, from the GP who thought Asperger’s was a childhood syndrome — “Do they think kids magically shed ASD when they’re 18?” asked one parent incredulously — to the social workers who repeatedly lump young adults with ASD (autism-spectrum disorder) together with those who have mental-health or severe learning difficulties.

Dedicated teams within local authorities will now be tasked to ensure that every 14-year-old with a statement has a transition plan. This is a statutory requirement set out in the SEN (special education needs) code of practice, yet at present only 34% of children with ASD have them. The consequences of getting things so badly wrong are huge. Currently, only 15% of adults with ASD are in full-time employment, and they report that their experiences at work are marred by misunderstandings and inadequate support.

Peter Griffin still shares a bedroom with his 25-year-old brother, Christopher. Christopher has a long-term girlfriend, and their brother Michael, 27, is married. Does Peter see himself married one day? “Oh dear,” he says. “Hmmm. Yes and no.” My questions on this subject are relayed through Ann. Peter is keen to answer, but points out that I’m looking at all this from a neuro-typical point of view. “I’ve never had a girlfriend, so how can I know if I’d like one?” Do you have friends? There is a long pause. “Not really, no. It’s difficult. To develop. To maintain?”

He says working out the basics of social etiquette has been “like learning times tables”.

He lacks instinct. It’s just about okay until there’s a nuance in the complex web of communication, and Peter has no idea if something has happened or what. “Before I ask a question, I like to know the answer so I have an idea of what to expect.” I can see how tricky this must be.

“It’s just much safer to do nothing rather than risk making a prat of himself,” says Ann.

Because no appropriate support exists for Peter, the Griffins are having to define it. After a disastrous year at Leeds University — “He slept all day, played computer games all night and ran up thousands of pounds of debt” — Peter got his degree in astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire, where he had a “buddy” provided by the Disabled Student Alliance.

Did the physics department all tend towards the, um? “Do you mean, were they all Aspies? Of course they were!” says Peter.

His dad, Laurence, who works in IT — “a very Aspie profession” — acknowledges that a genetic link is likely. “If there were 100 people in a room, one of them would have Asperger’s.”

“No, no!” says Peter. “You’d never get the Aspie in the room!” And they all fall about laughing.

Ann has explored the idea of Peter working as a teaching assistant. He did an eight-week programme with a council-run scheme called Work Solutions. “He was very, very motivated. They said, ‘We’ll allocate someone to work with you in a few weeks.’ ” But three months went by and nobody phoned. Peter’s mood plummeted. His conclusion was: “I don’t know anything is happening, so I’ll assume nothing is happening.”

Robyn Steward, a 22-year-old with Asperger’s and associated difficulties, from dyspraxia to tunnel vision — she lists them for me — has no truck with the idea that “You’re autistic, therefore you must be a genius”. “At school everyone was expecting Rain Man. Well, I’m rubbish with numbers.” Robyn was isolated, stressed and unable to learn because she was bullied all the time. She was 12 when she was told she had Asperger’s. “I was sat on my mum’s bed. I remember the bedspread?”

Robyn has now learnt to make eye contact, but not to break it. We are eyeball to eyeball for nearly two hours. She has worked hard to understand how neuro-typical people feel:

“It’s like you have a jar in your head and you have emotional tokens which swoosh round, so you’ve got a constant flow. With people on the autistic spectrum, the jar gets full really, really quickly and then it explodes and they get scared and they don’t know what to do.”

When Robyn’s jar gets full, she paints. Her tiny kitchen is crammed with paintings, “111 in all”, many of them consisting of black swirls with primary-coloured gashes. A particularly dark one was painted after a row with a musician friend, also autistic. “He asked me if I thought he was a genius. I said no. I didn’t mean it horribly — I was just being honest. He said, ‘Well, you’ve got an IQ lower than 70 and you’ll never get a boyfriend.’’’

Robyn has had one neuro-typical and one Aspie boyfriend. “I don’t think we feel differently to neuro-typicals. It’s just that we’re less good at interpreting feelings — ours and other people’s.” Robyn finds strong feeling — whether hunger, anger or affection — frightening and confusing, and it’s mostly this that has scuppered her relationships. Physical problems, she says, can be overcome. “I hate anyone hugging me. But one friend squeezes me gently round the waist while I look away.” The biggest problem is finding a connection and maintaining it. “During my teens I was practically a recluse because people were so horrible to me. I didn’t learn the things I should have done. Now I’m in my twenties, I find it easier to say, ‘I’m not very good at this,’ because I know neuro-typicals don’t find it easy either.”

Robyn’s experiences at school were so bad, she says, that “I thought I’d be a homeless drug addict by the time I was 21.” She was sent to social-skills classes: “Ate biscuits — pretty useless really.” But at college, thanks to a proper transition and good learning support, everything went right.

She is now a self-employed mentor for Aspie children, with referrals coming from SENCOs (special-needs co-ordinators) and parents. “I get them to draw while we talk, so they don’t have to look at me. They often haven’t a clue about their own condition. I think, ‘How does a kid get to 12 without anyone understanding them?’ ’’

Robyn does a very good job of appearing neuro-typical, yet she is often driven to the edge of reason just trying to get it right. During a spell working for a computer store, customers’ imprecision left her so frustrated that she banged her head on a wall hard enough to give herself concussion. She needs to know what’s coming, what’s certain, rather than what might be. She is not an order freak — she quite likes mess — but worries about shopping and food all day. She is hypersensitive to colour and texture. “I can’t go into Waitrose — I can’t stand the shiny floor.” Breakfast has to be two Weetabix lined up, with the milk to exactly the same level. “Sometimes I get so panicky I have to phone my friend Bill [a mentor] to find out what I want for my dinner and he says, ‘It sounds as though you’d like a jacket potato.’ He keeps me safe from the world.”

Robyn says that when we meet again, she won’t remember my face, but she has memorised my earrings and shoes. “Life would be easier for people with ASD if others made more of an effort to understand,” she says. And it doesn’t seem too much to ask, since Robyn has no choice but to spend her life trying to get her head around us.

The Asperger’s community, which by its very nature is pretty inflexible, is highly vocal on the subject of inclusion. People with ASD want what the rest of us want: jobs, homes, independence. But the wider community, uneducated in such things, doesn’t know if it wants them, and Aspies themselves are divided as to whether they want to put up with us. Part of the problem is that the autistic spectrum is so broad. Emma Cantons, mother of Robbie Petre, a 20-year-old with high-functioning autism, says it ranges from “the man in the office who doesn’t mix, and is fixated with balls of elastic bands, to those who will never live independently”. Of the group whose slogan is “Autism isn’t a disability, it’s just a different way of being”, she says: “The logic is so delightfully autistic. Trust me — if it stops you fitting into society, it’s a disability, and it’s lifelong.”

As a child, Robbie had floor-bashing tantrums that would last for two hours. “The gap between him and other children widened until there came a point where I couldn’t pretend everything was okay.” He was diagnosed with dyspraxia at 7 and autism at 11. “He had one friend who, when Rob was in the middle of a screaming fit, would say, ‘D’you want to do some Lego?’ Or, when Rob ate with his hands, ‘Come on, mate, use your fork.’ But that is so rare. In the main, the world has absolutely no patience with people like Robbie.”

Robbie is fortunate that he has had an engaged social worker and fantastic care. After he pushed his sister down the stairs, social services listened. “It sounds terrible,” says Emma, “but I thank God he can be violent, because it’s the only reason we’ve had the help we have.” Since he was 16, Rob has had a 52-week residential placement, currently at Ruskin Mill, a working farm community in Gloucestershire. Sitting in her south London garden, Emma has no doubt that, for him, the decision has been the right one. “Robbie doesn’t need reminding to pay his bills — he needs care.”

She sums up the fear and uncertainty of his world very neatly: “I might bring out a cup of tea in a minute or an elephant might drop from the sky. For Robbie, those two things are equally possible. And the gap goes on widening. I think, ‘Woo-hoo, Rob walked to the bus stop on his own.’ Then you realise other 20-year-olds are backpacking in Peru. But within the context of Rob, he’s doing fantastically well. At one point I saw no future for him at all, because I thought he’d kill himself. It is a Greek curse to possess the intelligence to see what you can never have.”

Rob can stay where he is until he is 21, and after that the future is uncertain. “My big sorrow,” says Emma, “is that it can’t go on for life.”

Polly Tommey’s vision for a supported autistic community would perfectly accommodate Rob, with his “islands of ability surrounded by great abysses of difficulty”. Polly, a former actress, formed the Autism Trust two years ago. She publishes The Autism File, a forum for parents of children with ASD, and is trying to raise £10m to build the first outreach centre where autistic adults can be supported to work. She talks at 90mph of rolling the idea out nationally and globally: “America is interested. Dubai wants one?”

Calling on the help of friends in advertising, she launched a billboard campaign: “Dear Gordon Brown, I can save you £508m a year. Please call me”. It hit the spot: Brown invited her to No 10 to discuss better training in the private sector and the creation of a multi-party autism coalition.

In the Tommeys’ bedroom — her husband, Jon, is a clinical nutritionist — four computers compete for space with tumbling piles of files and laundry. E-mails to Polly’s dressing room-cum-office go like this: “Dear Polly, I have a 21-year-old son with autism and urgently need advice and help?” She is driven — “We cannot afford to lose these young people to a life without a purpose” — yet is clearly exhausted and often defeated by the number and desperation of the calls she gets. “I don’t do this through choice. I cannot ignore the need.”

Her own son, Billy, now 13, was so profoundly affected by autism and attendant gut problems that he spent the year between 18 months and 2½ screaming. “He’d bang his head for 12 hours a day.” She recalls getting on a train and sitting between two compartments, crying and crying as people climbed over her. “I was desperate. I know how that feels.”

She is realistic about Billy’s future. “He has full-blown autism. He will never be independent. People say, ‘Oh, Polly, you shouldn’t say that.’ But it’s true. If he lived in the community, he’d be a liability. Not fair on the public. Not fair on Billy. But that doesn’t mean he can’t lead a useful and productive life with the right support.”

The trust’s centres will include a residential wing for those who need it, a working farm and a business centre with mentors and PAs. “Autistic people have amazing brains — I haven’t met one who can’t do something — but aspects of life need to be managed for them.” Polly gets calls from grandparents looking after grown-up boys their own children can’t cope with, and from weeping mothers who talk of suicide.

One writes: “I hope destiny brings a pill which will wipe us out together?” She tells a ghastly story about a 25-year-old on a nine-month waiting list to see a counsellor, whose anxiety reached tipping point. He put a noose round his neck and hanged himself.

There are pockets of good practice: local authorities in Liverpool, Newham and Oldham have dedicated teams to support autistic adults. And in Sunderland, Paul Shattock has established inspirational residential colleges for autistic adults. “In the right environment — low stress, low sensory stimulation — you’ve got a chance to make a real difference,” he says. ESPA colleges, which take a mix of long-term residential and day students and have a waiting list of hundreds, have their own charter of rights; paramount is “No decisions about us without us”.

Paul points out that there’s a lot of money to be made in autism. “Nightclub owners”, as he calls them, “buy a house, fit it out and fill it with five or six autistic adults. That’s not acceptable. But neither is the other option: the vast majority of autistic young people who end up stuck at home with ageing parents, doing nothing”.

The NAS hopes that the national adult autism strategy, due at the end of this year, will “hold local authorities legally responsible for providing support for autistic adults and ensure they have clear routes to diagnosis, assessment and support”. Which all sounds marvellous, but a plethora of legislation and statutory guidance already exists that is supposed to do the job. Unless local authorities are held to account, this new guidance may not be worth the paper it’s printed on. Amanda Batten, the NAS’s head of policy, says: “We do not underestimate the challenge. We’ll keep a very close eye on it and we’ll go to court if we have to.”

Tribunal-weary parents know that local authorities’ quibbling over semantics has become so entrenched in some areas, it could almost be considered policy.

Amy Brosnan, an ethereal 19-year-old lodged somewhere between childhood and adulthood, was diagnosed with autism at 11. There was a lot of “holding down” at her first school, which Amy remembers as “all fear and no learning”. Since she turned 12, she has been at home; she has had no suitable education at all. And now, her mother, Cathy, believes, she has no future.
Cathy sifts through files of letters, evidence of a systematic failure even to acknowledge Amy’s needs. “Local-authority psychologists assess you down. Then, when you get a statement, you fight for every aspect of the provision.” Cathy has been to tribunal three times, the last time over a school that Amy could have attended until she was 21. The local education authority vacillated for so long that she lost the place.

Amy, so anxious about my visit that she has barely slept, looks sad and lost. She sits and listens, head on one side, occasionally getting so upset that she has to leave the room. She loves taking photographs, and when I leave she gives me a shot of a landscape that shows real ability, but Cathy believes Amy’s confidence and self-esteem are now so low that she will need one-to-one care for the rest of her life. It’s a tragedy and makes no financial sense, since the cost to the country of looking after Amy will be far more than that of supporting her properly in the first place. “I really hope the Autism Bill works for the kids who are coming through now, because it’s too late for us,” says Cathy.

One in three autistic adults suffers mental-health problems, and for each of those, not one but several lives are shattered. So many parents talk of the difficulties in securing a diagnosis, or of getting one — but much too late, when their child has dropped out of college or employment or suffered an emotional breakdown. Janette Robb’s 30-year-old son, Danny, was only formally diagnosed two years ago. “My son has spent 75% of the past five years in psychiatric hospitals, much of it due to lack of support within the community.”

Rosie Cousins, whose adult son has become addicted to prescription drugs, is filled with fury at the years of botched diagnoses and, ultimately, with grief over what might have been. Her plea is simple: “I love him dearly,” she writes. “I don’t want his life’s journey to be a worthless one.”

Autism lowdown

Autism is a lifelong developmental disorder that affects how a person communicates and relates to others. It is often referred to as an autism-spectrum disorder (ASD)

The Austrian psychiatrist and physician Leo Kanner described the classic autistic syndrome in a seminal paper in 1943

Autism is estimated to affect more than half a million people in the UK today; about 133,500 of them are under 18

Scientific studies suggest a genetic link: it was recently found that mutations in genes involved in brain connections may increase a child’s risk of autism

ASDs appear in 1 in 100 children; of these, 40% wait more than three years for a clear diagnosis, others longer still

Boys are four times more likely than girls to develop autism disorders, which are a lifelong disability

One or, at most, two in 200 people with an ASD — the ‘autistic savants’ — have an extraordinary talent

Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.

The original source for this article can be found here: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article6794806.ece

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Stories like these are the everyday reality that people with Autism, Aspergers Syndrome or other Autism Spectrum Disorders have to live with. And the sad fact is that it wouldn't take a whole lot for individuals diagnosed with any of these conditions to live the normal lives they desire. Something as simple as being diagnosed early enough and being offered the necessary help without having to fight for it every step of the way would really make all the difference. This is something that I can particularly relate to, not being diagnosed till I was 14, after a so-called expert called in to look into my case during my time at primary school said my solitary behaviour was due to a phase I was going through and was something that I would grow out of. Some expert...not only did I not get diagnosed till I was 14 as a result of their failure to notice signs that must surely have been quite obvious but also my parents, especially my late mom, had to fight to get the help I needed and as a result many of the difficulties that could potentially have been overcome will now be with me for the rest of my life. If this help was available without all the hassle then surely I and others like me would be a whole lot better off. At least I can consider myself lucky in some ways though. While I find many things difficult in day to day life at least I have developed some measure of independence and have achieved many things to be proud of. Stories like that of Amy Brosnan truly break my heart as, due to the failures of others, she will not be able to experience any of the freedoms that come with living independently. I just hope that measures are put in place soon to ensure that the future Autistic adults of the country are in much better position to live out their lives than we are today

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Short Film: 'Reality Check'

2010-07-06T07:32:00.000-07:00

Reality Check from Jack Green on Vimeo.

