How I hate my life, or, a BBC documentary on autism

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... ith-autism

What a load of vacuous nonsense... literally, the only two-three things that were relevant (besides the anecdotal accounts) were the historical case, the scientific one (although details remained a mystery) and the Where's Wally experiment... besides the well-known doll test which is often criticized (of which there is no mention). The presenter was so soft and idiotic that I'm thinking of contacting her to express my disapproval...

I mean, what's so special about all those portraits of random people with supposed autism? I recognized one, the child of someone I knew, and they're only there because they happened to have supportive parents, while I have all the fast food in the world to wallow in.

What a load of unscientific speculation... Horizon should be clear-cut science, not vanity anecdotes.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:29D653865883C450C87459246DA0033F89CC19CA&dn=living+with+autism+horizon+bbc+hd+zigcom&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337

(Use torrent - easily available.)

Here's another source: http://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Liv ... ed2k_Links

Or... http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1z48q ... -autism_tv

This documentary is over a year old. There were a couple of threads about it at the time, most of them focusing on a single line, but those who watched it were overwhelmingly positive.

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If you want to inform people about autism on television, you have to use real people and try to be as representative as possible. If you just use scientific studies (and there were a few experiments in there) then you won't reach as many people.

Well, that's why I created this thread then, to criticize it... and sure, they won't reach as many people, but what's the point of Horizon? When they present astronomy programmes they don't get people to say how they loved their stay at a black hole and that's it. That would be ridiculous. It should be science. Those people interviewed barely had autism and had got on the programme simply because of nepotism. Pure corruption, plain and simple (incidentally, Walrus, you don't like talking to me these days?)

This seems great to some of us in America when we compare it to the "I am Autism" type videos or "This is real Autism" videos showing violent meltdowns we have here. It did show as broad a part of the spectrum as one can show in an hour long program.

I agree that the statement about "mentalizing" was too general. I recognize others have different motivations the me exp. why black people would be more fearful of police. This is a result of extensive reading and coursework in these areas. All this "expertise" does me little good in one on one situations. Knowing the other person probably has a different worldview then me is helpful to some degree, being clueless of what that worldview is makes the help quite limited.

The "mentalization" issue is part of the larger main criticism I have with the program. While it acknowledged Autistics can learn social "scripts" there seemed no understanding of the constant effort and exhaustion involved with "pretending to be normal". This problem was noticeable in the accurate statement that having some autistic traits does not make one autistic. If you are going to say autistics can't mentilize would not the logical conclusion be that a "real autistic" person watching this program will think "normal" people have the same level of difficulties as they do and conclude that they are not "impaired"?.

The lid experiment was relateable to me. I don't know how many things I have broken by trying to grab something the shortest and fastest way possible.

As for the triangle experiment while I knew it was a social experiment it was hard for me to get past the idea they are just f*****g triangles. The persuasion experiment at first I thought they were trying to say show love, then changed my mind to bullying. The other one I had no clue.

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I am equivocal about that BBC documentary.

I don't like the tone of the documentary. It portrays autistic people as childlike. I also don't like the term "mentalizing". I prefer the term theory of mind.

Well, quite a lot of the people on it were children or teenagers, autistic or not. There were only 3 autistic adults (that I can think of) - the woman and man who were together (they didn't seem childlike, they were in a relationship and she did formal presentations) and the guy in his 50s (he didn't say very much)

The guy doing the drama stuff was either an older teenager or a young adult, I'm not sure.

The autistic children were childlike because they were... children.

Am I missing something?

Well, my only reason for thinking so is anecdotal, so it can't be externally verified... but this person's mother even got in a picture with the local MP, so it's no wonder she could get her daughter on a British documentary... (the really annoying thing is that as far as I know I'm friendly with this person, yet the only 'researcher' on autism she sent my way (she knows I'm interested very much in neuroscience) was a PhD student who didn't even send me a copy of his thesis as he promised... so, I'm just frustrated. How ironic.)

I was annoyed when they said that the tendency to focus strongly on the detail rather than the overview explains why autistic people get upset when something in a room is moved a little bit. It doesn't really explain that. It explains why they might notice it's been moved, but not why they'd be upset about it.

I wasn't surprised that it underwhelmed me - popular science documentaries usually do that to me. But I thought it was OK as these things go.

Horizon doesn't usually disappoint me. Astronomy ones are usually awe-inspiring... even the one about placebos was really interesting and thought-provoking... it's just sometimes they're substandard (one about infinity was kind of as well, as it was sensationalized). There's always a difference between strictly scientific ones and others that merely strive to touch on the topic (e.g. not a single neurotransmitter was mentioned in this one, whereas it was in the placebo one).

Must confess I haven't seen a lot of Horizon. There was one a while back that seemed weak, but I can't remember its subject.