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AUTREAT
LAURA:
“I don’t know that I recall being ever being normal, or being perceived
as normal.”
DAVE:
“There were a lot of social difficulties. I would have a lot of trouble
figuring out what the right thing to was in a particular social situation
or even if I knew what it was, sometimes doing it.”
JIM:
“It wasn’t a decision not to speak. It wasn’t like when I was one year
old, I decided, okay they all want me to speak and I’m not going to.”
LAURA:
“I knew I was definitely not normal. I was teased in school, my parents
didn’t approve of almost anything I did.”
DAVE:
“I had one friend, I went over to see him one day, and it turned out
that he and his family were out at the time. I tried the front door of
their home and it was unlocked. So I simply went inside and sat down in
their living room and waited for them. And I couldn’t understand why they
were upset when they came home to find me in their house.”
NARRATION:
EVERY SUMMER, AN UNUSUAL GROUP GATHERS HERE, IN THE HILLS OF UPSTATE
NEW YORK. “AUTREAT” IS RUN BY AND FOR PEOPLE WITH THE BRAIN DISABILITY
OF AUTISM - LIKE FOUNDER JIM SINCLAIR– AS A BREAK FROM WHAT THEY CALL THE
“NEUROTYPICAL” WORLD.
THERE’S NO FISHING OR HIKING AT “AUTREAT” – BUT THERE’S A LOT OF TALKING -- ABOUT WHAT EVERYONE HERE HAS IN COMMON.
JIM SINCLAIR:
“It’s been a way for autistic people to come together and learn about
each other and some of the things one may never have associated with autism,
especially if all the information you have about autism is what you see
in the literature, which is all negative and kind of biased towards seeing
autism as pathological.”
NARRATION:
AUTISM EXISTS ALONG A SPECTRUM. MOST OF THE PEOPLE AT AUTREAT ARE HIGH-FUNCTIONING
INTELLECTUALS, LIKE DAVE SPICER, WHO CAME WITH HIS WIFE, DOVE. BUT THEY
SAY THEY HAVE THE SAME SENSORY PROBLEMS AS LOW-FUNCTIONING AUTISTICS WHO
CANNOT LIVE INDEPENDENTLY.
DAVE:
“I’ve likened being autistic to driving a car with a bent frame, where
if you just take your hands off the wheel, it’s going to veer into the
ditch. So you always have to compensate for things.”
NARRATION:
UNDER STRESS, HIGH-FUNCTIONING AUTISTICS CAN LOSE THEIR LANGUAGE ABILITY.
BUT THE LOW-FUNCTIONING MAY NEVER BE ABLE TO SPEAK. DEREK USES A KEYBOARD
– HIS CONVERSATION IS LIMITED TO ASKING QUESTIONS.
DEREK’S COMPUTER
“How many planets are in the solar system?”
NARRATION
JIM SINCLAIR SAYS UNTIL HE WAS 12, HE WAS LIKE DEREK – UNABLE TO SPEAK,
OR TO UNDERSTAND ANYTHING THAT WASN’T CONCRETE
JIM SINCLAIR:
“So I could write very advanced papers for my age, but I couldn’t speak.
But everything that I did with words was factual. I could do an independent
research project, and go read a whole lot of books about the skeleton or
the circulatory system, and write a report about it, but ask me about anything
subjective or anything abstract, and I wouldn’t know what you were talking
about.”
LAURA TISONCIK:
“A social species works because there’s a lot of different people cooperating.
Some of those differences include people who hyper-focus, who specialize
in one thing, who aren’t really that interested in people – this is a very
valuable kind of personality.”
NARRATION
TO LAURA TISONCIK, AUTISM IS NOT SO MUCH A DISABILITY AS A DIFFERENT
BALANCE OF ABILITIES.
LAURA TISONCIK:
“It’s a disability when you try to fit it into the expectations of
others. I was repairing my own computer within a week or two of owning
my first computer in contrast, you present me with something very simple
– it took me a very long time to deal with the telephone.”
NARRATION
AUTISM IS CONSIDERED A SOCIAL DISABILITY BECAUSE AUTISTIC PEOPLE OFTEN
DON’T UNDERSTAND NONVERBAL CUES, SUCH AS LOOKING PEOPLE IN THE EYE. DAVE
SPICER SAYS FOR HIM, IT’S NOT FOR LACK OF INTEREST.