This is a film I worked on as part of a group project for my Bachelors Degree in Creative Studies at Bangor University. I am posting it here because one of the stories within the film is about a character with Autism.

Reality Check is a short film consisting of three different stories based around perceptions of reality.

The first Jigsaw is about how a man with Autism views the world.

The second Mobile is about a man who becomes convinced that he is living the events of certain films.

The third and last Coma is about a woman who is unsure of whether she is dreaming or awake.

I mainly did camera work but also played a small part in the second story (sorry for that - I know I can't act).

The real talents behind the film are Jack Green, David Pallant, Rhi McCrorie, Iain Williamson and Tom Ensor.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'My Name Is Khan' Movie Review

2010-06-26T02:35:00.000-07:00

The following is a review I have written for the movie My Name Is Khan. It was released in cinemas in February.

My Name Is Khan ****½

With Asperger’s Syndrome becoming far more widely recognized by the people of the world, more films featuring characters with the condition are starting to appear. Last year saw the fantastic American indie film Adam tackle the issue of Asperger’s and relationships. Now we have something very different in the form of My Name Is Khan. Coming out of the Bollywood filmmaking stable - even though it is not a Bollywood film in the traditional sense, this not being a musical in any way and actually being something of an international production, with dialogue being in Hindi, Urdu and English and, due to the multinational nature of the story, featuring American actors as well as Indian ones - My Name Is Khan focuses more on some of the negative preconceptions that can arise due to a lack of understanding of Asperger’s and how those with it are affected by the condition as well as dealing with the issue of changing racial perceptions in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. My Name Is Khan is literally the first Bollywood movie I have ever seen so my knowledge of the background of this huge area of filmmaking is limited but, based on the evidence of this film, it is not hard to see the appeal.

Rizwan Khan (Shahrukh Khan) is a Muslim from the Borivali section of Mumbai who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome, a form of high-functioning Autism that complicates socialization, prevents him from fully understanding the world around him and causes him to display behaviours that many would consider to be odd. After the death of his mother, he moves to San Francisco to work for his brother there and it is here that he meets Mandira (Kajol), a Hindu single mother with whom he develops a bond and eventually marries. Things go well in Rizwan’s life for some time as he, Mandira and her son Sameer (Yvaan Makaar) live the dream but after the tragic events of 9/11 everything changes. With racial hatred towards Muslims growing, tragedy strikes their family and Mandira, blaming Rizwan for what has happened forces him away. Misinterpreting her sarcastic suggestion for him to meet the US President to say “My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist” as a genuine request, Rizwan sets out on an epic journey to do just that, following the President as he goes on tour around the country. Along the way, he gets detained by authorities who mistake his disability for suspicious behaviour, helps apprehend some genuine terrorists, forms new friendships, shows what true heroism is and inspires the entire nation – all so that he can win back the love of Mandira.

At the start of My Name Is Khan, a disclaimer reads “The protagonist in this film suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of Autism. While the film endeavours to depict the character as authentically and sensitively as possible, it is a work of fiction and hence certain creative liberties have been taken in the portrayal of the condition.” While it doesn’t reflect on the quality of the performance by Shahrukh Khan, this disclaimer is apt as the performance is certainly not one of the more restrained portrayals of a character with Asperger’s Syndrome, in fact being quite an over the top one. While “certain creative liberties” may have been taken, however, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the performance doesn’t ring true to life. While the portrayal isn’t the most restrained and perhaps doesn’t reflect the majority of people with Asperger’s, as someone with the condition myself, I can say that there almost certainly are people out there just like Rizwan. And it is the depiction of Rizwan that truly makes the film work. Shahrukh Khan is superb in the central role (as is Tanay Chheda who portrays the young Rizwan), perfectly displaying the mannerisms and eccentricities of an individual with Asperger’s. He perfectly captures all the different facets that can be found in people with Asperger’s in real life, from the difficulty in maintaining eye contact to the discomfort with physical contact, and the way he takes everything literally at face value to the manner in which certain sights and sounds trigger anxiety attacks. All of this rings true and all of it I, and probably many other with the condition, can personally relate to. The strong central performance, along with well written dialogue and a strong plot, ensures that we do truly believe in the character, his life and his journey, everything he says and does seeming completely plausible – the way he freaks out over things that most people take for granted; the way he interprets everything literally, such as Mandira’s suggestion that he meet the President; his inability to understand basic social cues; the way his behaviour gets misconstrued and the way he fails to comprehend why he is treated in a certain way. The relationship between Rizwan and Mandira also convinces, thanks to a terrific chemistry of sorts between a perfectly paired Khan and co-star Kajol (who delivers a very strong performance in her own right). The nature of Rizwan having Asperger’s means that he is unable to express his emotions openly (something which is represented in the film through him writing his feelings down in a diary, which we hear as voiceover narration) but even without us seeing the emotion on screen, there is still a certain spark between Khan and Kajol when their eyes first meet that makes us truly believe in them as a couple. Even though the relationship seems to progress very quickly, it never fails to seem organic and we really can buy that they are falling in love with one another. This delightful love story at the heart of the film is the driving force for the entire plot and for a good while, the film is happy and cheerful, reflecting the joy of Rizwan and Mandira’s life together, the film tending towards the comic during this period, with a sweet and quirky sense of humour akin to what you would expect from the better films that the romantic comedy genre have to offer. When the events of 9/11 come into the film, however, things take on a much different, darker tone, the comic being replaced by the tragic and in a way that seems completely natural. Suddenly, an easy to watch film becomes much harder going (although still worth sitting through). You see, this film isn’t just about Asperger’s Syndrome, it is also about the changing attitudes towards Muslims following the tragic events of 9/11. With Rizwan, the fact that he is a Muslim is every bit as important to the plot as the fact that he has Asperger’s Syndrome. Without either one there would be not film but together they set the stage for his epic journey. In this regard the film also succeeds, painting an all too realistic picture of the racial hatred that erupted in America post 9/11, even if it doesn’t have much to say that hasn’t been said before and, ultimately, it is the Asperger’s aspect that prevails in the end. If the film falls short of being perfect, it is because the long running time (2 hours 34 minutes) combined with the hard subject matter that arises post 9/11 make for a film that is occasionally hard to watch and the climax of the film tends towards the saccharine, abandoning the realism that has been the order of the day up to that point in favour of an unbelievably happy ending where the best of humanity prevails and love conquers all. This isn’t to say that it is a bad way to go out as it ensures the film ends on a high note, just that given some of the harder stuff that has come before it is somewhat difficult to really buy into it. Additionally, the manner in which the film shifts between languages, with a character one moment speaking English and the next speaking Hindi or Urdu (those unfamiliar will have difficulty discerning which is which) often proves confusing, especially when a character is speaking in these languages to people who shouldn’t be able to understand them yet clearly do. So, My Name Is Khan falls somewhat short of being a masterpiece but nonetheless proves to be a very compelling and very well made film that is inspirational, moving, heartwarming and epic. A very powerful movie going experience indeed.

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My Name Is Khan is available to buy on DVD on Monday 28th June 2010.

Review by Robert Mann BA (Hons)

I'm normal . . . I'm just programmed differently

2010-05-16T00:53:00.000-07:00

I'm normal . . . I'm just programmed differently

Article from Cambridge News Online - April 17, 2009

By ALYSON BRADLEY

Emma Thomson, who is living with Asperger's syndrome, has published a book detailing her experiences in her bid to help others understand and cope with the condition.

SHE has been arrested for a bomb hoax, expelled twice from school, sectioned in a mental hospital, and admits some days she wakes up with suicidal thoughts.

But Emma Thomson has learned to live with Asperger's syndrome and, despite the daily struggle to deal with society's ignorance of her condition, the 21-year-old from Eaton Socon is doing a media course at Bedford College, sings karaoke in a village pub every Thursday and has established an online support group for fellow sufferers.

Emma blogs on the website nearly every day and, remarkably, has just written a self-published autobiography chronicling her teenage experiences dealing with Asperger's.

"I know that I'll never really fit in because I'm an outsider and there have been people who have said nasty, spiteful things to me because I'm different, but I use those comments to improve myself," says Emma.

"There are still bad days but sometimes you even forget that you're not like the neurotypicals that you hang around with. I've lived my life in bitterness and anger for years because I wanted to be normal, but now I've realised I have to make the best of who I am."

Around quarter of a million people in the UK have Asperger's syndrome - a mild form of autism, which affects the ability to relate to people.

More common in men than women, the syndrome is a lifelong condition for which there is no cure. Medication is available to help with some of the side-effects of the condition, like anxiety or or depression.

Experts say it is a "hidden disability" which affects social skills, ability to read body language and sensory sensitivity. Sufferers often have a narrow psychological range and obsessive interests.

"I'm actually offended when people call me autistic because I'm not on that part of the spectrum," says Emma, chatting via email because this is the easiest and most fluid way for her to communicate.

"The best way I can explain it to someone who knows nothing is it's like being drunk. There's a mass full of sights and sounds. People and places just seem to come at you in major ways. It's like having an abstract brain.

"I am technically a normal person, just programmed differently socially. I do get sensory issues and even though I have sensitivity to noises of a certain pitch, I'm still able to participate in karaoke on Thursday nights at a local pub."

Emma is frank about the problems of living with her condition.

"I know that I can get on people's nerves a lot but it's not like I ever mean to actually annoy them," she says. "I sometimes try too hard because I know I have to compensate for my lack of social capacity."

For Emma, the most testing times were during her school years. The National Autistic Society says 25 per cent of children with an autistic spectrum disorder have been excluded from school at least once. Emma was expelled from two different schools in Leicestershire and was also forced to leave another two colleges.

"The schools thought I was thick because of the way I acted socially. I was intelligent but couldn't show it so was put in the bottom sets, and these had the bullies in them so I got targeted worse because of that."

Emma found salvation through her love of music and performing. "I became a different person when I was either singing or acting in school performances," she says.

"When I walked on that stage, I became a different person." An enthusiastic singer, she even auditioned for X Factor in 2006.

"I had the confidence to audition," she recalls, "and although I got nowhere, it was much fun."

To cope with the bullying, Emma also began chronicling her despair in letters to sympathetic teachers. But her obsessive nature rang alarm bells at a college she had turned to after being expelled from school.

"The college gave me an ultimatum saying if I emailed this tutor one more time about anything, I'd be kicked out."

Emma devised a plan in revenge at her exclusion, tipping off a UK airport that the tutor with whom she had become obsessed was carrying a bomb on to a flight. She was subsequently found out and arrested.

After years of misunderstanding and bullying, Emma was diagnosed with Asperger's when she was 16 by the Birmingham Forensic Mental Health unit. The authorities finally took action five years ago when she downed excessive amounts of painkillers and then got in her car and drove from Somerset to Leicestershire. She was arrested while driving and sectioned at Milton Park Hospital in Wyboston, Bedfordshire, where she stayed for a year before moving to residential home Oakley House in Eaton Socon, which cares specifically for adults with Asperger's.

"Although my past has been terrible, I wouldn't be as understanding and accepting as I am today (Thursday, 16 April) if it hadn't all happened," says Emma. "I've learned to cope in the world that I live in now but it's taken a long time."

With the right support and encouragement, Asperger's sufferers can lead full and independent lives, which is what Emma is now aiming to do. She set up the website http://www.assupportgrouponline.co.uk/ for Asperger's sufferers when she was 17, and chronicles her experiences on a blog most days.

"If I hadn't been so open about my life since I started the website, I don't think it would have helped other people with the same condition. I sacrificed my privacy to help others really," she explains.."I care about people, which is the reason why I run the website regardless of the problems in my life."

Emma receives around 50 emails a month from other Asperger's sufferers.

She says: "People have said it is so nice to see someone writing from a personal perspective rather than a professional one."

Emma's autobiography, Tortured Soul, has been selfpublished and is available online from www.lulu.com.

"I have always found it easier to communicate in writing," she says. "I'm going to get my autobiography published properly eventually."

As she matures, Emma has adopted a matter-of-fact approach to life and her condition. "I don't think it's worth placing the blame on anything because it happened and now I just have to deal with it because I have no choice.

"You can either accept it as a gift or a curse."

If you don't want to live your life in denial and bitterness then accept it as a gift."

I fight the challenges my disability makes me face with people daily, with all the strength I have inside me and I won't ever give up fighting for things I believe in."

Copyright © 2009 Cambridge News Online

The original source for this article can be found here:
http://asplanet.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=110&Itemid=155

Emma Thomson's book, Tortured Soul Part 1: A Female Aspies Story, can be purchased from here:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/tortured-soul-part-1-a-female-aspies-story/2871080?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/9

The support group founded by Emma Thomson, Aspergers Support Group Online, can be found here:
http://www.assupportgrouponline.org/

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Emma Thomson's story is a sad but all too realistic and common one. Her experiences perfectly demonstrate the lack of understanding and tolerance that the neurotypical world has for those afflicted with Autism or Asperger's Syndrome. She has experienced a harsh life simply because those around her fail to understand or accept her the way she is. And I guarantee you that she is not alone in this. Many people in the UK and around the world suffer because of a lack of understanding and acceptance of Autism and the difficulties it creates for those people that have it. While I personally cannot fully relate to Emma's experiences, not having experiences anywhere near the level of difficulties resulting from my condition as she has, I nonetheless sympathise and empathise (as much as is possible for someone with Aspergers anyway) with her plight.

In many ways she is something of an inspiration for people with Aspergers Syndrome. While she has professed to having thought about killing herself, she has managed to go on with her life and has done much to help others with her condition to go on with their lives. Support groups like the one she has created offer valuable resources to people with Aspergers to communicate with one another, exchanging ideas, offering one another advice and forming friendships, all things that make it that little easier to cope with the difficulties posed by Aspergers. Emma's example is one of bravery and determination and shows us that no matter how hard things get we must persevere. Aspergers may create many problems but it also creates perhaps some of the most interesting and unique people you may ever met. Without us I suspect the world would be a duller place and it's about time the world began accepting us as we are. Then, maybe we could be truly accepted and experiences like those of Emma could be avoided.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Autistic couple in Az subject of film

2010-03-18T03:48:00.000-07:00

Autistic couple in Az subject of film

Article from Arizona Daily Sun

By BETSEY BRUNER.

Jerry Newport and Mary Meinel just published Mozart and the Whale: an Asperger's Love Story, a memoir of their life together. They both have Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism.

FLAGSTAFF - Jerry Newport and Mary Meinel joined their two families of birds when they married on Jerry's birthday in 1994.

"The birds got along very well," Jerry said. "They all have double-digit ages."

Besides their 13 birds - five cockatiels, six parakeets, one dove and a cockatoo - the two share a condition, Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism that affects millions of Americans.

Asperger's and other forms of autism are complex developmental disabilities that make social interaction and communication difficult. Maintaining personal relationships can also be daunting, and isolation often sets in.

After their first marriage, a separation in 1997, a divorce in 1999 and a remarriage on Valentine's Day 2002, the couple is still together, refusing to give up in the face of many challenges.

"Mary wasn't sure what kind of future we had, but she was sure we were better off together in some way than we were separate, and she's right," Jerry said.

Today, the Newports live in Flagstaff and have added Wolfie to the family unit, a fluffy-white poodle mix they got at a local animal shelter.

Their story was the inspiration for the 2005 movie, Mozart and the Whale.
Starring Josh Hartnett as Donald (Jerry) and Radha Mitchell as Isabelle (Mary), the movie had a short run in Spokane, Wash., where it was filmed, and was released in DVD at the end of 2006.

"Donald is a very good interpretation of me when I was a young person," said Jerry, who grew up in Long Island. "I was a young person who was obsessed with fitting into society and never quite could."

The movie's title comes from the costumes they wore to celebrate Halloween - Willy the Whale for Jerry, and Mozart's sister, Maria Anna Mozart, for Mary.

Reversing the usual cycle of movie based on book, the Newports have just published a memoir, Mozart and the Whale: An Asperger's Love Story.

