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Grr. So, of course the autistic kid in tonight's episode of Criminal Minds is lower-functioning than Rain Man. Never mind that the majority of people with autism (particularly ones who are diagnosed as children and whose parents put time, effort, and money into therapy as this kid's parents obviously have) are higher functioning than that. I could deal with that; after all, there are definitely people that low-functioning, and it's what the whole drama of the episode is based on, that they need to figure out a way to communicate with the kid to find out who kidnapped his parents. Then Reid is at the kid's school talking with his principal, and spouting off about how autistic kids are more logical than others--often true--and how they see patterns more clearly than other people do which is false. The reason people with autism get obsessed with patterns is because they have a harder time figuring out patterns than most people do, and so cling to the patterns they do understand (often numbers, statistics, a daily routine, etc.) as a kind of shield against a world that they find chaotic and often incomprehensible. For example, if you can't find the pattern in the sound of a large crowd, if your brain is trying to take each voice and sound and figure out what it's saying, then a crowd is overwhelming because you have problems tuning out what's just background noise and what's the person you're trying to talk with. That's one of the reasons that people on the autism spectrum tend to prefer "blander" or less intense sensory stimulation (dimmer lights, quieter sounds, fewer spices, less touch, no perfume or cologne), because they can be overwhelming.
And now, he's a genius piano player! Which is not necessarily impossible, or even implausible--given his parents' profession, if he got obsessed with music, he might spend hours practicing while in his parents store. But combine it with virtually non-verbal, and it plays right into the whole "idiot savant" stereotype. (It's not that people on the spectrum are any more or less intelligent than anyone else; but people on the spectrum are more likely to get obsessed, often with a narrow specialized area, and when someone is obsessed and putting all their brainpower on one thing, well, neurotypical people sometimes find the results surprising. It's not genius, so much as focus and a different approach. Take Temple Grandin: she had a perspective different from neurotypical, and she had a specialty she wanted to understand and study (cattle) in ways nobody else had bothered to do before. And she stuck with it, pounding away, until she was the greatest expert in the world on that subject. By the way, the HBO movie Temple Grandin is an excellent movie, Claire Daines was note-perfect as a person with autism and the cinematography and special effects really take you into what the world looks like inside her head.
I like the picture flipbook stuff, though, that's well done and accurate. The kid acting like a zombie the whole time, or a robot, is definitely not. He wouldn't look or act like a normal kid, no, but he wouldn't be a zombie.
Also: why is it that whenever they give Emily a plot of her own, they slather it in enough melodrama to choke an elephant. And instead of five minutes crammed onto the end of a series of episodes, like an afterthought, why not give her a few episodes to herself?
Of course, a large part of my kvetching is because Criminal Minds is usually so good, so it sticks out when it isn't. (On the bright side, Siever is growing on me. Of course, since the first few eps she was in she's been minor at best. I'd like to see if they could actually show more of her now and not have her be so annoying. I figure you gotta give her slack for how annoying she was in the first ep, the one thing Criminal Minds regularly fails at is introducing new characters.)
And now, he's a genius piano player! Which is not necessarily impossible, or even implausible--given his parents' profession, if he got obsessed with music, he might spend hours practicing while in his parents store. But combine it with virtually non-verbal, and it plays right into the whole "idiot savant" stereotype. (It's not that people on the spectrum are any more or less intelligent than anyone else; but people on the spectrum are more likely to get obsessed, often with a narrow specialized area, and when someone is obsessed and putting all their brainpower on one thing, well, neurotypical people sometimes find the results surprising. It's not genius, so much as focus and a different approach. Take Temple Grandin: she had a perspective different from neurotypical, and she had a specialty she wanted to understand and study (cattle) in ways nobody else had bothered to do before. And she stuck with it, pounding away, until she was the greatest expert in the world on that subject. By the way, the HBO movie Temple Grandin is an excellent movie, Claire Daines was note-perfect as a person with autism and the cinematography and special effects really take you into what the world looks like inside her head.
I like the picture flipbook stuff, though, that's well done and accurate. The kid acting like a zombie the whole time, or a robot, is definitely not. He wouldn't look or act like a normal kid, no, but he wouldn't be a zombie.
