AGXStarseed
Well-Known Member
(Not written by me. Click the link at the bottom of the page to read the full article, which is too long to post here)
Siobhan and Mark Keaney with their autistic son Sean and their daughter
Siobhan and Mark Keaney always suspected there was something slightly different about their son, Sean. As a two-year-old he would wake in the summer months screaming at the daylight, prompting his parents to smear the windows with black paste to simulate darkness. They wondered about his obsession with wanting to open and close the car door on his own, but didn’t think it was anything to worry about until his nursery suggested that his need for routines and his tendency to have meltdowns required further investigation.
That was how, in February 2015, Siobhan and Sean found themselves in front of a paediatrician, a speech and language therapist and a clinical psychologist. They read Sean a story and observed how he played with toys. The meeting lasted for two hours. “They went away to discuss it,” Siobhan recalls, “and then they came back and said, 'We think he is autistic.’ ”
It is Friday afternoon and we are talking in the living room of Siobhan’s north London home. The 41-year-old, a part-time secondary school teacher, is making tea for six-year-old Sean, who is in the dining room, lost in a computer game, while his three-year-old sister watches a television programme on a laptop.
There had been murmurings about autism for some time before the official diagnosis: murmurings Siobhan had dismissed. “I thought there was no way Sean could be autistic,” she says. “To me autism was someone living in their own world and a mathematical genius.”
She could hardly be blamed for associating autism with such characteristics. “The autistic characters we’ve seen in films and books have often either had savant abilities, like in Rain Man,” says Tom Purser, who works for the National Autistic Society and examines cultural depictions of autism, “or they have tended towards being geniuses, like Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.”
Tom, who alongside his wife Beth, has an autistic son, Charlie, was one of the advisers on a compelling new BBC television drama, The A Word, a British remake of an Israeli series. It is written by Peter Bowker, who wrote the acclaimed 2004 drama Blackpool and last year adapted John Lanchester’s Capital for the screen. The new series, which stars Christopher Eccleston, Lee Ingleby and Morven Christie, tells the story of the Hughes family as they struggle to come to terms with the news that their five-year-old son, Joe, has autism.
The series was partly inspired by Bowker’s own experience – before his television career he spent 13 years working in a hospital for people with severe learning disabilities, including autism. Joe is relatively high functioning: he needs routines and is sometimes anti-social, but his behaviour could be explained away as eccentric. This was a deliberate decision from Bowker. “I did not want to make my character a genius at something,” he says, “and I wanted him to be someone who was midway on the spectrum so his parents could plausibly overlook, or choose to overlook, the truth about his condition.”
“I think I was in denial about Sean,” admits Siobhan. “It has taken me a long time to accept it.” It is estimated that there are around 140,000 children with autism in the UK and the average age of diagnosis is five – the age both Sean and the fictional Joe were diagnosed. There is a range of support and information available for parents to come to terms with an autism diagnosis that varies according to where they live.
Around 70 per cent of children with autism – including all those in this article – are in mainstream schools and, depending on the level of need and the local authority, they will receive some support in the classroom. “Charlie has a teaching assistant to support him in every class,” Tom says, “and he spends lunchtimes in a learning support room – he just couldn’t cope with the big, noisy lunch hall.”
READ MORE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/wellbeing/mood-and-mind/autistic-children-are-a-pleasure-not-a-problem/
Siobhan and Mark Keaney with their autistic son Sean and their daughter
Siobhan and Mark Keaney always suspected there was something slightly different about their son, Sean. As a two-year-old he would wake in the summer months screaming at the daylight, prompting his parents to smear the windows with black paste to simulate darkness. They wondered about his obsession with wanting to open and close the car door on his own, but didn’t think it was anything to worry about until his nursery suggested that his need for routines and his tendency to have meltdowns required further investigation.
That was how, in February 2015, Siobhan and Sean found themselves in front of a paediatrician, a speech and language therapist and a clinical psychologist. They read Sean a story and observed how he played with toys. The meeting lasted for two hours. “They went away to discuss it,” Siobhan recalls, “and then they came back and said, 'We think he is autistic.’ ”
It is Friday afternoon and we are talking in the living room of Siobhan’s north London home. The 41-year-old, a part-time secondary school teacher, is making tea for six-year-old Sean, who is in the dining room, lost in a computer game, while his three-year-old sister watches a television programme on a laptop.
There had been murmurings about autism for some time before the official diagnosis: murmurings Siobhan had dismissed. “I thought there was no way Sean could be autistic,” she says. “To me autism was someone living in their own world and a mathematical genius.”
She could hardly be blamed for associating autism with such characteristics. “The autistic characters we’ve seen in films and books have often either had savant abilities, like in Rain Man,” says Tom Purser, who works for the National Autistic Society and examines cultural depictions of autism, “or they have tended towards being geniuses, like Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.”
Tom, who alongside his wife Beth, has an autistic son, Charlie, was one of the advisers on a compelling new BBC television drama, The A Word, a British remake of an Israeli series. It is written by Peter Bowker, who wrote the acclaimed 2004 drama Blackpool and last year adapted John Lanchester’s Capital for the screen. The new series, which stars Christopher Eccleston, Lee Ingleby and Morven Christie, tells the story of the Hughes family as they struggle to come to terms with the news that their five-year-old son, Joe, has autism.
The series was partly inspired by Bowker’s own experience – before his television career he spent 13 years working in a hospital for people with severe learning disabilities, including autism. Joe is relatively high functioning: he needs routines and is sometimes anti-social, but his behaviour could be explained away as eccentric. This was a deliberate decision from Bowker. “I did not want to make my character a genius at something,” he says, “and I wanted him to be someone who was midway on the spectrum so his parents could plausibly overlook, or choose to overlook, the truth about his condition.”
“I think I was in denial about Sean,” admits Siobhan. “It has taken me a long time to accept it.” It is estimated that there are around 140,000 children with autism in the UK and the average age of diagnosis is five – the age both Sean and the fictional Joe were diagnosed. There is a range of support and information available for parents to come to terms with an autism diagnosis that varies according to where they live.
Around 70 per cent of children with autism – including all those in this article – are in mainstream schools and, depending on the level of need and the local authority, they will receive some support in the classroom. “Charlie has a teaching assistant to support him in every class,” Tom says, “and he spends lunchtimes in a learning support room – he just couldn’t cope with the big, noisy lunch hall.”
READ MORE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/wellbeing/mood-and-mind/autistic-children-are-a-pleasure-not-a-problem/
