Watched it last Monday on BBC 4 ("Storyville"- British version), it was a truly wonderful documentary (one of the best ever) and I'm not surprised that it's been nominated for many awards. There is always something out-there that can unlock the voices and potentially of nonverbal individuals with autism; Carly Fleischmann wasn't the first, and Owen Suskind certainly isn't the last. I think his ASD classification would be somewhere in between "late onset" regressive autism and the very rarely diagnosed "childhood disintegrative disorder" (Heller's syndrome), although today in my analysis he would functioning at the "moderate" end of the autistic spectrum.
I really loved the part (don't know if it was shown in America) when he was imitating parrot Iago's voice line (Gillbert Gotfried) from the Aladdin scene where he encourages Grand Vizier Jafar (Jonathan Freeman, who was also excellently re-vocalizing Jafar's lines) to subvert the order of the Sultan of Agrabah by marrying Princess Jasmine. Oh and last thing, Jafar ABSOLUTELY petrified me as a child and it took me years to overcome my classically conditioned fear of him (he was my former all-time animated arch-enemy as diametrically opposed to my later animated hero Marvin the Martian) since transforming into that giant, vicious cobra! It was the main reason (now one of my all time favorites) why I once hated the film Aladdin.
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Diagnosed with "Classical" Asperger's syndrome in 1998 (Clinical psychologist).
RAADS-R: 237/240
Aspie score: 199 out of 200
Neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 1 out of 200
Alexithymia Questionnaire: 166/185 AQ: 49/50 EQ: 9/80
01 Jul 2016, 3:03 am