Also: why is it that whenever they give Emily a plot of her own, they slather it in enough melodrama to choke an elephant. And instead of five minutes crammed onto the end of a series of episodes, like an afterthought, why not give her a few episodes to herself?
Of course, a large part of my kvetching is because Criminal Minds is usually so good, so it sticks out when it isn't. (On the bright side, Siever is growing on me. Of course, since the first few eps she was in she's been minor at best. I'd like to see if they could actually show more of her now and not have her be so annoying. I figure you gotta give her slack for how annoying she was in the first ep, the one thing Criminal Minds regularly fails at is introducing new characters.)
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Date: 2011-02-24 05:32 am (UTC)From:The reason people with autism get obsessed with patterns is because they have a harder time figuring out patterns than most people do, and so cling to the patterns they do understand
I once described this to someone when we were talking about difficulty reading expressions: it's not that I can't SEE that your face muscles are doing all sorts of things. I can. In fact, I probably see muscle-movements in your face you have no idea you are making! It's just that I'm not always sure which of those movements I am supposed to be deriving information from, especially the little ones.
He wouldn't look or act like a normal kid, no, but he wouldn't be a zombie.
That really bugged me.
By the way, the HBO movie Temple Grandin is an excellent movie, Claire Daines was note-perfect as a person with autism and the cinematography and special effects really take you into what the world looks like inside her head.
Oooer. I had actually been looking for an endorsement/condemnation about that one from someone who actually knew Autism, so this stranger says thank you. :)
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Date: 2011-02-24 05:45 am (UTC)From:Exactly! I actually found that watching movies and tv shows critically was a big help with that; you can tell from the plot and the music what the character is supposed to be feeling, and body language and facial expressions tend to be slightly exaggerated, which makes it more obvious. Of course, I'm an Aspy, so it's easier for me than my brother with Autism or my Dad who's also an Aspy but grew up before anybody really understood anything about it and was diagnosing it, so I have an easier time than others who are further along the spectrum. Also, part of my problem when I was young was growing up in a house with (at least) two other people on the spectrum, and a family/social network that just handwaved--oh, that family is just odd, that's just the way they are, don't pay any attention to it. So my early socialization reinforced those tendencies.
That kid tonight, though--I kept half-expecting him to either keel over dead or go "brains, BRAAAAAIIIINNNSSSSSSSSSSSS!" Really? Really really?
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Date: 2011-02-24 05:55 am (UTC)From:Then I started reading really complex fiction for the bits Trek elided or got wrong. >.>
But I had a hell of a time when I started trying to WRITE fiction and got that whole "show, don't tell" thing shoved at me - people kept saying, well, describe how their face moves! And I stared at it and went " . . . .but then I'd have like a whole paragraph saying things like 'and the corner of his mouth ticked up just a little bit while his nostrils flared slightly but not as much as they would have flared if he'd smelled something really bad, and the muscles in the very bulb of his chin twitched . .' and that would be ridiculous."
It took me a while to realize that they didn't actually see any of those things. At most, they saw that his mouth twitched up at the corner. And suddenly, I was enlightened. Then I shared this with a dear friend somewhat more ASD than I am and she went " . . . wait, you're supposed to IGNORE some of the muscle movements in people's faces? NOW YOU TELL ME!" (she is thirty) /extra-babble
I'm usually good these days unless I am ULTRA TIRED, at which point I try to avoid dealing with any humans who cannot be relied on to articular their emotions to me on request.
That kid tonight, though--I kept half-expecting him to either keel over dead or go "brains, BRAAAAAIIIINNNSSSSSSSSSSSS!" Really? Really really?
Yeeees. Also, I am not entirely sure why he kept staring at the roof. There did not appear to be much interesting on the roof in any of the places he was.
I did like the sudden-scream at the touching, but it would have been much better if it had been in there with other actual ASD quirks instead of zombie!boy.