DAVE SPICER:
“I can pay more attention to someone when I’m not making eye contact.
To me there is so much information available in eye contact, all of which
is nonverbal that I have a hard enough time dealing with nonverbal communication
anyway, picking up cues and figuring out what people’s expressions mean.
I have to work so hard at figuring that stuff out, that for me to have
eye contact with someone and to have a conversation at the same time would
be very, very hard.”
NARRATION
AT AUTREAT, FOR ONCE THE WORLD IS ARRANGED TO SUIT AUTISTIC NEEDS.
THERE’S NO SHAKING HANDS -- AUTISTIC PEOPLE OFTEN DISLIKE HUMAN TOUCH.
JIM
“It’s going to be hard to walk and carry a toad at the same time.”
NARRATION:
AND EVERYONE HAS A BADGE FOR LIMITING SOCIAL CONTACT.
SUSAN:
“Okay we have three colors, like a stoplight. Green means welcome to
anyone to come talk to you. Red means you want to have your own thoughts
to yourself and don’t want anybody to come talk to you. And yellow, which
is in here, means only people you know you want to come to talk to you,
not strangers just come up and start talking.”.
NARRATION:
NINE-YEAR-OLD ELIJAH HAS BEEN COMING TO THE CAMP FOR THREE YEARS, WITH
HIS MOTHER VALERIE TEKAVEK.
VALERIE:
“He started having seizures at around age three and he had had delayed
speech and a lot of repetitive behavior. Since he was our first child and
our only child, we really didn’t know what this was. Shortly after
that, then the word autism started to be bandied about.”
ELI:
“I want to be Phil and Lil. I’ll show you something Grandpa Mel taught
me.”
NARRATION:
VALERIE SAYS THAT ENTERING INTO ELIJAH’S FIXATIONS ABOUT CERTAIN MOVIES
OR GAMES RATHER THAN TRYING TO DISTRACT HIM HAS HELPED HIM GROW
VALERIE:
“Ooh, I call that beginner’s luck”
ELIJAH:
“Did you think I knew? I didn’t know. I just guessed”
VALERIE:
“At first it was just building upon a greater awareness of things,
but that has very gradually and I must say beautifully, become an awareness
of ethics, of emotion, of other people, and difference in point of view
– all of the important things in life.”
NARRATION:
VALERIE TEKAVEK IS A PROFESSOR AT BARD COLLEGE. SHE’S WRITING A CULTURAL
HISTORY OF HIGH-FUNCTIONING AUTISM. SHE SAYS THAT MANY GENIUSES IN ART
AND SCIENCE – ALBERT EINSTEIN AMONG THEM -- SEEM TO FIT THE PROFILE..
VALERIE:
“Einstein’s theory of relativity was an elaborate fixation. Andy Warhol’s
soup can paintings and silk-screens were a fixation that changed the face
of art in this country and in the world. And these are all things that
all of us share in as a culture.”
LAURA:
“One issue here camera-wise is -- someone here is having some real
problems so, really, I don’t know how much right here should be filmed.”
NARRATION:
AUTISTIC PEOPLE DO SUFFER FROM BEING SO DIFFERENT – THEY’RE OFTEN MISLABELED
MENTALLY ILL. LAURA TICONCIK WAS ONCE DIAGNOSED AS SCHIZOPHRENIC
LAURA:
“I’ve said that that is proof that psychiatrists hallucinate. I’ve
said at times that my current diagnosis is the autist formerly known as
schizophrenic. What other joke would you like? I’m sure I could invent
one if you’d like.”
NARRATION:
DESPITE THE DIFFICULTIES, THE CAMPERS AT AUTREAT SAY THEY WOULD NEVER
CHOOSE TO BE NON-AUTISTIC. THEY SAY THEY WOULDN’T BE THEMSELVES ANY MORE
– AND THE REST OF THE WORLD WOULD LOSE SOMETHING VALUABLE, TOO.
ELIJAH:
“My name is Elijah.”
NARRATION:
THIS IS CAROLYN WEAVER.
TO LEARN ABOUT “AUTREAT,” WHICH IS HELD EVERY SUMMER IN NEW YORK STATE,
LOG ONTO ITS PARENT ORGANIZATION:
http://www.ani.ac
YOU CAN ALSO LEARN MORE ABOUT AUTISM AT:
http://www.autism-society.org