The book was co-written by People magazine writer Johnny Dodd and is moving up fast in book rankings based on sales, Jerry said.

People with Asperger's syndrome can be high functioning if a bit eccentric.

"A lot of people would say to us, 'You're just a little off,' " said Jerry, 58, who started an autism support group in Long Beach, Calif., where the couple met in 1993.

Asperger's syndrome was named in honor of Hans Asperger (1906-1980), an Austrian psychiatrist and pediatrician, who described his young patients as "little professors."

The Newports are savants who can perform remarkable feats in specialized intellectual areas, Jerry at math and Mary at music.

With unique personalities, the Newports have become celebrities in the world of autism, featured twice on 60 Minutes.

Because they often have a foot in two worlds, the conventional and the autistic, people with Asperger's are of special interest to people studying autism.

"It's a different culture," said Susan Marks, a special education professor at Northern Arizona University. "Adults with Asperger's are able to provide us a window as to what a child who has autism is experiencing, but is unable to speak. They can tell us what the sensory experience is."

With a degree in math from the University of Michigan, Jerry is a whiz at the subject.

During an interview, he took less than a minute to calculate he was 21,333 days old.

"I started off as a 7-year-old, discovered for being able to do things like square roots in my head, with as many decimals as people wanted," he said.

Because of their difficulties communicating socially, people with Asperger's may not be able to earn a living in their areas of interest.

Jerry works part time for Friendly Cab in town, where he said he is treated well and is becoming a good driver.

Mary, 52, who was born in Tucson, worked in Hollywood as an actress and doesn't consider her form of autism a disability.

"I always considered it a plus," Mary said. "That's where the savant comes from."

Inspired by Russian composers, she bought a synthesizer to compose Neoclassical music.
Another passion is sewing. Mary said she wants to fashion an updated version of her Mozart costume from some new red brocade fabric.

"I'm just bound and determined to cash in on life, to live it to the fullest," she said. "You should have a lot of dreams and see how many of them you can fulfill. You should do what you'd rather be doing."

The original source for this article can be found here:

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/local/39363.php

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This is another article that I have found about Jerry and Mary Newport.

I have posted other articles about the couple previously which can be read here:

http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2009/11/star-trek-spot-aspie.html

http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2009/11/when-jerry-met-mary.html

http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2009/11/mozart-and-whale-interview-with-jerry.html

http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2009/10/against-odds-love-story.html

Additionally, content about the movie 'Mozart and the Whale' which is based on their lives can be found here:

http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2009/11/mozart-and-whale-movie-trailer.html

http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2009/11/mozart-and-whale-movie-stills.html

http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2009/11/mozart-and-whale-movie-poster.html

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Love can prevail

2010-03-10T10:18:00.000-08:00

Love can prevail

Asperger Syndrome need not nix romantic opportunities

Article from Longmont Times-Call - November 17, 2009

By PAM MELLSKOG

Eugenia Brady and her boyfriend Miles have been together for about two years since they met at a social event for people who are affected with autism. Eugenia was attending a meeting for parents with children of Autism and Miles was participating in a monthly function for adults with Aspergers.

LAFAYETTE — Every now and then, as they make dinner together in her small kitchen, Eugenia Brady will stop chopping vegetables and interrupt their conversation to kiss her boyfriend passionately.

“But when I come up for air, I just want to finish my story,” said Miles, a man diagnosed as a child with Asperger Syndrome, who preferred not to share his last name.

Though the highest-functioning members of all those diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder,

people will Asperger Syndrome still often miss opportunities to enjoy healthy dating and marriage relationships given the way the disorder hobbles communication.

“If someone is angry, I know what it means if they give me the bird or shake their fist. And I know if someone is happy and cheering, like at a Broncos game. It’s the subtle communication in a marriage that I struggled to see. … Relating to someone romantically is like dealing with another culture,” said Xenia Grant, 44, an AS-diagnosed widow and Autism Society of Colorado support group organizer in Denver.

Brady and Miles attribute some of their more maddening moments of misunderstanding and conflict to as much.

“Other times, it’s just a guy thing, a Mars/Venus thing,” Miles said, referring to the popular book by John Grey, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.”

However, psychologist and marriage counselor Kathy J. Marshack recently tailored a book to address communication issues in this subculture titled, “Life with a Partner or Spouse with Asperger Syndrome: Going over the Edge? Practical Steps to Saving You and Your Relationship” (Austism Asperger Publishing Company 2009).

“Most adults with Asperger Syndrome are undiagnosed. So, someone’s smart, financially successful husband could have AS … and can pass for normal, except at home,” the Vancouver, Wash., resident said.

To cope, the affected partner tends to isolate or dominate in the relationship, which worsens the situation, she said.

Others living with the syndrome never get a chance at romance because they miss the cues that

lead to a deeper relationship.

“I should have worn a button that said, ‘I’m hard of hearing and nearsighted. Please flirt aggressively,’” Miles, 47, said.

Still, he and Brady clicked after meeting in December 2007 at an Autism Society of Colorado potluck. Brady, also 47, attended the event after participating in a class to learn more about the then-recent AS diagnosis of her third child, Benjamin, now 6.

She needed to make the first move, though — something she did in April 2008 by inviting Miles to dinner.

Brady worried about all sorts of things before he arrived. Would the flickering of the fluorescent lights in her kitchen or the high-pitched sounds from the TV agitate him?

“And I needed to remember to ask him for a hug when he left instead of just giving him a hug,” she said, referring to the touch sensitivity some people with AS report.

Since then, the couple has learned ways to work around that issue and others.

For instance, the Costa Rican native often smiles and touches people when she talks.

“That is how I speak, too,” she said.

But Miles initially complained that tickled him.

“The thing is, sometimes it tickles and sometimes it doesn’t,” he said.

Now, when Miles shies from her conversational taps, she sometimes tickles him in earnest. And part of her playful response to his diagnosis-related hang-ups has healed him, Miles said.

Now, often he takes her hand to show her he is focused on listening — even though staying focused enough to listen well challenges the couple, too.

At his tech support job with a local wireless company, Miles listens all day to callers explaining glitches in service. He manages handily to analyze the problem and solve it.

Part of his expertise lies in his extraordinary attention to detail. At a previous job fulfilling orders for printer driver software, he memorized part prices along with the tax and shipping rates to almost every state.

Still, conversation with a sweetheart takes different turns than conversation with a customer.

Brady notices that Miles may say four unrelated things without batting an eye.

“(His conversation) can be disconnected. But now I know to tell him, ‘Miles, I don’t get the connection. You have to explain it to me,’” she said.

Other times, instead of feeling hurt by his silence when she tells him about a tough day, she prods him to respond.

“I just think differently,” Miles said. “I remember reading Dr. Seuss’ ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ story with my sister when I was a kid. She said, ‘Do you know what this means?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, even if food doesn’t look right, you should eat it.’ She has never thought about that story like that.”

But for Brady, this aspect makes working through their communication issues worth it.

“Our differences can be the color of our hair, our eyes, our skin or the way our brain is wired and the way we process information and respond to situations,” she said.

Brady appreciates his fresh takes and, to avoid the unhealthy dominating dynamic highlighted by author Marshack, she gives Miles lots of room to guide her in practical matters as much as she guides him through abstractions.

This fall, for instance, he taught her with plenty of patience how to drive a manual transmission vehicle.

The give-and-take aspect of their relationship along with their shared sense of humor helps them see progress in each other — even when it needs to be spelled out.

“I love that wink she gives me,” Miles said. “I now know it means that she finds me attractive.”

The original source for this article can be found here:

http://www.timescall.com/health-story.asp?ID=19333

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Here is another true love story involving a man with Asperger's Syndrome, the big difference to other stories I have posted recently being that in this case the woman does not have the condition as well.

Stories like this show that individuals with Asperger's can indeed find love and that it doesn't necessarily have to be with someone who has the condition (although in some cases it obviously does play a part). This is certainly a story that can provide hope to men with Asperger's Syndrome as, given the small percentage of girls with the condition, there are far more males than females with it and, besides, a girl having Asperger's Syndrome alone isn't enough to base a relationship on.

What we need is simply someone who can accept us as we are. If we can meet someone who can truly understand our difficulties, perhaps through personal experience, i.e. someone who has the condition themself, then great, but ultimately we just need someone who will accept us and love us as we are and stories like this one show that this is most definitely possible, even with a neurotypical partner (after all, you can't define a person with Asperger's by a label, so the same should definitely apply for Neurotypical individuals as well).

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Vancouver couple show autism, romance can coexist

2010-03-08T01:46:00.000-08:00

Vancouver couple show autism, romance can coexist

Article from The Seattle Times - February 24, 2008

By ERIN MIDDLEWOOD, The Columbian

Emilia Murry Ramey and Jody John Ramey have co-written a book entitled Autistics' Guide to Dating. In the book, the married couple reflect on their personal experiences and give advice on relationships.

VANCOUVER, Wash. — Emilia Murry Ramey and Jody John Ramey met through a mutual friend. They soon discovered they had more in common than their friend. Both were students at Portland State University. And both have autism.

The Vancouver couple are among the estimated 1.5 million Americans living with the effects of some degree of autism.

Specifically, Emilia and Jody both have Asperger syndrome, marked by social awkwardness and a lack of understanding of conventional social rules.

As if dating weren't hard enough.

"I hadn't had any dating experience before meeting her," said Jody, 35.

"I used to say I had more jobs than dates," joked Emilia, 33.

Not only did Jody and Emilia figure out dating, they laid out tips for others in a book, Autistics' Guide to Dating: A Book by Autistics, for Autistics and Those Who Love Them or Who Are in Love with Them.

The book is available for $19.95 on the London-based Jessica Kingsley Publishers Web site jkp.com.

"A lot of literature on autistics comes from the medical community that shows autistics as broken and in need of fixing," Jody said. "We don't talk about autism as a deficit at all. We talk about how to sell the positive traits of autism in a romance."

The couple, who married in 2006, didn't set out to write a book. Soon after they started dating, Jody, who has made presentations at autism conferences around the world, suggested they make a proposal to the Autscape conference in London for a session on dating.

"Since we'd only been dating for two weeks, she thought I was nuts," Jody said. But Emilia was willing.

The couple's presentation was a success, and they went on to offer similar sessions.

"We decided the book was the next step," Jody said. "A large percentage of our book is just good, solid relationship principles."

The book stresses communication.

"People on the autism spectrum aren't good at reading subtle social cues," Emilia said. So couples have to specifically voice their feelings and concerns. Even then, she said, things can get tricky.

Emilia said she learned that if something Jody said offended her, she should ask what he meant before getting upset.

The book also addresses touch, which makes many autistics uncomfortable.

"I'm a bit touch-defensive," Jody said. "It isn't that I don't like to be touched. It's that there are specific ways I like to be touched. The book helps couples find those ways no matter what their verbal ability."

Autistic people often have very narrow interests, which can be a barrier to connecting with others. The book helps them navigate beyond a laser-point focus.

"If you love Star Trek, go to a Star Trek convention," Jody said. "Don't talk about Star Trek at your grandmother's funeral."

The book also seeks to help autistics overcome stereotypes.

"One of the problems that holds people back is a negative view of autistics," Emilia said. "People think of Rain Man or someone banging their head against the wall.

Autistics can have successful relationships."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004197834_autisticcouple24.html

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Here is another true story that shows that people with Autism or Aspergers Syndrome can be successful in love.

Just like with Lindsey Nebeker and Dave Hamrick, Emilia and Jody Ramey are passing on things that they have learnt in their relationship onto others and some of the things they have to say are very useful for anyone Autie or Aspie inviduals who are looking for love.

I for one will certainly take the advice that they have given if and when I meet someone I like and enter the world of dating. And I think others should too.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Love Conquers All for One Autistic Couple

2010-02-23T14:07:00.000-08:00

Couple Lives With Autism, Comfort of Each Other

Love Bloomed After Socializing Was Learned

Article from ABC Good Morning America - February 25, 2009

By THEA TRACHTENBERG and LINDSAY GOLDWERT

David Hamrick, 29, and Lindsey Nebeker, 27, look like a typical couple in love, but what's not apparent is how hard they've worked to be together.

Hamrick and Nebeker live together in a Jackson, Miss., apartment, yet they have separate bedrooms, eat meals apart and spend most of their time focused on their own interests.

This unusual setup is how Hamrick and Nebeker, who are both autistic, make their relationship work.

About 1.5 million people in the United States have autism, with varying degrees of severity. Many people with autism struggle with the most basic social interactions, so finding love may seem like an impossibility.

Hamrick and Nebeker are high-functioning but, since childhood, both have found it difficult to make friends and even harder to keep them.

"All of her socialization had to be learned, usually by hard experience," said Nebeker's father, Gordon Nebeker.

Autistic people can also be hypersensitive to touch and sound. Hamrick can't stand when the room is too warm and cringes at certain sounds; Nebeker can't take florescent lights; and both are profoundly uncomfortable with small talk, said Lynn Harris, who profiled the couple for Glamour magazine.

Learning to Interact with Autism

Despite their difficulties, they both kept trying to reach out and connect with others. Nebeker learned to make friends by reading Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Hamrick had tried to untangle the rules of dating by reading self-help books.

"No one teaches you to flirt," said Diane Twactman-Cullen, editor in chief of Autism Spectrum Quarterly. "Individuals with autism would really be at a loss. So there might be some missed signals."

When Hamrick and Nebeker met in 2005 at an autism conference, Hamrick was smitten.
"I pretty much liked everything about her," he said. "She was very sweet, easy to talk to, and a good listener."

But Nebeker was unsure.

"In my early 20s, I had decided I was no longer going to seek a relationship," she said. "I was mainly going to focus on my career and my friends that I had been able to make and keep."

They became friends. Then one day when they were at a café, Hamrick knew he was making progress when he put his hand on hers.

"My heart was racing," Hamrick said. "I was fearful it might not work out the way I had anticipated, but the fact that she didn't pull back and she was able to hold my hand there for at least five minutes, I was very touched by that."

Living Together With Separate Needs

After two years of dating, they took the huge step of moving in together, despite their unique and separate needs.

Nebeker admits that it seems highly unusual for a typical couple to agree to separate bedrooms.

"We both understood the importance of an individual with autism needing their own space," she said.

When they are in their apartment, they are rarely together. Hamrick, a meteorologist, is often in his room on the computer or absorbed in the Weather Channel while Nebeker, a musician, can get lost for hours playing the piano and working on her music.

A romantic dinner for two presents major challenges.

"There are a number of sounds that are unpleasant to me," Hamrick explained. "Such as chewing sounds and crunching sounds."

And Nebeker has many complicated eating rituals. Her napkin has to be placed just so and her meals prepared in just the right way.

"Sometimes Dave will spontaneously ask, 'Hey, you want to go out for dinner tonight?' And I break into sobs and I say, 'I am so sorry, I just can't. I just can't,'" Nebeker said.

The couple's parents have seen their children struggle with their disorder and are in awe of the way the two care for each other and express their love and devotion.

"Being high functioning is almost more difficult than being low functioning," said Gordon Nebeker.
"You are so close to there, and yet not quite -- and that is heartbreaking."

But for all the compromises, the couple's love story is actually a pretty traditional one, one of deep understanding and acceptance.

"When I have had a bad day at work or just a bad day for some other reason -- and I come home, I don't even have to say anything, he senses it. Dave will come up to me and start cuddling up to me and that's really all I need," Nebeker said. "I know that I am with a partner who is not going to judge me for certain eccentricities I have."

Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

The original article can be found here:
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/story?id=6952013&page=1

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This is a follow-up to my recent posts. Other articles I have posted about Lindsey Nebeker and Dave Hamrick can be found here:
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/02/video-learning-to-love.html
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/02/theyre-autisticand-theyre-in-love.html

This article is an accompaniment to the video I posted previously - see the above link.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Video: 'Learning to Love'

2010-02-22T01:26:00.000-08:00

The original source for this video can be found here:

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=6955074

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Following up my previous post about Lindsey Nebeker and Dave Hamrick, here is a lovely news piece that was done about them on ABC News shortly after the story was published in Glamour magazine.