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Date: 2011-02-24 07:23 am (UTC)From:There are two factors that may have helped create portrayalfail! here. The actor portraying the kid may have been working from tapes of autistic kids, not actual visits with autistic kids, which might have led him to overemphasize some moments or behaviors over others. Everyone (even autistic kids) has moments when they woolgather. Maybe he caught one of those and exaggerated its importance. The other possibility is that the director's familiarity with autism is very outdated. I worked a while at a facility for very low-functioning kids of all kinds (known with the usual insulting irony of this type of facility as High Points, when most of the denizens were doing mandatory "educational" time until they got old enough to be warehoused somewhere). I subbed for their Aquatics Director. This was in the very early eighties, and some of the kids who were labeled as autistic were rather zombie like. These were, as I have said, low functioning kids, and given developments in the field since then, I am perfectly willing to believe that either 1) they were misdiagnosed or would be diagnosed as having a different syndrome now, or 2) had received ineffective or (perhaps due to the difficulty of making a diagnosis and starting treatment in those days) very delayed treatment, and were not making the connections and learning the skills that kids nowadays can achieve. If the director's experience was with kids of that era, he may have been trying to show that kind of baseline.
Most likely, though, they just didn't do their homework, nor did the writers, and the result was more MadeUpSyndrome-ism than Autism.
There's a reason why my husband, a physician, can't bear to watch medical shows. The inaccuracies and exaggerations drive him nuts (not to even mentioned the floppy-elbowed technique when CPR is done), and it just makes him mad. All those shows actually hire a medical professional (whether doctor, nurse, or physician assistant, etc.) whose job it is to make sure that the medical stuff isn't too far from reality. I doubt that Criminal Minds had an analogous expert on autism on hand.
In any case I can completely understand how the episode would leave a very bad taste in your mouth!
Oh, and I've seen Claire Daines' portrayal of Temple Grandin. It was marvelous, and reminded me forcibly of a little boy I taught swimming to, whose diagnosis was that he straddled the border between fullblown autism and Asbergers.
What you have to say about pattern and overstimulation and obsession rings so true with what I've seen of the behavior and interests of the higher functioning autistics I've met and read about, and seem to be such important pieces for those of us with more neurotypical brains to understand if we are to understand some of the nature of the challenges that the autistic must go through in order to make a connection with us. It helps us make a better stab at meeting them halfway.
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Date: 2011-02-24 01:07 pm (UTC)From:Still, it's been ten or fifteen years since then. One would hope that (especially with autism being the Trendy Disease of the Decade) at least a little bit of that knowledge would make it out into popular consciousness.
I don't want to be to hard on the actor, here--he was probably only 10-12 years old. He was just so still. Unless he was specifically supposed to be doing something, he sat extremely still in one of a few postures. Then when he was supposed to be doing something it was an immediate switch to smooth, purposeful motion. He knew and was paying attention to the other characters--that's the whole point of his character, that he can't respond the way "normal" people do, but he's trying to tell them stuff in his own way. My experience with people on the autistic spectrum is that "off in their own world" doesn't mean "might as well be dead for all the movement/reaction going on." If he saw any tapes of autistic people, he didn't know how to copy anything they actually did. Again, he was only a kid. But still.
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Date: 2011-02-25 07:11 am (UTC)From:I vote we blame the director and the writers, and leave the kid out of it. ;)
I'm very, very glad that there have been such advances in treating all kinds of people with conditions and syndromes that involve the brain. So many people are being allowed to lead richer, fuller lives now. So many fewer are simply warehoused.
There was one day that I was working in the pool when two aides brought in a severely, profoundly brain damaged kid in a wheel chair. The aides were swearing at him and calling him all kinds of names, on the grounds that "he was just a retard, and he wouldn't understand!" They were shocked when I saw red and lit into them. "Yes," I said. "He can't communicate with you in any meaningful way, but show me the evidence that he isn't locked in there able to understand, but not able to respond! Even if he were a complete vegetable and utterly incapable of anything what you guys are doing is wrong, but you don't know that! He could be very bright and very trapped. Treat him with respect!"
They were quiet and subdued and polite after that. Given their earlier behavior, I didn't hold out too much hope that their behavior remained nice once I was out of ear-shot, and given the difficulty that they had getting and retaining staff, I had no illusions that the reporting the incident I did with my supervisor lead to major changes either, but I had done what I could.
I'm still angered at the behavior, and thrilled that advances in care and education can reduce the number of people who might be so much at the mercy of others.
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Date: 2011-02-25 03:02 pm (UTC)From: