Television documentary features three young autistic men

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The documentary The Autistic Me, to be shown on BBC 3 on Tuesday 11 August from 9 pm to 10 pm, follows Alex, Oli and Thomas who are on the autistic spectrum.

Here is a description of the programme together with a four minute clip of Alex going on a date with Kirsty, who is autistic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m5jb4 .

(NB. The program will be repeated, a few hours later, at 12:40am. At least, I hope that's the case, as I will not be able to catch the earlier showing.)

The video is not available in my area.
Please someone let me know once it is up on YouTube.

Cool I shall have to watch that. Have set my Sky+ to record it.

Watched it. Pretty good, on the whole, though I was disappointed that all three they spoke to had very unclear speech. It's probably coincidental, I know, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of perpetuating the old cliche of "'ret*d' people speak like this". I mean, I speak in pretty clear old-school BBC English, and none of the other Aspies I know have any form of speech defect. Well, one is from South Africa, but we can't really hold that against her.

I watched it. I thought it was good. As far as I remember the speech of the three young man featured was clear enough for me. I like how a large part of the programme was them talking, rather than other people talking about them. There is an intelligent and perceptive review of the programme in today's issue of the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/ ... -tv-review . No doubt there are people who would say that Alex, Oli and Tom are "nothing like my child". That the programme did not show what autism is really like. For me it showed the truth of the saying that when you have met one autistic person you have met one autistic person.

Unless we had been told that Alex had Aspergers syndrome I would have thought he was a shy, socially awkward young man, not an Aspie. I could identify with him on his date with Kirsty.

All three young men had very protective mothers.

I thought the show was as much about the role of the parents, especially the mothers, in the lives of the 3 guys. All 3 mothers clearly love their sons and want what they think is best for them, but as a result of the poor education available to parents of children with autism, their understanding of autism affects their sons' developments in different ways.

Tom's family worried me, and it's something I've seen a lot of. His mum, with the best will in the world, can't see her son as anything but a 4 year old child, needing constant and close supervision, which translates to crowding him. His "limitations" as she sees it has provided her with a son she feels she should never let go of, and in holding on so much and trying to control and supervise so much of his life creates the problems she later complains about. If you crowd yourself into someone's personal zone, right up in their face, and corner them so that they can't escape, you cannot be surprised or angry when you get a panicked elbow in the face. However, never able to accept blame, she then turns that against Tom. She crowds him, panics him, gets hit, and uses that violence as justification to crowd more, to supervise more, which will lead to more panic, and more fear. She gives him no privacy, even to the point of searching his room, and removing personal, private letters, and her obvious "over my dead body" attitude over him having a girlfriend, or even friends, increases the prison environment around him. I was glad to see him go to the boarding school, and hopefully there he will be able to find the calmness he needs to truely grow up. He needs to be able to spend time on his own without having to hide for fear of his mum bursting into the room and jumping straight into his personal zone with no warning and no invitation.

Alex's mum needs Alex in her life, I think she truely loves him, not just as a son, but as her closest friend and her companion. This is lovely, but again is too crowding. You can hear her trying to talk him out of having a "proper" girlfriend, nothing that would mean him moving out and living his own life, because what would she do then? I think if he did move out she would realise that the bond she treasures so much will still be there, and will only become stronger if he had his own independance. There's no way of knowing whether this is because of the tv crew, the situations, or whether it's like this in every day life, but other than when Alex was at work, his mum seemed to never be more than a few metres away from him, even to the point of sitting on another bench overseeing the date that mustn't be allowed to be a date.

Oli's mum seemed to be quite different. We didn't see as much of her as the other mothers, as she seems to give Oli that much more space. She seems to see her role quite similarly to the role my parents play in my life. She seems to understand her son more than the other mothers, and she's always there for him, but when he needs her. When the careers worker was round at the house, she was there, quiet, but watching her son for the flickers on his face that tell her he's not understood a term, and rather than talking "about him" and explaining what the term means, she just asked him if he understood that ok, and allowed him to then ask her for clarification.

Again, as with any of these programmes, there was a lot of silly talk about how autistic people's brain's don't work "right" and how they "can't" do the same things as good old normal folk. I was quite disappointed actually, I was hoping for a programme that actually talked to autistic people about what like if like being autistic, rather than just following a few guys whose lives had been disabled by the constant reminder from those around them that they are "wrong".

I thought the programme was interesting however the wording was rather amateurish by the BBC to say that Tom has an autistic spectrum disorder Oli has high functioning autism alex has asperger's syndrome. Basically asperger's syndrome and high functioning autism are very similar and both are on the autism spectrum disorder so you can't call tom having an autism specturm disorder because the spectrum is very wide. I think all three have asperger's syndrome but it affects them differently instead of using three different terms for three people.

I didn't watch it, couldn't really be bothered. My mum didn't want to watch it because it's too "depressing" and said "we already live it I don't want to watch it aswell". Well I'm ever so sorry for that MOTHER!!

Ditto. I can identify with Tom, because I sort of have a similar situation: very irritating parents, who I'm glad I can escape when I go to school during the week. Despite the lack of interent access and the fact that it prevents any social life developing beyond 'hello, see you next month' But anyway, I trusted Tom more than his parents.

ut the part when they said Alex has Ass Burgers I had to stomp on the floor at that point.

Watched it, liked it. Some really personal stuff showing parents in not such a great light. Best quote ever: "Saturday... (BBC guy must have shown some lack of understanding/confusion/expecting him to say something else)... you know, comes after Friday" lmao:-)

(could have been sun, comes after sat, but you get the idea)