Enjoy.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

They’re Autistic—and They’re in Love

2010-02-21T00:25:00.000-08:00

They’re Autistic—and They’re in Love

Article from Glamour - February 2, 2009

By LYNN HARRIS

There are two bedrooms in the cozy Jackson, Mississippi, apartment: Dave Hamrick’s is like a dad’s den, with a striped beige armchair and a hanging map; Lindsey Nebeker’s is darkly girly, with spiky dried roses hung over a bed topped by a graphic leaf-print quilt. After work on any given evening, Dave and Lindsey are likely to be orbiting the home separately, doing their own thing. Dave may be flipping through magazines, pausing to stare fixedly at design details or leaning in to inhale the scent of the pages. Lindsey typically sits down to eat alone—from a particular plate with a particular napkin placed just so—and may slip so deeply into her own world that Dave has learned to whisper “Psst…” when he approaches so as to not startle her and, on a bad night, make her scream.

An observer might assume the two are amicable, if oddball, roommates. But Lindsey, 27, and Dave, 29, are deeply in love. And they are autistic. Every day of their relationship, these two beat tremendous odds. That’s because the very definition of autism suggests that for adults with this disorder, love—especially the lasting, live-in kind like Lindsey and Dave’s—is not in the cards at all.

About 1.5 million people in the United States (an estimated one fifth of them are female) have autism, with varying degrees of severity. The disorder can create sensory issues, like hypersensitivity to touch and sound, and impair social skills. While some autistics are gifted (often in music or math), they may be utterly baffled by the nuances of small talk and eye contact. Expressing empathy can be virtually impossible. Imagine a first date—never a breeze for any of us—with those limitations.

“I hear a lot of loneliness, sadness and fear among the autistic adults I meet,” says Stephen Shore, author of Beyond the Wall and an internationally recognized expert on autism who has the disorder himself. “Without a natural understanding of communication, it’s much more difficult for people with autism to find and sustain an intimate relationship.” They have hearts that feel; it’s the funky wiring in their brains that makes things so challenging.

Contrary to stereotype—the Rain Man-esque loner who’d rather count toothpicks than make friends—adult autistics often know what they’re missing out on and hope to find love, like anyone else. Since hanging in a crowded bar or going on a blind date can be terrifying, many connect through social-networking websites. Still, successful relationships aren’t very common, especially relationships in which both partners have autism.

Lindsey and Dave have experienced their fair share of heartache: at school, among so-called friends, in their search for partners. Yet both have also summoned the courage to take a risk, perhaps the biggest risk of their lives, for each other. Theirs is a still-unfolding tale—an unconventional story about unconditional love.

Autism has been making headlines lately, especially now that more and more children are being diagnosed with it. Celeb mom Jenny McCarthy, for one, speaks and writes about her son’s autism. The head writer for Days of Our Lives developed a story line about an autistic child based on her parental experience. Last fall, autism-awareness advocates raised hell over the “Autism Shmautism” chapter in comic Denis Leary’s latest book. Observations included “Yer kid is not autistic. He’s just stupid. Or lazy. Or both.”

The attention, good and bad, has made it somewhat easier for adult autistics to find acceptance in the world. Former America’s Next Top Model contestant Heather Kuzmich—who has Asperger’s syndrome (considered an autism spectrum disorder) and who had trouble making eye contact in TV interviews—has become a role model. Claire Danes is starring in a forthcoming HBO biopic about best-selling autistic author Temple Grandin. Also helpful are sites like wrongplanet.net, geared toward autistic adults, where users can find answers to questions such as “How do I learn to flirt?”

Lindsey, an auburn-haired beauty with an artistic, bejeweled style you might call peasant-goth, has been more fortunate than others (including her severely autistic younger brother). When she was 19 months old and not talking, her parents tested her for autism, and she got the benefit of early treatment. Today, her occasional wandering gaze and the forced cheer in her voice make her seem just a bit off. It takes effort, she says, not to sound “robotic.”

Even as Lindsey’s speech caught up and her talent for playing piano emerged, she developed habits typical of autistics: staring for hours at the fibers of a carpet, for example, or performing soothing rituals like stepping on cracks in the sidewalk. Classmates teased her mercilessly, and she’d come home with kick me signs on her back. Real friendship seemed painfully out of reach for the eccentric, awkward girl who came across as blunt. In high school, when another student asked Lindsey what she thought of her new makeup, Lindsey recalls, “I told her it looked fake. She became silent, and I knew I had blown it.”

Depressed, Lindsey burned herself with a curling iron and cut her arms with safety pins, hiding her injuries with sweatshirts. “Lindsey’s struggles were heartbreaking,” says her mother, Anne Nebeker, 63, a retired teacher in Logan, Utah. “I was very anxious about how she would manage as an adult and whether she would have a social life at all or find love.”

Yet Lindsey’s torment fueled a determination to learn the very skills that eluded her. Her best resource: Dale Carnegie’s self-help classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. Advice as simple as “Be a good listener” began to help, especially by college. The subtleties of romance, however, remained a mystery. She’d fool around with a guy and get dumped a few days or weeks later without explanation. “I had no idea what I was doing that was scaring guys away,” says Lindsey. “I felt like I had failed somehow.” In her early twenties, she gave up. “I decided to focus on the friendships I’d managed to make,” she continues, “and quit worrying about love altogether.”

That’s when she met Dave. It was 2005, and they were at an autism conference in Nashville. Diagnosed at three, Dave grew up with pronounced fixations. He’d tote around empty Clorox bottles, and carry a thermometer to assess the air temperature. Like Lindsey, he had trouble making friends. Dave also has Tourette’s syndrome, which can overlap with autism; it’s the cause of his near-constant head jerks and occasional stuttering and grunting noises. His parents were told he would always be in special education, never able to work or live on his own. By fourth grade, he was in a mainstream class; he went on to college, where he majored in meteorology.

When he and Lindsey met, Dave says, “I was hopeful, but realistic.” They e-mailed and talked on the phone, then hung out again a few months later at a conference in Virginia. On their last night there, at a café, Dave took the plunge. Seeing Lindsey’s hands resting on the table, Dave reached for them. “When she didn’t pull away, I knew I had a positive result,” he says in his endearingly geeky, textbookish way. The next day, he gave her a bouquet. “I’d never gotten flowers from anyone, other than my dad after a piano recital,” says Lindsey. Looking Dave in the eye was hard for her. So, she says, “it was a relief to close my eyes and lean in to kiss him. I had my guard up, but some part of me was willing to give it a try.”

Two years later, Lindsey and Dave moved in together. It’s a big step for any couple, but for autistics, it can mean merging two rigid ways of life. Dave likes it cool; Lindsey likes it warm. Dave needs his mattress firm; Lindsey needs hers soft. These may sound like trifles, but what’s merely irritating to others may be, for an autistic, 20 fingernails on 20 blackboards. They’ve discussed every last detail, down to lightbulb preference.

When Dave awakes for work, Lindsey—a night owl—may still be up from the evening before. By noon, she’s improvised a few riffs on her beloved Steinway and is performing the 20-minute ritual of preparing her three thermoses of coffee (touch of flavored syrup, drop of almond milk, heat, adjust, repeat), which she will take with her to her job…at Starbucks.

Being a barista isn’t her Plan A. She dreams of studying photography or special ed in grad school. Dave has turned his fixation on temperature into a meteorology career (his e-mail name is “weatheringautism”). An entry-level forecaster at the National Weather Service, he finds his job exciting. It requires only limited face-to-face contact with strangers; on a typical day, he gives callers weather reports or heads out, alone, to release a weather balloon.

Both often come home exhausted, like actors who’ve been on stage all day. That’s one reason Lindsey and Dave need so much time alone after work, and why they rarely call each other to check in and chat. “Every day, we put out so much effort to speak properly in the workplace and other social settings,” says Lindsey. “When we talk on the telephone, our conversations normally don’t last long because we get uneasy when the small-talk script runs out.”

On weekends, they’re more likely to prowl a bookstore than go to a party or a restaurant. Their friends—mostly from college and conferences, some of whom are autistic—don’t live nearby. They also prefer to eat by themselves. Dave, as if he had superhero hearing, is sensitive to the sound of chewing. He can eat only cooked vegetables—never raw, crunchy ones. Lindsey finds it so torturous to deviate from her food rituals that Dave’s occasional invitation to dine out can send her into sobs. “I just keep telling him, ‘I’m so sorry, I can’t,’” she says. “I feel awful about it.”

Once in a while, with enough notice, Lindsey says yes and they’ll head to a bright and bustling pan-Asian buffet; it’s the opposite of romantic. Dave, lit up like a kid on Christmas Day, will happily put away several crabs’ worth of crab legs. Lindsey, wary of food she didn’t prepare herself, would rather prod stiffly at her wasabi than moon over Dave. But what other diners can’t see is something even more tender than canoodling: Lindsey and Dave’s willingness to step outside their comfort zones to please each other.

Adjusting to sex took time. Lindsey was somewhat nervous about the fact that she was a virgin and Dave was not. “Spontaneity was not an option,” she says. “People with autism really have to mentally prepare for everything.” She felt bogged down by the procedures she’d established in her head from seeing romantic movies like Pretty Woman—“OK, now I’m supposed to take off his shirt.” Three years into their relationship, though, they readily visit each other’s beds.

Marriage, they say, is a possibility; children, they’re less sure about. Both worry about a genetic predisposition to autism, a valid concern, especially given that both Lindsey and her brother have the disorder. Even if they adopt, parenting seems perilous. “Dealing with our rituals and sensory issues demands so much from us,” says Lindsey, “that I don’t know how we’d take care of someone else.”

Lindsey still gets depressed when people misunderstand her. “Sometimes, after a bad experience, I shut myself off from the rest of the world,” she says. “I don’t have to face judgment in my room.” Recently, as a man at work was talking, she tuned out but kept nodding and smiling (a frequent habit). Suddenly he blurted, “Did you hear what I said? I got mugged last night.” Lindsey was crushed. “It’s exhausting,” she says, “to be 27 and still have to work at getting interactions with people right.”

These are the times when she needs Dave most. “He reminds me that tomorrow is another day,” she says. “He makes me feel like I’m worth something.” Dave loves to stand behind her, wrap his arms around her waist, press his nose into her hair and take long, deep breaths. Last Valentine’s Day, he festooned their bathroom mirror with plastic gel hearts (he’s been obsessed with the shape since he was a kid). They’re still there today.

Though connecting with others will be a lifelong struggle, Lindsey and Dave have formed a bond that defies their autism. They may sometimes come across as blunt to strangers, but speaking their own minds clearly and directly—just as they did when they moved in together—has helped their relationship. There’s none of the “if you have to even ask what’s wrong, then forget it” passive-aggressiveness many couples experience, no expectation of mind reading. “People like Lindsey and Dave put so much thought and dedication into making their relationship work,” says Diane Twachtman-Cullen, Ph.D., a speech-language expert who specializes in autism and knows the couple well. “Frankly, we could all take a page from their playbook.”

Lindsey’s mom is similarly awed. Anne Nebeker recalls that when Lindsey and Dave came to visit her for the first time, “we went to a local lake. The two of them were running around and splashing water at each other, and I was so pleasantly surprised to see them doing a normal-couple thing like that. Even when Lindsey calls him ‘Hon’ and it sounds natural, not forced and rehearsed, I am amazed. I am so happy to see her in love.”

These days, when Dave whispers as he approaches Lindsey, she’ll whisper back; it’s become a term of endearment. “Psst…,” he’ll say after he walks in the door and sees Lindsey in the living room. Her face lights up when their eyes meet. “Psst!” she’ll respond, smiling. She knows that with Dave, she’s in a safe place. “I’m so lucky to have found him,” she says. “When I’m with him, I forget about my challenges.”

The original article can be found here:
http://www.glamour.com/magazine/2009/02/theyre-autistic-and-theyre-in-love

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As with the story of Jerry and Mary Newport, I find myself unable to fully relate to the experiences of Lindsey Nebeker and Dave Hamrick, one because the condition I have - Aspergers Syndrome - is somewhat milder than full on Autism, and two because I yet to even date a girl let alone have a relationship. Although, thinking about it, the latter does sort of allow me to relate as just like they became frustrated in their search for love and even began to think that they might never meet anyone, I too often feel much the same way, having been looking for someone for a while with absolutely no success. This ability to relate to that aspect of Lindsey and Dave's lives actually makes their story all the more inspiring because if they can find love why can't I?

There is much more to Lindsey and Dave's story than just two people with Autism finding love though, as not only have they found it, they have also found a way to maintain it. Their tends to be certain conventions about relationships and how they should be conducted - couples should sleep in the same bed in the same room for instance - and these things are generally conducted almost to the letter by neurotypical couples. The pressure to conform to such rules is probably a key reason why relationships between individuals with Autism can often struggle, perhaps even fail, but Lindsey and Dave have taken the route of not conforming to such rules, making their relationship work for them.

They certainly seem to have found a way to make a relationship work around their personal situation and I can't help but feel that if I ever do find myself in a relationship I may be able to take a few pointers from Lindsey and Dave. The idea of sharing a bed for example - now, this isn't to sound selfish or anything but when I am sleeping I need my personal space, it is just something I probably wouldn't be able to change. So, the concept of having a separate bed, a separate room in fact, to my partner would actually be quite desirable. Particularly if I found myself with a partner who is also Autistic, each having our own space could be very beneficial to the relationship as a whole. This is also true of my personal hobbies and interests - while I would love to meet someone who shares the exact same passions as me, the chances of that happening aren't wholly promising given my eclectic range of interests, and for a relatoonship to really work I would need my own space. I'm not saying that I wouldn't make some sacrifices to make a relationship work but there are some things I could never change about myself and someone who truly loved me wouldn't expect me to just as I wouldn't expect someone I truly loved to give up everything for me. Lindsey and Dave have shown the way for people with Autism, Aspergers or other ASDs to enjoy a healthy, loving relationship free of the pressures that neurotypical ideas about relationships place on people like us. This is something truly inspiring.

The way that Lindsey and Dave manage to come out of their comfort zones for each other is also inspiring, showing that they truly are in love and are prepared to make sacrifices for one another. I just hope that if and when I meet the right girl that I am able to show my love in the same way that Dave shows for Lindsey and vice versa. Theirs is a truly sweet and romantic story, one that puts any of the tired and predictable nonsense from Hollywood movies to shame and the fact that it is 100% real, not fiction, only makes the story all the inspirational.

Lindsey and Dave have achieved something that many people with Autism Spectrum Disorders, me included, aspire to but many are unable to achieve - they have formed a connection with someone they truly love and are actually keeping the relationship alive. Anyone on the Autism Spectrum cannot fail to be inspired by this. Lindsey and Dave have shown us that love, even the lasting kind, is possible for people like us. Their story is only only a delightful one but that should give hope to lonely people with Autism all over the world.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Adam' DVD Cover Art

2010-02-10T13:10:00.000-08:00

Here is the cover art for the region 2 release of Adam on DVD on Monday 15th February.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Adam' Movie Review

2010-02-06T07:24:00.001-08:00

The following is a review I wrote for Adam when it was released in cinemas last August:

Adam *****

Over the years there have been numerous films that tackled the condition of Autism with such high profile actors as Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man) and Sigourney Weaver (Snow Cake) both having played Autistic characters. However, aside from the little seen Mozart and the Whale starring Josh Hartnett and Radha Mitchell, another form of the condition known as Aspergers Syndrome has been all but ignored by the filmmaking community, until now that is. Adam is a romantic comedy starring British actor Hugh Dancy as a man with Aspergers who develops a romantic relationship with a cosmopolitan New York girl. Already a critical success and winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Adam will hopefully pave the way for future films involving characters with Aspergers, something that I, as a person who has the condition, greatly look forward to. Future films aside, however, the question is how does Adam fare? Is it a well made and entertaining film and perhaps more importantly does it accurately portray a condition which is quite common yet so many people know hardly anything about?

Romance can be risky, perplexing and filled with the perils of miscommunication - and that's if you aren't Adam, for whom life itself is this way. Adam (Hugh Dancy) is a handsome but intriguing young man with Aspergers Syndrome who has all his life led a sheltered existence - until he meets his new neighbor, Beth (Rose Byrne), a beautiful, cosmopolitan young woman who pulls him into the outside world, with funny, touching and entirely unexpected results. Their implausible and enigmatic relationship reveals just how far two people from different realities can stretch in search of an extraordinary connection.

Following a recent slew of mediocre Hollywood romantic comedies - The Proposal and The Ugly Truth you have been named and shamed - it is refreshing to see Adam, a film that could teach Hollywood filmmakers a few things about how romcoms should be done. Writer/director Max Mayer succeeds on two fronts with this film. Firstly, he has created a romantic comedy that is full of charm and warmth but that is based on a real world relationship with all the problems that entails as opposed to a fairytale happily ever after romance, and is free of many of the clichés and conventions that permeate mainstream romcoms. The film’s ending is far from a fairytale, being quite bittersweet in fact, but nonetheless the film will still leave you with a smile on your face because it is so sweet and touching that it really is hard not to love it. While not laugh out loud funny the film also has a good sense of humour, clean, honest, sincere and quirky, coming from heartfelt character moments rather than cheap, irrelevant gags. The second area in which Mayer greatly succeeds is in the manner in which Aspergers Syndrome is portrayed. He clearly knows his stuff and it really shows in the film, both in the script and in the production design. The film accurately portrays the condition and explanations for what is and how it affects those who have it are done using accurate terminology and presented in a manner that is simple without coming across as patronizing to moviegoers. Simple things in the production design such as the way Adam’s cupboards are arranged also accurately illustrate key factors of Aspergers and such little details really make a big impact. Certainly this film will educate viewers as well as entertain. The accurate portrayal of the condition isn’t entirely down to Mayer, however, with the performance of Hugh Dancy being pivotal. Dancy completely convinces as Adam, accurately portraying all the mannerisms associated with Aspergers and conveying all the difficulties and misunderstandings that come with it brilliantly. As a person with Aspergers I can honestly say that his performance rings true to life. Another great performance is given by Rose Byrne who is delightful as Beth and who convincingly portrays her character’s affections for Adam and frustrations at the difficulties she faces in her relationship with him. The relationship dynamic between them is extremely realistic, highlighting that a relationship with an Aspie is extremely difficult to maintain, and while it could be said that there isn’t much chemistry between them, this is really the point. Beth has genuine feelings for Adam but, due to his condition, he is unable to express such affections in return. This effectively illustrates how people with Aspergers are unable to experience love in the same fashion that others do. The tender and delightful performances of Dancy and Byrne are the heart and soul of the film, but there are also some good performances from the supporting cast, with Frankie Faison as Adam’s friend/confidante and Peter Gallagher (the focus of a subplot that doesn’t add much to the film as whole but is key in the character development of Beth) and Amy Irving playing Beth’s parents. All in all, Adam is an extremely touching film that successfully blends together both happiness and sadness to create a sweet, touching and entirely believable story of the difficulties people with Aspergers face when it comes to love and relationships. It is a truly delightful film that will leave you with a smile on your face and, quite possibly, a greater understanding of Aspergers Syndrome and those who have it.

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Don't forget that Adam is available on DVD from Monday 15th February 2010.

Review by Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Adam' Movie Stills

2010-02-05T12:43:00.000-08:00

Following up my previous posts here are a selection of still images from the film Adam.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Adam' Movie Trailer

2010-02-04T01:32:00.000-08:00

Following up my previous post, here is the trailer for Adam starring Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne, and written and directed by Max Mayer.

Don't forget - Adam is out on DVD on Monday 15th February so make sure you get your copy and give this film the attention it deserves.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Adam' Movie Posters

2010-02-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

These are the movie posters for the film Adam starring Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne, and written and directed by Max Mayer.

Winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Award as last year's Sundance Film Festival, Adam is a charming romantic comedy/drama about Adam, a man with Aspergers Syndrome who has lived a life sheltered from much of the outside world. Everything changes, however, when he meets Beth and the two embark on a romantic relationship, one in which they face both the joys and the difficulties that come with a relationship involving an Aspie partner.

The film paints a very realistic portrayal of a character with Aspergers Syndrome, one that I could particularly relate to (well, not the actual relationship part - I want a relationship more than anything but have never been on a date) and fully empathise with (empathy is perhaps not really the right world - being an Aspie empathy is something I am not fully capable of - but something to that effect anyway).

Both funny and moving, this is a film that is ultimately uplifting, even with an ending which some may consider to be a bit downbeat, and definitely ranks among the best movies of 2009.

Adam was released in cinemas last August, annoyingly on a very limited release but fortunately it is released on DVD on Monday 15th February, so be sure to buy it - it is a truly lovely film and you won't be disappointed.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

A love for film conquers all

2010-01-19T08:38:00.000-08:00

A love for film conquers all

Article from Student Life in Bangor

Graduating with an upper second class honours degree in Creative Studies is a dream come true for film fanatic, Robert Mann from Llandudno who's among the first class of students to graduate in this new BA degree at Bangor University.

Robert, who's 21 and a former pupil of Ysgol John Bright, Llandudno was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome at the age of 14 and has struggled more than most to adjust to university life. He said,

"I came to Bangor because it was in daily travelling distance which meant that I could continue living at home, as I'm not ready to live alone yet. I started off having to have taxis to get to and from Bangor, initially required a mentor for getting around the campus, needed a note taker at first and had major difficulty socialising and working with other students."

Over the three years, Robert has overcome all obstacles and is now much more independent; being able to travel alone, produce his own notes and interact with other people as well as holding down a job in his local cinema. He added,

"I feel happy and relieved. Also, a bit surprised because I have faced a lot of obstacles and because the 3 years have gone much better than I expected them to."

"I struggled a lot at school because other pupils didn't understand me. I had support from my teachers and because I wanted to go to university they helped me in the right direction. Because I have an interest is film (watching, reviewing and making) I have been able to incorporate this into my studies at university."

As part of his Creative Studies Course, Robert got a chance to be involved in the production of a number of films including a documentary on Aspergers Syndrome from his own personal perspective which he hopes to develop further in future.

Having gained confidence in himself and his ability, Robert has decided to continue his studies. He added,

"I'm starting an MA in Bangor this September, which I will be doing part time over two years. In the long run I hope to become a film critic and/or director, as this is a profession that I would really enjoy doing and I feel that I would very good at it."

Robert would like to thank all the staff at Bangor's Student Services Centre and his tutors who have helped and supported him on his journey to success.

Copyright © 2001-2010 Student life in Bangor

The original article can be viewed here:
http://www.bangor.ac.uk/studentlife/news/robert_mann.php.en

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This article is a follow-up to my previous post:
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/01/level-success-for-movie-critic.html

I feel that, when compared to the previous article, it illustrates the ways in which I have developed socially and academically during my time at university.

While I doubt that I will be developing much more socially, my Masters degree involving me being on my own a lot more, I believe that once my Masters is completed, I will have developed significantly more in academic terms.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

A-Level Success for Movie Critic

2010-01-18T01:52:00.000-08:00

I just thought I would share this article that was published in North Wales Weekly News on August 25, 2005, written by MARI JONES.

It was written about me just after I had completed my A-Levels.

I will shortly be posting another article about me from after completed by Bachelors Degree at University.

Combined the two articles help to show how I have progressed and overcome some of the difficulties posed by my Aspergers since leaving school.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

New horizons for beautiful mind

2010-01-16T03:19:00.000-08:00

New horizons for beautiful mind

Article from Yorkshire Post - October 27, 2009

By ROB PREECE

MEETING and introducing new people was never easy for Daniel Lightwing at school in Yorkshire but now he lives in a city of 17 million people and plays an unlikely role in helping Britain forge closer links with China.

In three amazing years at Cambridge University, Mr Lightwing got married, graduated in two subjects, appeared in a feature-length film and a television documentary, and was named one of the best child stars ever to appear on screen.

Now the 21-year-old's impressive CV boasts a further distinction after he became the first British student to be awarded a Chinese government scholarship to study at Beijing University.

Not bad for a young man whose problems at school were only explained after he was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, a form of autism which affects how he relates to others.

Millions of television viewers were introduced to Mr Lightwing, from York, in the film Beautiful Young Minds, which was screened on BBC2 in October 2007.

The Bafta and Emmy-nominated film followed his year-long quest to become a member of the UK maths team and his gap-year trip to China, where he met his future wife Yan.

Yan's difficulties in obtaining a visa and immigration clearance were also followed by the film-makers, and the cameras were present at the couple's wedding in York in December 2006.

Mr Lightwing's story delighted movie critics, and earlier this year film magazine The Big Picture included him in its list of most appealing child stars, along with actors from the films Slumdog Millionaire, Life is Beautiful, Pan's Labyrinth and Rabbit-Proof Fence.

Last year, Mr Lightwing was featured in a documentary for the Australian TV science programme Catalyst, which looked at the link between having Asperger and thinking with a highly mathematical mind.

He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, this summer after majoring in both maths and Chinese, having already applied for the Beijing scholarship.

His mother Carolyn said: "The fact that he was not only good at the Chinese but also another subject persuaded the Oriental Studies department at Cambridge to nominate him.

"He had to write a description of himself in Chinese and he had to be backed by three people from the university to write references for him."He applied for it back in February but didn't hear until August. He is delighted that his application was successful."

Mr Lightwing, who was educated at York College and St Peter's School, moved to China in June, not knowing whether he would be awarded the scholarship but keen to get on to another course if he was not successful.

The scholarship fully sponsors his tuition fees, health insurance, accommodation, living and travel expenses for seven years of postgraduate study.

He has begun studying for a masters degree in linguistics and applied linguistics, specialising in computational linguistics, and he hopes to follow this with a PhD in syntax and programming.

Mrs Lightwing, who hopes to travel to China next summer, said: "It's a lot of money and a very high-value scholarship, and I think it shows that there are efforts to promote relations between the UK and China."

Quite a few people have come from the US in the past, but we believe that Daniel is the first student from the UK to be awarded a scholarship like this."

He has always said that he finds it easier out there than he does in the UK, and apparently that is quite common in people with Asperger."

People in China understand better some of the difficulties he has, and particularly the problems he has when he meets people for the first time, because he is in a foreign country.

"I think, in this country, he finds it harder because people do not expect him to have such difficulties when he is meeting them for the first time."I think he would like to stay in academia, but he is also very interested in syntax and I think he would love to work for a company like Microsoft.

"He is interested in the interaction between computer language and human language, which is a field of study that could help other people with Asperger."

GLOBAL MATHS CHALLENGE

Daniel Lightwing was chosen to represent the UK in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), a global maths competition attended by 500 students from about 100 different countries.

Beautiful Young Minds charted his progress from the first UK squad selection meeting in November 2005, through to the main contesr in Slovenia a year later.

He went on to win a silver medal in the IMO, a test with six questions so difficult that only half of the 500 competitors were able to attempt more than two answers.

©2010 Johnston Press Digital Publishing

The original article can be found here:
http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/New-horizons-for-beautiful-mind.5768620.jp

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This is a follow-up to my recent posts. Other articles I have posted about Daniel Lightwing can be found here:
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/01/tv-spotlight-on-maths-whizzkid.html
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/01/documentary-beautiful-young-minds.html
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/01/autistic-genius-finds-true-love.html

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

TV spotlight on maths whizzkid

2010-01-14T06:06:00.000-08:00

TV spotlight on maths whizzkid

Article from The York Press - October 12, 2007

By HAYDN LEWIS.

A TEENAGE maths sensation and former York College student will feature in a BBC documentary on Sunday.

Eighteen-year-old Daniel Lightwing is one of a group of exceptionally gifted young mathematicians taking part in Beautiful Young Minds, on BBC2, at 9pm.

Daniel, of Warthill, near York, gained a place to read maths at Trinity College, Cambridge, when he was 16, but was asked to defer his entry until he was 18.

The documentary tells the story of some of the brightest mathematical brains of a generation.
Each year, exceptionally gifted teenagers from over 90 countries compete for medals at the Inter-national Mathematical Olympiad. The film follows a group of brilliant teen-agers as they battle it out to become the chosen six selected to represent the UK.

Daniel, who was 17 at the time of filming, has been diagnosed with Aspergers' Syndrome, a form of autism that affects the way a person communicates and relates to others. But he recognises that "it's good to be different".

Apart from mathematics, the most important thing in Daniel's life is his wife, Zhu Yan.
The couple met when Daniel spent three months travelling around China - during which time he taught himself Mandarin to fluency.

In the programme, Daniel is desperate to win a medal at the Olympiad and we follow his progress as he gears up for the competition and brings Zhu Yan back from China to his family home in York with the intention of marrying her. As the competition draws closer, minds and emotions are pushed to the limit.

It follows his attempts to represent the UK at the Olympiad, where he won a bronze medal while competing against the best in the world. There were 12 countries taking part in the contest, and each of them put forward six mathematicians.

As The Press reported at the time, Daniel spent a year training with the UK maths squad, teaching English in China and travelling.

He was then selected for the UK team at the main International Mathematics Olympiad, in Slovenia.

His mum, Carolyn, a maths teacher, said: "He's always been very exceptional at maths, and the fact it's been recognised to this point now is really fantastic."

© Copyright 2001-2009 Newsquest Media Group

The original article can be found here:

http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/1755315.tv_spotlight_on_maths_whizzkid/

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This is a follow-up to my recent posts. Other articles I have posted about Daniel Lightwing can be found here:
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/01/documentary-beautiful-young-minds.html
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2010/01/autistic-genius-finds-true-love.html

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Documentary: 'Beautiful Young Minds'

2010-01-09T01:34:00.000-08:00

Beautiful Young Minds Part 1 of 4

Beautiful Young Minds Part 2 of 4

Beautiful Young Minds Part 3 of 4

Watch Beautiful Young Minds [Part 3] in Educational View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

NOTE: Part 3 is included as an embedded video due to the file size being too large for upload.

Beautiful Young Minds Part 4 of 4

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Here is a BAFTA nominated British documentary by Morgan Matthews entitled Beautiful Young Minds which tells the story of several individuals gifted with impressive mathematical abilities who are trying to get accepted into the International Mathematical Olympiad. Among the individuals, most of whom have some degree of Autism, hoping to get accepted is Daniel Lightwing. This film focuses particularly on his efforts, as well as the difficulties he faces in his day to day life, and also his relationship with Zhu Yan, their marriage actually being filmed for this documentary. The film not only manages to be entertaining but also gives an honest, sincere, sensitive and heartfelt look into the lives of its subjects and is very well done in every respect.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Autistic Genius Finds True Love

2010-01-07T01:53:00.000-08:00

AUTISTIC GENIUS FINDS TRUE LOVE

Article from The Sun - October 27, 2007

By SAM WOSTEAR

MATHS wizard Daniel Lightwing is one in a million – and he has the figures to prove it.

Sitting in his smart student flat in Cambridge, surrounded by books, he explains the probability of triumphing at the global Maths Olympics.

“To get a medal, the odds are one in a million,” he says, “Yet to get to represent your country in the Olympic Games the odds are only one in 100,000.”

But 20-year-old Daniel not only reached last year’s annual International Mathematical Olympiad in Slovenia, he won silver – and all despite suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome.

The condition, a type of autism, has left him struggling to form emotional bonds with others and unable to perform simple tasks – such as making a cup of tea.

Yet other aspects of his intellect are truly breathtaking, such as his mathematical ability – and becoming a fluent speaker of Mandarin Chinese in just FOUR months.

Daniel, now a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, says: “I never felt like I fitted in at school."

“The British don’t celebrate academic success like other, less developed countries, they just label you a geek. Students who are good at sport get all the praise."

“I always felt frustrated at school because I just wanted to learn more and more about maths but because I was good at it, the teachers tried to make me focus on other subjects."

"They didn't understand how I could excel in maths, yet only achieve mediocre grades in other subjects such as English."

Indeed, despite his incredible feat in learning Chinese, Daniel points out that after studying French for eight years through school he still can’t speak a word of it – because it simply doesn’t interest him.

He continues: “I was bored at school, so I started misbehaving. I certainly wasn’t a teacher’s pet. I hadn’t been diagnosed with Asperger’s so they all just presumed I was a trouble maker.”

Daniel’s mum Carolyn had noticed her son was special when at the age of two he was able to recite the alphabet forwards – and backwards.

At four he explained how he could work out how many tiles were on the kitchen ceiling without counting them but by using the equation for area.

Although they were amazed by his incredible maths ability, teacher Carolyn and her husband David, a GP, enjoyed a loving relationship with their son, and so were not immediately aware he could have Asperger's.

The characteristics of the condition mean that sufferers can experience feelings of extreme isolation.

Feeling misunderstood and rejected can lead to very low self-esteem which is usually expressed through anger.

But mild-mannered Daniel, from York, found a way to cope with these problems.

He adds: “I wasn’t bullied but I did shy away from meeting people and playing with the other children. I’m not comfortable in large groups and even as a child I realised I wasn’t the same as the others.”

Although Daniel was incapable of feeling emotion like other children he understood that others did – an ability which may well have helped his condition go undiagnosed for so long.

He says: “I realised the other children in my class would respond differently to situations so I copied them and took it into account when I was with them, but it wasn’t something that came naturally.”

Daniel was finally diagnosed with Asperger’s at 18 when a sixth-form teacher referred him to a specialist. He says it was a great relief finally to understand there was a reason he had always felt different.

It was the fact that Daniel didn’t fit in that led to his interest in China and the Chinese culture of celebrating academic success.

After changing schools more than five times, he decided to take a gap year before university and travel to China.

And in just four months he had taught himself to read, write and speak Mandarin fluently.

Somehow he also found the time to befriend a young Chinese girl, Yan, who was working as a receptionist at the hostel where he was staying.

The friendship blossomed – and six months later the couple married and now live together in Daniel’s Cambridge student digs.

Though it can be hard for Asperger's suffers to form emotional relationships Daniel says that when he saw Yan he knew he was in love.

"I know it sounds cheesy but it was love at first sight. From the moment I saw Yan I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her."

"I would go down to the reception where she worked and pretend to practise my Chinese on her. But really I just wanted to talk to her.

“Yan is the only person who understands me. She has given up so much to come with me to the UK and I appreciate that. I much prefer going out for dinner with my wife than socialising with other students.”

And he adds: “I was interested in China because they are the only country out of all the International Mathematical Olympiad teams to enter where each of the six members wins a gold medal. They have a totally different attitude to learning and achievement so I thought I had a good chance of fitting in there – and I did.

“When I am out and about in England I feel like I stand out. In China I thought that if I did come across weird they’d just put it down to me being a foreigner.

“I wasn’t disappointed. I love China and would consider living there one day with Yan.”

And he adds: “Yan doesn’t judge me because she doesn’t have an understanding of Asperger’s – she just accepts me for who I am.”

© 2009 News Group Newspapers Ltd.

The original article can be found here:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article394147.ece

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Daniel Lightwing is in some ways a textbook case of Asperger's Syndrome and a person who I can very much relate to. He has some unique abilities yet has difficulty with simple things that many people take for granted, such as making a cup of tea. While I personally can make tea I too find many such simple tasks to be beyond my capabilities, while I am very capable at some things that may well elude others. At school Daniel did very well in subjects such as Maths but struggled with others like English. When I was in school I too had similar difficulties, although any mathematical ability I had has been lost with time and ironically my primary gift is now my creativity, something which is often considered a product of English. Regardless, I understand the difficulties that Daniel faced in school, particularly the way others misunderstood me. Daniel also has difficulty forming emotional bonds, another aspect I can really relate to as, since childhood, I have had great difficulty making friends and even greater difficulty maintaining friendships. I have also had great difficulty dealing with the opposite sex, wanting to meet to form a romantic relationship for a long time but my confidence constantly beaten by several failures with girls I liked, many of them based around misunderstandings on my part, one of the ways in which Aspergers has hindered my social development over the years.

Where I cannot fully relate to Daniel though is in his unique abilities. While I do have some gifts, mine certainly do not compare to his. He learned to speak Mandarin Chinese fluently in just four months. I did Welsh and French in school and while I was pretty good at both while I was doing them, nothing stuck with me, my mind seemingly unable to absorb any second (or third, fourth, and so on...) languages. I also can't even begin to comprehend the level of mathematics ability demonstrated by Daniel. He has a true intellectual gift, one that I could never even dream of having.

Daniel Lightwing is a true inspiration to me, and should be to other Aspies as well. He has unique abilities and has harnessed them to great success in his academic life. He has found true love, something that many Aspies, me in particular, aspire to but have great difficulty in finding. And, most importantly of all, he demonstrates that people with Aspergers are capable of anything, if only we put our minds to it. You can't get much more inspiring than that.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Star Trek' - Spot the Aspie

2009-11-26T07:04:00.000-08:00

Have you ever watched Star Trek?

If the answer is yes, then, have you ever seen this woman?

A blue Bolian who can often be seen in the background, either at Ten Forward on The Enterprise in The Next Generation or in Quarks Bar on Deep Space Nine.

If you have what you might not have realised is that the woman playing her is Mary Newport, the Aspie who has been one of the subjects of many of the articles I have posted recently.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

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Here is a bit of background about Mary Newport from a Star Trek website:

Mary Meinel-Newport is an actress seen in several episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, playing a Bolian extra. She appeared throughout the first four years of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as a Bolian background character, possibly Lysia Arlin. She can also be seen in Star Trek: Generations as a Bolian Woman in Ten Forward.

Raised in Tucson, Arizona, both Mary and her husband, Jerry Newport, have Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism. They have two sons, Stephen and Peter, along with two grandchildren. Mary and Jerry Newport's relationship was the subject of a 1995 LA Times article, which became the inspiration for a 2005 film called Mozart and the Whale – named after a book written by the Newports (along with Johnny Dodd) entitled Mozart and the Whale: An Asperger's Love Story. They also wrote a book called Autism - Asperger's & Sexuality: Puberty and Beyond.

Mary Newport appeared on Babylon 5 as a Centauri female (a series that starred Bill Mumy and Andreas Katsulas), and was interviewed twice on 60 Minutes, in both 1996 and 2004.

The source for this information is here:
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Mary_Meinel-Newport

When Jerry Met Mary

2009-11-26T06:34:00.000-08:00

When Jerry Met Mary: Lesley Stahl Revisits A Couple Who Both Suffer From Autism.

Article from CBS News - September 29, 2004

By REBECCA LEUNG.

Jerry Newport and Mary Meinel were brought together by something that usually keeps people apart: autism.

People who suffer from it, as Mary and Jerry do, are usually born with it, and usually grow up unhappy, wary of others, often shutting out even their own parents.

Some autistic people are profoundly retarded; and some are brilliant, like the two people that
Correspondent Lesley Stahl first introduced you to in 1996, and then again eight years later.

Jerry Newport always knew there was something wrong with him. But as he was growing up, he didn’t know what it was.

“The one thing I've never had is natural grace. I guess that's the part of me that I've always felt was missing, that everybody around me seemed to have, was this natural sense of when to talk and how,” says Jerry. “What to say and how to say it, and do all those other unspoken things.”

Jerry was always out of step with the rest of the parade. He did well in school at the University of Michigan, but then he spent the next 20 years drifting from job to job. He was a taxi driver, a messenger, a clerk, busboy and deliveryman. He failed at work, and he failed at relationships. He even had trouble, and still does, making eye contact.

”I was just Jerry,” he says. “I was just odd, eccentric … just almost normal.”

But he got so depressed that he tried to kill himself twice. Without friends, he developed a deep bond with animals. He let his pet cockatiels fly loose in his apartment. And then, just when he felt he would never find his way, he went to the movies. He saw Rain Man, which starred Dustin Hoffman as Raymond Babbitt, an autistic man who spent his whole life in an institution.

Babbitt had some unusual skills, which Jerry discovered he had, too. When a man in the movie asked Babbitt how much 4,343 times 1,234 was, Jerry knew the answer.

”The answer was 5,359,262,” says Jerry. “I said it before he [Babbitt] said it. People in front of me in the theater just looked around. And then, I realized, ‘Uh-oh.’”

As Jerry watched Hoffman play Babbitt, he said, “That's me.” Babbitt was 40 when he first realized he was autistic. So Jerry set out to learn everything he could about autism, and found his way to the department of psychiatry at UCLA. There, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, which most experts say is a distinctive form of autism.

Asperger individuals are often highly intelligent, with unusual skills. But like other autistic people, they suffer from severe sensitivity to light, sounds, smell and touch.

Once Jerry knew what he had, he went looking for others like him. He organized a support group of grownups with autism, and they meet on a regular basis.

Mary Meinel is a savant, considered a genius in some ways. Yet as a child, she was labeled difficult, even retarded. One teacher even thought she might be deaf. But Mary was hearing sounds that other humans couldn’t hear. She cried if the piano was out of tune. She played musical instruments with virtually no lessons. She writes music but goes about it like no one you’ve ever heard of.

She can write music from the last page and do it backwards. She says it’s because the music is already written in her brain. In fact, when she was with Stahl, she was writing four parts for a string quartet.

Like Jerry, Mary has Asperger’s Syndrome. After years of turmoil, including a nervous breakdown and thoughts of suicide, she found her way to Jerry's support group.

”And then I found out that he had cockatiels, and he kept them loose in his house,” says Mary. “And I’m going, ‘Hey, me, too.’”

These two lost souls had found each other, and seven months after they met, Jerry asked Mary to marry him. They couldn’t believe their good fortune. They live in an average house in an average neighborhood. And they’re just an average couple – almost, but not quite.

The Newport household includes one rabbit, three iguanas, and 11 birds.

Every new marriage takes adjustment, but theirs took more than most.

“Jerry will walk in the door, and I'll go, 'Hi, honey. How are you?' Hug. He goes, 'No! [Don’t touch me],' says Mary. “It’s like being electrocuted.”

“The kinds of touches that intimidate me are the ones that are a complete surprise,” says Jerry. “But it's when you want to have sex, and that's what both of us want to do, that's a different story, a good story.”

They both say they have saved each other.

“She's the kite and I'm the anchor. I didn't know how to hope, and all she could do was hope,” says Jerry. “It’s incredible. I mean, it’s a miracle. I wake up and I feel like I’ve won the lottery and I didn’t even buy a ticket.”

But their relationship has taken some twists and turns, as Stahl discovered when she visited Jerry and Mary Newport eight years later.

Their divorce in June 1999 came as a shock for everyone who knew them.

“For me, it was a very, very low point in my life,” says Jerry. “Because I really felt like I’d lost the greatest and perhaps the only opportunity I would ever have to have a relationship with somebody who was really a soul mate.

Mary moved back to her hometown of Tucson. But a year later, after being lonely for her soul mate, she decided to take a big step.

“I made a phone call. I said, ‘Please, come back. I miss you,’” says Mary.

Jerry missed her, too. Eleven months later, they remarried and held their reception at the local dog track, where a race was named in honor of the occasion.

For Jerry and Mary, life is good once again. Jerry and Mary now live in the Arizona desert, where they dote on their exotic menagerie of pets. Mary no longer writes music, but she’s happy at home, tending to her flock.

Since this story first aired, Jerry has been in demand as a public speaker, demystifying for others the condition of autism. Together, the Newports have written self-help books for people like them. They are now working on an autobiography they hope will appeal to a larger audience.

Hollywood producers had the same idea when, inspired by Mary and Jerry, they made a film based loosely on their lives. The movie, due out later this year, captures the social discomfort that people like Jerry always feel. But at this stage in his real life, Jerry says he’s come to terms with who he is.

“Rather than being obsessed with trying to be in step with the world, I've come to accept the fact that in certain ways I never will be. And I just don't hate myself for it,” says Jerry. “I think that once I started learning how to love myself as I truly am, it made it easier for other people to love me the same way.”

© MMIV, CBS Worldwide Inc.

The original article can be found here:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/29/60II/main646311.shtml

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This is a follow up to my recent posts. Other articles I have posted about Jerry and Mary Newport can be found here:
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2009/10/against-odds-love-story.html
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2009/11/mozart-and-whale-interview-with-jerry.html

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Mozart and the Whale' Movie Stills

2009-11-24T04:33:00.000-08:00

Following up my previous posts here are a selection of still images from the film 'Mozart and the Whale'.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Mozart and the Whale' Movie Trailer

2009-11-17T01:58:00.000-08:00

Following up my previous post, here is the trailer for Mozart and the Whale starring Josh Hartnett and Radha Mitchell, written by Ronald Bass and directed by Petter Næss.

It may not be the most authentic and true to life of Aspergers related films - personally I found Adam to be better in that regard - and it may have its flaws, but it is nonetheless an extremely charming and moving film that any Autistic person who has ever felt out of place in the world should not fail to be moved and inspired by, and it does a pretty job of both representing the difficulties that Autistic adults face frequently and also being pretty entertaining as well.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

'Mozart and the Whale' Movie Poster

2009-11-08T01:17:00.000-08:00

This is the movie poster for the film 'Mozart and the Whale' starring Josh Hartnett and Radha Mitchell, written by Ronald Bass and directed by Petter Næss.

Based on the lives of Jerry and Mary Newport it presents a fictionalised account of how the two met, fell in love and got married. As it is a fictionalised account with the names changed it should be taken to represent the true story - that is told in the book 'Mozart and the Whale: An Asperger's Love Story' which came after the film - but it is nonetheless a charming film that is well worth a watch.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Mozart and the Whale: Interview with Jerry Newport

2009-11-03T02:08:00.000-08:00

Mozart and the whale set to debut in Spokane

Article from Wrong Planet - April 12, 2006

In this installment of the WrongPlanet.net interview series, movie consultant and author Jerry Newport has graciously given me the opportunity to ask him quite a few questions about life, Asperger's Syndrome, his pets, and the upcoming motion picture, Mozart and the Whale, which is based on his life as an individual with Asperger's Syndrome.

In Mozart and the Whale, Josh Hartnett plays the character based on Mr. Newport and Radha Mitchell plays the character based on Mr. Newport's wife, Mary Meinel. Jerry worked as a consultant for the production, which was directed by Petter Naess and written by Ron Bass. The movie is in post-production and the IMDB describes it as "A love story between two savants with Asperger's syndrome, a kind of autism, whose disabilites sabotage their budding relationship."
Again, I would like to thank Jerry for his time, patience, and generosity throughout the interview process.

WrongPlanet.net: When did you first find out about Asperger's Syndrome?

Jerry Newport:1993 and 1994. I heard about it from various lists, mostly from ANI-L.

WP: You mentioned in another interview that you first heard about Autism because of Rain Man.

JN: I saw it in 1989. I had a friend in San Diego; Dr. Linda Nickell, a fellow Michigan graduate. I visited her in April after losing another job and she was finishing her PhD in Psychology. She had also worked with autistic children when getting her Masters Degree in Educational Psychology. Linda saw Rain Man the week before. It was out in theaters again because of the Oscars it won.
Linda said, " I don't think you are autistic but you aren't normal either :)" " The main character in this movie reminds me of you in an unusual way. I would like you to see it and hear what you think of it. It might help you understand yourself better."

WP: In Mozart and the Whale, your romantic interest (who later becomes your wife) also has Asperger's Syndrome. In real life, the two of you get a divorce. What is your view on relationships in which both individuals have Asperger's?

