From the Eyes of the Autistic
13/09/2011
Arnold Wengrow
Asheville Citizen-Times
If you think you know about people with autism from films like “Rainman,” “Forrest Gump” and “Temple Grandin,” psychoeducational therapist Catherine Faherty has another film she wants you to see.
Faherty works with autistic children and adults and their families at Asheville’s TEACCH Center, one of nine regional centers for Treatment and Education of Autistic and Communication-related Handicapped Children, run by the UNC Medical School.
So many films about autism are “ideas from the filmmaker's head,” she said, “not from the point of view of the person with autism.” That’s why Faherty thinks a new documentary, “Neurotypical,” by Asheville filmmaker Adam Larsen, is “breaking new ground.” It shows at the Fine Arts Theatre on Thursday and Saturday.
“Neurotypical” lets people on the autism spectrum tell their own stories, as it interweaves the lives of a child, a teenager and an adult newly diagnosed with autism. “It’s so valuable to hear from them personally how they see the world,” Faherty said. “There’s no way someone not on the autism spectrum can imagine that experience.”
Faherty says the characters in “Rainman” or “Forrest Gump” don’t capture what’s going on inside an autistic person’s mind.
Neurotypicals, a term people with autism use for nonautistics, “understand at an early age that other people have their own thoughts and feelings,” she said. Autistic people may not have that understanding and typically cannot read subtle cues of mood and emotion from verbal nuances, facial expressions and body language.
That leads to many communication problems. For example, looking at your watch may not tell an autistic person you need to end a conversation.
“The most respectful way to communicate” wtih an autistic person, Faherty said, “is to be clear, concrete and literal. Say what you mean and mean what you say.” For most people, “I can’t talk to you anymore” sounds rude. For an autistic person, she said, that directness is “refreshing.”
Besides learning about autism, Faherty hopes people will see “Neurotypical” for another reason. The screening benefits a new scholarship program at TEACCH, which has seen its budget shrink steadily over the past five years.
Since 1972, the Asheville center has offered diagnostic and educational services without charge to 12,000 children and adults. “For the first time,” Faherty said, “we’ve been told we have to start charging.”
Larsen was hoping to show “Neurotypical,” his first feature-length film, in his hometown when he learned that TEACCH needed to help its clients financially. A benefit was the perfect opportunity to do both.
A 1998 Asheville High graduate, Larsen knew people with autism through his father, Ron, then a teacher at TEACCH. “As a teenager, my family hosted get-togethers for autistics to socialize in a supportive environment,” he said. “I got to know many wonderfully unique individuals through their personalities rather than their diagnosis.”
Since completing film studies at the N.C. School of the Arts in 1998, Larsen has worked as a freelance cinematographer on projects from cooking shows to extreme sports and as a projection designer for live performances.
He decided to make a documentary about autism, he said, because “I noticed a huge disparity between the media’s portrayal of autistics and the individuals on the autism spectrum that I grew to know. Most of the documentaries about the subject were clinical. I wanted to make a documentary from their perspective.”
His parents, Ron and Linda, now own Shoebox Tasks, an Asheville company that employs people on the autism spectrum to make educational tools for people with autism. They have been producers for “Neurotypical” during its four years of filming, editing and post-production.
The film premiered at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in Greece in March and has since been shown in Vancouver, New York and Albany, N.Y.
Early this year Larsen previewed “Neurotypical” for Asheville members of the autism community and friends, including Gene Felice, an artist and designer who teaches at the Odyssey Community School in Montford.
For Felice, the film was “a real lesson on what is it feels like to be categorized as very different from everyone else and being told this is a problem that we need to get rid of, instead of this is a different kind of person and we need to relate to him differently.”
That’s a lesson that, by serendipity, he particularly needed to learn. Two days before he saw the film, his 5-year-old nephew was diagnosed with autism.