JN: I think marriage is a lot of hard work no matter who is married. The hardest thing if you have two AS people is that's a lot of inflexibility in one relationship.

WP:Are they harder than relationships where only one individual has Asperger's?

JN: I don't know. I see way too much blaming of men with aspergers as the villains, on lists that are dominated by their "normal" spouses. That is bull. If the spouses don't have some issues too, they don't marry aspie men.

WP: School seems to be a problem for lots of people with Asperger's Syndrome because of the social issues and the fact that teachers don't like it when homework isn't turned in. How was school for you?

JN: High school was generally a happy place. The structure was very reassuring. It didn't hurt to have two older brothers do well enough for me to get the benefit of every doubt. And my parents were both high school teachers. I loved school and don't understand the homework issue. I guess some of us just take too long to finish because we want to explore every option?

I was not a good athlete but running helped me stay in shape enough to not be a target and improved my focus. My father encouraged me to manage the basketball team, where I was also the scorekeeper and reported all of the games to the newspaper. It was his way of socializing my savant skills. Trombone playing in band provided aerobic benefit too and improved my social skills.
So by middle of my senior year, I tied for second out of 180 students and had several 800s on the SATs. My cum for math-verbal was 1411, on the morning of my worst illegal hangover of my 17 years :) Socially, I was late to date but at least I had a few dates and even one girl-friend so it was a start.

WP:Do you have any words of advice for people with asperger's who are currently struggling in school?

JN:Find the most comfortable environment. If you are being bullied and the school isn't helping you with that, GET OUT. Study at home, go to a community college, take the GED instead but DON"T accept daily bullying!! Also, try daily exercise. It will help you with stress, focus and you will feel and look better.

WP:You've been a taxi cab driver and now you're becoming a famous writer, yet you have a brilliant mind for mathematics. Why didn't you choose to become a mathemetician or an engineer?

JN: My problem was being a huge fish in a small pond, intellectually. I was never really "into" math, other than a numerical and sometimes visual, geometrical stim. I hated being shown off to other kids with the mental math stuff. It made me feel like a freak. But I accepted it, assuming that math in college and graduate school would be just as easy and the payoff would be a high-paying job that I would do with little effort. I was a good high school math student, best in my county and one of the top- rated in the nation in one contest. But college proved to be different. High school math is a lot more concrete and concrete is ASD turf.

My math ego crumbled soon after I arrived at Michigan. I was in the honors sections of math but not the best student even after more effort than I had ever made. It became apparent to me, halfway in my junior year, that at best, I would just be another academic and not a hotshot. That wasn't good enough if it came with being a freak to most people. I lost interest in math and had no mentor.
I envy Temple Grandin because while I don't think she is brilliant, she has focused on something that she could do. With the proper mentor, I might have gone into designing running shoes or other athletic equipment as I was always interested in athletics. I just had nobody to guide me out of theoretical math, in which I was doomed to mediocrity, to something more practical and enjoyable.

WP: What drew you to your career in taxi cab driving and then your writing career?

JN: I flunked all of the job interviews for white-collar work. My dad, who might have helped me with that, died in the middle of my senior year. My mom lacked the sensitivity to help me. She just wanted me to "straighten out and take care of myself." So I was walking home in Santa Monica, Ca. one afternoon in 1971 and saw a taxi pulling out of the Red Top Taxi lot. I asked the driver how he liked doing it. Once I realized the advantage of relative freedom, daily cash (tips), use of the taxi for personal business ( as long as you make enough not to be noticed ) and the informality of attire, I decided to try it.

Taxi driving was never what I expected to do for fifteen years but it took me that long to get over the social baggage, the interview block.

Writing became an interest to me because I had plenty of time in the taxi, between fares, to read and write. It started with poetry, really primitive stuff. Then I began writing letters to tnewspaper editors. That led to writing speechs for local Democratic candidates and articles in the more progressive underground papers in San Diego.

By the time I left San Diego and moved back to Los Angeles in 1985, my brother Jim, a movie production designer and scriptwriter, encouraged me to focus more on writing.

WP: How were you approached about the doing a movie? Do you have connections with people who are in the movie making business, for example?

JN: I have some relatives in the movie business but the movie resulted from a front-page article in all editions of the Los Angeles Times about Mary and me. That was 10-23-1995. We thought it was about our entire adult support group but the reporter focused on us. That article was read by enough industry types that eventually, we heard from a half-dozen agents and producers.

One of the producers was Robert Lawrence, originally connected to Rain Man as VP for new projects at Universal Studios. Robert knew that Stephen Spielberg had wanted to direct that movie and had promised to give him the first shot at another autism story. So when Robert met us, he knew it was just a matter of finding a screenwriter. He found Ron Bass, co-writer of Rain Man. Ron met us in spring of 1996 and by June, we were all up at Dreamworks, doing lunch with Mr. Spielberg, who offered to pay Bass and Lawrence a record 2.5 million just for the idea of a story based on the lives of Mary and me.

Ron Bass wrote [the Mozart and the Whale] script. Mary and I helped him by sharing some of our history, but the writing is from Ron Bass and his staff of writers who interviewed us, too.

WP: I know that you've talked with famous actor Josh Hartnett.

JN: Josh Hartnett is an intense, sincere fellow. If I wasn't a dozen days older than his dad, he would be a fun friend but it was fun to meet him. His interest came from having a close friend whose cousin is autistic. He put a lot into his acting and was also a big force in finding financial backing and a director for the movie.

WP: I'm really interested in your movie consulting career so I'd like to know more about that.

JN: Not really a career. I consulted on a low-budget flick back in 1971. It was called Cool Breeze, a Shaft type movie. I helped them set up a bookie joint since I was really into horseracing at the time. I consulted on a self-advocacy tape in 1994, called Robert's Choice. It was about making choices. And there's the current film.

WP: What was it like to be on location [for Mozart and the Whale]?

JN:I have been on a lot of locations before so that was no big deal. Of course, this time it was unusual since I had a connection to the subject. The cast, crew etc were all very friendly and I got to talk to the whole group just before lunch the first day I was there. They said I left a good impression but I think that is because people have such low expectations of us that anything we do or say surprises them. I was up in Spokane for two days and satisfied that they were doing a good job. I didn't stay longer because I didn't see any point and had work to do at home.

WP:Do you have any advice for aspiring actors and writers who happen to have Asperger's Syndrome and want to make a break?

JN: I say this on the basis of my own work on a few films as a consultant and watching my brother for almost four decades. Be flexible. There are lots of aspie types in TV, film and radio but they have learned the hard way, when they can be aspie-particular and when they have to fit in. Just about anybody can do lots of jobs in entertainment. So if you are too much of a pain, you are gone in a New York minute.

Be willing to learn to do and try anything. My brother always wanted to be a director and never got the chance. But he has seen his scripts for China Beach get on TV. He has worked in various roles, usually art director, for about every great director you can think of, on almost every continent. Jim has had a very interesting career despite not getting to do, yet, what he wanted. He lives in Bangkok now. He has also written a triad of novels about a 150 year old French Vampire who lives in Thailand, called The Vampire of Siam trilogy.

The important thing is to really want to do something with your life. Having that makes a lot of stuff make more sense. When I was a kid, I learned about the pyramids and thought it would be really cool to have my own pyramid someday, dedicated to whatever great thing I did. But I figured out there isn't enough space for everyone to have one. So I settled on trying to create things that would still add value to the world after I am gone.

Rain Man helped me find things to do like that. I began looking in my past for what had worked and began running again. That led to helping found the L.A. Leggers, one of the largest marathon training clubs in the USA. And eventually, it led to AGUA, my first support group and my future wife, Mary.

A goal in life doesn't always have to make you money. One of the best things that happened to me was when I helped found an adult support group, by default. I really didn't do anything more than find places to meet and compile the member contact list. But in 1993, such a group was a new thing in autism. It made me feel really good about myself. I always wanted to do something that might last after my life was over and that group finally helped me reach that goal.

I think it is important to have a specific goal, like my brother's one of being a director, but be happy with the jobs you do on the way. My other brother has had similar experiences. Both of my brothers are authors. John, my oldest brother, started out in accounting, went into Hosptal Administration, got a PhD in Public Health and went into substance abuse counseling, which led him to a PhD in Psychology. He has a book out, "The Wellness Recovery Connection", that is selling better than my first two books!

I met Mary through that group and I certainly wasn't the best looking or richest male available but I did feel good about my place in life. Adult life is not easy for us, even in the best of times and we all have to give ourselves credit for stuff we do even if society doesn't generally recognize it or pay us for it. Lots of people have no idea how valuable, for example, the mostly voluntary lists and groups are on the Internet. Those people who run them should be proud of what they contribute.

There is a place for us in this world and a NEED for us too.

WP: When did you first start collecting pets? I'm sure you agree that pets are great for providing a special sort of companionship for people with Asperger's Syndrome. I had a guinea pig and I treasured her because she loved me unconditionally, something that is rare for people (other than family members).

JN: That is it, the unconditional love part. I have always had pets. My family had dogs, cats, budgies, hamsters, rabbits, fish and a garden. I began breeding birds in 1980.

The original article, complete with images, can be found here:
http://www.wrongplanet.net/article324.html

The Los Angeles Times article can be found in my previous blog post:
http://thewonderfulworldofautism.blogspot.com/2009/10/against-odds-love-story.html

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This is a follow-up to my previous blog post - see the above link.

This interview fills in additional details regarding Jerry Newport's relationship with his wife Mary, along with many of the difficulties that both have face throughout their lives, offering a much more personal perspective.

It is a very interesting read and offers greater insights than the Los Angeles Times article and I feel the two pieces complement each other pretty well.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Against the Odds: A Love Story

2009-10-28T01:11:00.000-07:00

Against the Odds: a Love Story; Jerry and Mary Newport grew up as outcasts. Now, they have found each other--and clues to the medical mystery that tormented them.

Article from The Los Angeles Times - October 23, 1995

By KIM KOWSKY.

Precisely 28 weeks had passed since Jerry Newport had met Mary Meinel. He had been waiting for this very moment to pop the question. Twenty-eight, after all, is his favorite number.

"First," he said, "it's a perfect number--the sum of its factors equals 28. Twenty-eight is also the sum of the integers from one to seven and I'm seven years older than her."

Looking back at their April, 1994, engagement, Jerry's obsession with numerical perfection is both amusing and disturbing. And for good reason: It is a gift that comes at a terrible cost.

Jerry has Asperger syndrome, a neurological disorder that isolates those who have it from other people, even while sometimes bestowing unusual talents.

Mary has it too. And while her gifts lie in art, she may be the only person who has ever fully appreciated his delight in numbers.

Who else but Jerry could have found such significance in the landmark fig tree in West Los Angeles where Mary said she wanted the magic moment to occur? The tree, you see, just happens to be 119 years old.

"If you divide seven into the age of the tree," he said, "you get 17, and that's one of the numbers you can make a polygon out of in a circle. But if you square 17, you get 289 and we met on the 289th day of the year."

Clearly, this couple's love story--involving everything from an exorcism and an obsession with whales to a compulsion to read license plates backward for fun--is no ordinary romance.

It is a story of triumph in the face of a potentially devastating but often unrecognized affliction.

Asperger syndrome is often described as a social communication disorder that is similar to a mild form of autism. Patients have trouble understanding subtle gestures that convey what others are thinking or feeling. As a result, they are often characterized as rude, selfish or just plain weird.

Jerry, 47, and Mary, 40, spent most of their lives as social outcasts, feeling intensely alienated from others without knowing why.

Their wedding on Aug. 19, 1994, was a poignant turn in the lives of two people who had always assumed they were too odd to find mates and who, until they found one another, had resigned themselves to live out their years on society's fringes, lonely and alone.

Their union has shown that it is possible for people with Asperger syndrome to find the kind of companionship and fulfillment that other people take for granted. And despite their communication difficulties, the Newports have become forceful advocates, as well as symbols of hope, for adults with autism or Asperger syndrome.

"They are superstars in the world of autism," said Linda Demer, chief of cardiology at UCLA and a former board member of the Autism Society of Los Angeles. "They've been a source of inspiration for a lot of people."

Syndrome a Mystery

Scientists have had so little success in unraveling the mysteries of Asperger syndrome that almost everything about it is in dispute--including its definition.

Many psychologists consider it a mild form of autism. But it was given its own category just last year in the standard manual of psychiatric disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Like autism, Asperger syndrome is identified in the manual as a "pervasive developmental disorder," affecting social interaction and communication and marked by repetitive behaviors and interests. While those who have the disorders are sensitive to sound and touch, people with Asperger syndrome show curiosity about their environment and eventually develop language and self-help skills.

In practice, however, the categories are harder to define--mostly because there is so much overlap between Asperger symptoms and those of the "high functioning" end of autism, psychologists say.

"It's not like cancer or blindness where you can at least identify who has got it," said Gary Mesibov, director of North Carolina's statewide program for people with autism. "What makes this so difficult is we don't even agree on the essential characteristics that allow you to say who the people are."

Nor is there agreement on its prevalence--although more men than women have the disorder. Some researchers say Asperger syndrome affects as many as 1 in 250 people, while others set the figure at 1 in 650.

And although researchers agree that Asperger syndrome stems from a genetically caused malfunctioning of the brain or central nervous system, no one has determined what part of the brain is affected.

There is no cure, although patients--especially children--can be coached in socially accepted behavior. But first they have to be diagnosed--a task that requires psychologists to rely on mostly subjective judgments.

Some cases are easy to spot. A man with relatively normal speech who exhibits repetitive behaviors, strange speech affectations and extreme social awkwardness may easily suggest a diagnosis, psychologists say. But what about the gawky man with slicked-back hair and shirt buttoned to the neck who irritates his acquaintances with Civil War trivia? Or the "absent-minded professor" who is too absorbed by his studies to heed the social conventions of hygiene?

"There are many, many people with Asperger's who lead productive lives and are really just considered nerds," said Peter Tanguay, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Louisville, Ky., who plans to publish his study of Asperger syndrome this year.

But he added, "Unless there are fairly major disruptions of friendships and interpersonal relations with others, it shouldn't be labeled Asperger's."

Whales and Numbers

Even on first appearance, there is something noticeably odd about the Newports.

Both have a stiff gait and a maddeningly monotonous way of speaking. Jerry sounds hauntingly like a real-life version of Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of Raymond Babbitt, an autistic savant, in the movie "Rain Man."

Mary is a tall, big-boned woman who favors long skirts and tie-dyed shirts. One day, she wears a cap from India over her long red hair--which turns out to be a wig. She shaves her head for her non-speaking role as a blue-tinted Bolian on the television series "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine."

Jerry, who is tall and heavyset, keeps his longish blond hair in a tousled mop. He almost always wears jeans and a blue T-shirt featuring silk-screened dolphins and whales. He is so enamored of whales that two Halloweens ago he used chicken wire and newspaper to construct a killer whale costume that he keeps next to the sofa and strokes during conversations.

Today, the Newports sit in the living room of their tiny, cluttered apartment in West Los Angeles and talk about their first date on Nov. 28, 1993, at the Los Angeles Zoo. They had met a few weeks before at a Halloween party hosted by Adult Gathering, United and Autistic, a self-help group for adults with autism or Asperger syndrome.

Jerry recalls feeling instantly at ease with Mary. She was the first woman he had ever met who didn't make him feel self-conscious.

"We could do silly things together, like reading billboards backward and guessing what it said," he said. "Or I would turn license plate numbers into dates. Like if I saw the number 20,013, I could tell you that Oct. 17, 1955, is the 20,013th day of the century."

Mary was charmed by his mathematical abilities: "I liked it. It was a different version of what I could do with my music and art."

But they soon found they had more than their share of problems, too. Their inability to read each other's emotions made the normal adjustments that new couples face even more difficult.

Mary had to learn not to take it personally when Jerry shrank from her touch in pain. He had to learn to keep his voice down during disagreements to keep her from "emotional shutdowns" that render her speechless.

"The kinds of problems they have makes it much more difficult . . . mostly because of the difficulty {people like them} have with empathy," said B. J. Freeman, director of the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Program at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute. "But they do very well together. . . . It's wonderful to see."

In fact, their relationship is one neither of them ever imagined possible. The lives they led before they met are case studies in the kind of personal devastation that Asperger syndrome can wreak--especially when it goes undetected.

Turning Point

Jerry grew up in Islip, N.Y., knowing he was different.

He didn't walk until he was nearly 2 and only learned to talk at 3 by imitating his brother's pet crow, Blackey. He never looked people in the eye, constantly chewed on his clothing and nails and had a fascination with watching paint dry.

He was 7 when his mathematical abilities began to surface. He could add up a long column of three- and four-digit numbers in his head. Other calculations--like finding square roots--quickly followed.

At school, his talent with numbers, combined with his tendency to talk incessantly in a monotone, set him apart as odd. Most of the time he was shunned, except, he says, when his classmates wanted to dazzle some newcomer with his abilities. Then they would trot him out like a circus freak and bombard him with math problems.

"I remember being in the center of all these people asking me to do stuff and answering their questions so they would go away," he said. "For me, it was a case of either getting no attention at all or . . . having to perform."

Although he came to regard his gift as a burden, it saw him through in other ways. He was accepted to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and received a bachelor of arts in math.

By the time he graduated, he was capable of doing extraordinarily complex calculations in his head. He could change numbers from one base to another and could compute logarithms by knowing the sine or cosine. He could usually get the correct answer within a dozen decimal places. But when it came time to find a job, he was at a loss.

It never occurred to him to find work that would make use of his abilities. Instead, he drove a cab for nearly 20 years. During that time, he hardly dated. By his mid-30s, he was suicidal. He tried to kill himself by overdosing on pills, but changed his mind and got his stomach pumped.

"Rain Man" was a turning point. He identified with the main character so deeply that he contacted Bernard Rimland, the founder of the Autism Society of America. He found his way to UCLA's autism clinic, where he was told he probably had Asperger syndrome.

He began attending autism conferences and soon earned a role as a spokesman for adults with autism and Asperger syndrome. He helped coordinate the first adult self-help group and chairs the National Autism Society of America's ad-hoc panel of adult advisers with autism.

Although he regards the previous 20 years as "a waste," he considers himself "one of the fortunate ones."

"You can't compare me to others, not even to Mary," he said. "She had a much harder life than me."

Maelstrom of Pain

Mary is eager to talk about her childhood, but during a conversation in a noisy cafeteria, she gazes upward and begins slapping her hand against her arm. There are too many conversations going on at once, she says, and she cannot filter them out of the discussion.

She has been prone to sensory overload all of her life.

As a child in Phoenix, she often responded to stress, loud noises or strong smells by spinning in circles or rocking.

Although she walked and talked at a normal age, she had a penchant for imitating sounds over and over. One teacher suggested she might be mentally retarded.

She did relatively well in school--until she reached puberty. Then, inexplicably, she fell apart.

"My brain turned to Jell-O," she recalled. "I couldn't make heads or tails out of anything."

She dropped out of high school and went to Europe to live with one of her sisters in a religious cult, she said. There, cult leaders arranged a marriage between the 16-year-old Mary and an 18-year-old boy who she says couldn't stand her. The couple had a son. But she soon left the cult with her baby and moved to America, where she had a son with a man she no longer sees.

The next two decades were a maelstrom of psychic pain. Without a diagnosis for her condition, she only knew that she felt profoundly alienated from other people. While she could usually find work as a piano tuner, she was socially naive and often became a target for exploitation.

In 1986, she rediscovered talents she had lost touch with: drawing and composing music.

Her methods are unusual. She draws without looking at the page, allowing her hand to follow its own course. Only later, she says, does she find hidden images that she had no idea she was creating.

She composes by waving a pencil in circles over a score sheet until a sensation tells her where to put each note. She says she has no idea how it will sound until she programs the score into her keyboard and plays.

David Quaschnick, an Emmy-award-winning makeup artist who works with Mary for "Star Trek," describes her as "a very creative artist" whose art and music is "intensely creative."

"She doesn't have any formal training in art, but she somehow has a natural understanding of depth and focus," he said. "Her music is the same way. It comes from pure creativity."

But her art didn't always draw such praise. In the late 1980s, relatives and friends who were convinced Mary was doing "the devil's work" persuaded her to burn her art and music--and to undergo an exorcism.

The next few years were punctuated by deep depressions and two nervous breakdowns.

With her two sons, Mary had moved 14 times in 10 years, each time changing states and jobs. In between, there were bouts of homelessness, including time at a Los Angeles Skid Row shelter.

In 1991, she was so desperate for work that she shaved her head and attended an open audition with Central Casting. They agreed to represent her and landed her a job doing guest appearances on "Star Trek" the following month.

In 1993, a UCLA psychologist finally helped her make sense of the painful turns her life had taken. The psychologist told her she had "autism/Asperger syndrome" and referred her to Jerry's self-help group.

Jerry told her about the Halloween party. She came as Mozart. He came as Willy the whale. She thought he was strange. He thought she was weird.

It was, they would soon discover, the first stirrings of love.

'Spiritual Synchrony'

Jerry and Mary were married the following year on Jerry's 46th birthday at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Westwood. Mary's adult sons were the only guests. After the ceremony, the four rode the bus to Santa Monica and ate ice cream and carrot cake at a park.

A year later, the Newports celebrated their first anniversary. Mary made the invitations, which featured killer whales in the shape of a heart. Jerry wore his whale costume part of the time, ostensibly to entertain some children.

Almost all of the guests were support group members, their relatives or professionals who work with people with autism or Asperger syndrome.

Marshall Weeks, 26, who describes himself as "the autistic Steve Martin," thrilled people with his extensive knowledge of music trivia. Dean Beuerman, 23, who regularly combs the newspaper for weather-related stories, grilled a woman who had just returned from a trip to June Lake about the depth of the snowpack.

"I think that was the first party I ever enjoyed," Mary said. "Everyone was conversing and being social in their own way."

Clearly, there was a lot to celebrate. Jerry had finally left his job as a driver to work as an administrative assistant in UCLA Medical School's financial department. Part of the job requires him to proofread accounting spreadsheets--he can look at a column of numbers and know if one is out of place. The only difficult part for him is operating the copying machine.

Meanwhile, Mary passed the high school equivalency exam and is planning to enroll next March at the Gemological Institute of America to study jewelry design. She also was recently invited to exhibit her art at a soon-to-be-opened gallery in Ventura County.

Mary says she feels more comfortable in the world than ever. And Jerry, who spent years wishing he were more "normal," once again takes pleasure in his talent for numbers. For the first time in years, he believes the future holds some promise--including yet another perfect number.

You see, on July 31, 2016, it will have been 8,128 days--or 1,161 weeks and one day--since Jerry proposed to Mary. Of course, 8,128 is a perfect number.

Said Jerry: "I had never dreamed that I could live in such spiritual synchrony with anyone. What else matters? That we are both . . . savants and perhaps other labels is not the point. We are just meant to be together."

© Los Angeles Times 1995

The original article can be found here:
http://www.aspires-relationships.com/jerry_and_mary_newport.htm

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Personally, I cannot fully relate to many of the experiences of Jerry and Mary Newport. While i have Aspergers just like them, our lives have followed very different paths. In their autobiography Mozart and the Whale: An Asperger's Love Story they detail their entire lives up to and beyond the time when they found each other. With Aspergers not even being a recognised diagnosis for much of their lives they both lived most of their lives almost like outcasts from society and faced numerous difficulties that even the most hard willed of NTs might be unable to face let alone anyone with Autism. Yet, despite the harsh lives they have led and several suicide attempts they have eventually found happiness and this is something that is truly inspiring for any Autistic person who feels like life is too much to bare. So, while I may not be able to personally relate to such experiences (frankly, many of the problems I have are quite insurmountable by comparison) I can still be moved and inspired by them.

As for this article - which came some years before the book, consequently predating some of the events that are detailed within in it, and according to Jerry and Mary themselves isn't as honest as it might seem, their relationship hanging by a thread at the time - I may not be able to relate to much about relationships, never having even been on a date with a girl, but I do relate to the desire to obtain the 'spiritual synchrony' that both Jerry and Mary share. I may be woefully inexperienced in the world of relationships and possibly ill equipped to fully face the kind of complications that come with a serious relationship but I nonetheless want to meet that someone special more than anything.

And this story gives me hope that one day sooner or later (i'm really hoping sooner though) I will meet a truly special girl who I share a true connection with. And I'm sure that this story, and others like it (many of which I will be posting on this blog in the near future) will inspire others just as it has inspired me.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)

Welcome

2009-10-23T00:57:00.000-07:00

My name is Robert. At the age of 14 I was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, a form of Autism (I might have been diagnosed at a younger age if the person brought in to see me hasn't said that I was just going through a phase that I would grow out of - I showed them).

When I got this diagnosis it was a relief in many ways. I had always been an outcast of sorts at school and often got picked on (fortunately it was only ever verbal for me, not physical) for being different. My diagnosis changed everything. Once I knew of my diagnosis and all my teachers and fellow students were informed of it things improved for the better in my school life. I was no longer picked on by other pupils and teachers were far more understanding when I had difficulty coping with the work load (although less so the work itself - I was always fairly bright). In this regard being diagnosed with Aspergers is undoubtedly one of the best things that has ever happened to me. It has my life a whole lot easier in quite a few ways.

However, while my life is hardly what many would consider to be difficult, my condition still creates a huge amount of difficulties in my life. Of course awareness of it makes these issues considerably less difficult but it doesn't eliminate them. One of the biggest problems is one shared by many people with Austism Spectrum Disorders. The general expectation of society tends to be that everyone is responsible to get a job and pull their weight in the world. For Neurotypicals this is as easily done as it said, as many people perform jobs in shops, restaurants, offices, etc. day by day without too much difficulty. They just take such jobs for granted and perhaps even enjoy their work. For someone with Autism, however, doing such jobs is more easily said than done. The intense pressures that come with such common jobs as these are often too much for the Autistic mind to handle. We have major difficulties dealing with social situations, something that many of these jobs involve on a day to day basis, and we tend to mentally burn out at a much faster pace than people who aren't Autistic. Add into this, the sensory sensitivities that often come with Autism and it makes some jobs virtually impossible to do. Nonetheless, though, I do have a job, working at a cinema - a perfect fit considering how much I love film. For someone like me simply working at a place like this is quite a feat. Unfortunately, the difficulties created by my Autism mean that I can currently only handle one shift a week, after which I am usually so drained of energy and morale that it can take me ages to fully recover - although as I am also currently a student doing a Masters the stress created by my university work cannot be ruled out as a factor in this. It's not that I am work shy. In fact, once I have finished at university I would very much like to get a job. It's just that, like with many Autistic individuals, I can't perform the kind of work to the level of ability that others do. What I intend to do though is use the gifts that come with Autism to my advantage.

Autism isn't all bad. It comes with many positive aspects. For example, some Autistic people, referred to as savants, have incredible abilities involving things such as mathematics or art, abilities that make them true talents. Such abilities can very well by utilized by those who possess them as a means of making a living by doing something that they truly love doing. I, sadly, am not a savant, but even non savants can still possess impressive skills and abilities, often revolving around incredible memories relating to the favourite interest(s) of the individual. This is very much the case with me. The interest that I pursue obsessively (everyone with Autism seems to have one) is films. I watch films all the time and I have developed an extensive knowledge relating to the subject. While I often have difficulty remembering simple day to day films, I can remember considerable amounts of information about movies - release dates, production budgets, box office grosses, cast lists, that kind of stuff - and I am also very good at writing movie reviews and articles, something that I do on a weekly basis, publishing them on an online blog.

This is certainly something that I could pursue as a career. What's more though, like numerous other Autistic individuals, I have a very creative mind. Frequently, new ideas for films just pop into my head and while I am certainly not an expert scriptwriter I am getting very good at translating these ideas from my mind onto paper. This is something that I am actively pursuing as part of my university work. I have already done a Bachelors degree in Creative Studies for which I received a 2.1 Honours and now I am doing a Masters degree in Media Practice, the ultimate culmination of my work being a film about Aspergers Syndrome that I am currently working on. My university work is not without its share of challenges - recently, the pressure of my Masters has been getting to me quite a bit - but it nonetheless allows me to explore fields in which I am both gifted at and am extremely interested in, and will hopefully open doors for me to explore these fields when it comes to pursuing a career. I love writing film reviews. I love writing film scripts. I love making films. And I am good at all these things (not to mention also being quite good at photography and songwriting, among several other things) and hopefully one day I can put these abilities to use and become a success story of my own.

While my (extremely ambitious) long term goals do seem very much in reach, however, in the short term I continue to struggle with many of the difficulties that many Autistic people experience. Since starting university I may have become considerably more independent (before, apart from walking to school, I couldn't even leave the house on my own but now I can go many places on my own) but I am still not confident enough to live on my own - I still live with my parents - and I am finding myself more and more overwhelmed by the many responsibilities that adults face on a day to day basis. In fact, I frequently don't feel like I am an adult at all. I am 22 years old yet I often feel like I am only half that, like I am a child stuck in an adults body, or stuck in limbo somewhere between childhood and adulthood. When I am fully awake and everything is going right I can act and seem completely mature and you would be hard pressed to even realize that I am Autistic. When I am like this I am capable of so many things and my taste in things like films and music definitely reflects my mental state. You see, I probably have one of the most varied DVD collections you'd likely come across. I appreciate film as an art form with adult films such as 'Kill Bill', 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' and 'The Bucket List' yet I also love popcorn blockbusters like 'Transformers', romantic comedies like '13 Going On 30' and kids stuff like 'Hannah Montana'.

This brings me to how I become when I am tired or stressed, which is quite frequently given the amount of daunting situations I face - even little things can make me anxious, such as something in my room not being in quite the right position or a slight disruption in my routine. I am currently experiencing some pretty big things that create stress and anxiety as well although I won't discuss these due to them being of a very personal nature. When I am tired or stressed I often find solace in embracing my more child like side. I collect soft toy pigs and cuddling them both calms me and makes me feel happier at times when I feel very depressed and, while many would consider me weird for doing such things, this is as much a part of me as my love for more serious cinema or my varied abilities. It gives me something to help me avoid feeling low due to the constant feelings of loneliness that I, and others like me, endure.

I am not very good at making friends, desiring social interaction more than anything but being completely clueless at it, part of the reason for this being the fact that most social interaction seems to involve going out at night to venues that are loud and crowded and getting drunk, all things that I loathe - I would rather stay at home and watch a film, I can't stand loud noise, I hate crowds and even though I do occasionally (and I mean occasionally) drink alcohol I despise the feeling of being drunk. What's more, all my life the only thing I have really wanted is a girlfriend, but I am even more clueless when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex. Every time I have ever liked has turned me into a nervous wreck and eventually has rejected me, something which has damaged my confidence considerably. Some people say that you should try being friends with a girl first but I find this just makes things much more difficult - after I've known a girl for a while I almost become too intimidated to show any interest, let alone consider making a move. And with the various quirks that come with my Autism I often wonder if there even is a girl who would ever be compatible with me in any way. For the time being I have simply stopped looking, putting my efforts into my studies, and hoping that I might meet that someone special when I least expect it.

This brings me to the purpose of this blog. Not long ago I came across an inspirational story about an Autistic couple who had found love and found a way to make their relationship work for them. The article gave me a sense of hope and joy and since then I have been scouring the internet, devouring any and every story of hope and inspiration about individuals on the Autistic Spectrum that I could find. And now I am going to bring these stories together in one place, so that other people who, like me, often feel lost in a world that frequently fails to understand us can experience the sense of hope that I now feel thanks to reading these inspirational stories. My hope is that just reading these may make others feel a bit better about themselves as they did me.

Robert Mann BA (Hons)