Are You Autistic Channel 4 Documentary

Are You Autistic Review A Sorely Needed Primer

This was an ably presented look at autism. Not only did it seek to overturn preconceptions, but it showed that the condition is vastly more common than previously thought

People with autism have a word for those who dont have it: neurotypical. You might think this reverse labelling unhelpful, but it is an effective way to shift perspective to counter the sense of superiority that comes of thinking yourself normal, and to be obliged to own a term that seems reductive and exclusionary. While the label neurotypical doesnt begin to address the many and varied things that are wrong with me, it is still nice to have a diagnosis.

Are You Autistic? sought to overturn preconceptions about the condition . Autism manifests itself across a spectrum, but that spectrum is not a straight line there are any number of interconnected traits leading to varying degrees of difficulty with social interaction, organisation and sensory perception. Those with autism are not just a load of awkward people with a superpower that they bring out at parties.

Are You Autistic? constituted a fairly basic primer, but it was undoubtedly one the public sorely needs. Even if it sought to cater for an audience with zero knowledge or experience of autism including people who might have it and dont know it the programme probably told most viewers something they didnt already know.

Ambitious About Autisms Youth Council Speak Out For Young People With Autism In New Channel 4 Documentary

Seven council members star in Channel 4s Are You Autistic? – bringing the views and experiences of young people with autism to a wide national audience. The documentary is presented by Sam Ahern, 22 and Georgia Harper, 23, and also features Jack Whitfield, Jack Welch, Sadie Jaffey, Ollie Marchant and Georgia Ellin.

The youth council contacted Channel 4 while the documentary was in development to offer their views on its content. Programme makers subsequently invited members of the council to play a key role ensuring the experience of young people with autism is represented throughout the documentary.

Airing on Wednesday 28 March at 10pm, Are You Autistic? looks at many aspects of autism with youth council members helping to debunk common misconceptions and stereotypes.

It also examines the problems caused by delays in getting an autism diagnosis and explores how women with autism use masking in social situations.

Georgia Harper, Are You Autistic? presenter and youth council member, said: I hope viewers will learn that austistic people can have a huge range of possible traits, not all of which are obvious to others – and these can vary day by day.

Most of all, I hope that undiagnosed adults will see themselves represented for the first time, find their community and finally begin to accept themselves. If one more autistic person is recognised and supported as a result of the documentary, then well have done our job.

Channel 4s Autistic Survey

On tonights documentary programme the results of a Channel 4 study implies there are more people living with autism than previously thought.

Out of 750,000 people who took part in the survey 87,000 showed signs of being autistic which equates to more than one in ten. Over 50% which fell into the category were women despite more males being diagnosed with the condition compared to females.

In 2015 the National Autistic Society supported one male to every three females.

Are You Autistic? follows mum of three Jo Hoskins and JP Horsley remember him from R& B group Big Brovaz? as they undergo tests to find out if they have autism.

The former rapper told The Metro: I went to kindergarten in America, and it wasnt until I started that I saw the vast difference between myself and other children in my class.

I couldnt get comfortable or make friends, and it caused me great anxiety when I tried to speak in school.

The kindergarten teachers didnt know much about autism in the early 80s, but theyd often point out to my parents that I was in my own world a lot of the time and not participating with the rest of the children.

Id hear people speaking about my lack of interaction, but I wasnt in a position to explain my anxieties.

My eldest son, Richard-Michael, was diagnosed as autistic at two years old. While going through the diagnosis process with him, I knew I had the same symptoms that the specialists were pointing out to us as autistic traits.

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Are You Autistic Experts Answer The Big Questions

A lost generation of thousands of adults could be going through life without a diagnosis but there are signs of hope this World Autism Awareness Day

• 08:45, 2 Apr 2018

Autism cases are at an all-time high with one in every hundred people thought to be on the autism spectrum.

But experts in World Autism Awareness Week 2018 now think the true number may actually be much higher with the situation at crisis point.

A lost generation of thousands of adults could be going through life without a diagnosis, missed by a system struggling to understand the condition.

In one-hour special Are You Autistic? for Channel 4, presenter Anna Richardson and campaigners Georgia Harper and Sam Ahern, who both have autism, set out to uncover the true face of the condition in the UK today.

Working closely with charities, experts, and people with autism from across the spectrum, the show aims to challenge what we think we know about autism.

This is what we know for sure, though, thanks to the charity Ambitious About Autism who collaborated on the show.

Can Autism Be Cured

There is no known cure for autism and the focus should be instead on how people with autism can be supported to live full lives.

There are many different approaches, therapies and interventions to support people with autism and they will vary from person to person, as every person with autism is different.

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Episode One The Gender Clinic

The first film explores the difficult decisions faced by children when they feel like theyve been born into the wrong gender, or dont fit into the neat definitions dictated by society. While gender dysphoria is not a mental illness, it presents a whole manner of related developmental and identity issues.

For most living like this can be unbearable. It can lead to distress, suicidal desires, and frightened and desperate parents. And there are no easy solutions potentially life-changing decisions about transitioning into your chosen gender at a young age, and the medical interventions that follow, are very complicated.

The clinic has seen a 100% increase in referrals in the last year. Directed by the BAFTA-winning Peter Beard this episode will follow the daily lives of two transgender children, their families and their treatment by GIDS staff.

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For the first two years of the twins lives, Paddy and Christine pretty much stayed at home because it was less traumatic than going anywhere. The twins boundaries were unpredictable, their sleep fractured, their meltdowns hard to control and their development slow. The twins were diagnosed with autism at four and, later, Felicity at three.

Its a postcode lottery for most parents and McGuinness acknowledges that they were lucky. One of the toughest things for parents is the wait for a diagnosis. At least then you can work out what triggers your kids. I dont want to go into too much detail about my kids, but Penelope, for example, masks she does her best to fit into her environment and not draw attention to herself. Christine and I are constantly on watch, making sure the kids stay calm and happy as much as possible. But in some areas of the UK, the wait for a diagnosis doesnt take weeks or months, but years. It needs to change. People need to be seen much faster.

BBC/Raw Factual Ltd

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Paddy And Christine Mcguinness: Our Family And Autism

Paddy McGuinness and his wife Christine have three children who have been diagnosed with autism. In this documentary, they meet other parents, experts and people on the autism spectrum.

Paddy McGuinness and his wife Christine have three children: eight-year-old twins Leo and Penelope, and five-year-old Felicity. All three have been diagnosed with autism. This raw and intimate documentary follows Paddy and Christine at home and as they meet other parents, experts and people on the autism spectrum, including footballer Paul Scholes, who has a 16-year-old non-verbal autistic son.

Are You Autistic Meet The Man Challenging Stereotypes In A New Channel 4 Documentary

Jack Whitfield hopes the show will help people with autism realise their full potential in society

An autistic musician from Torpoint is to appear in a new Channel 4 documentary.

Jack Whitfield, 24, a member of Ambitious about Autisms youth council stars in Are You Autistic? .

The documentary, which airs tomorrow – Wednesday, March 28, looks at many aspects of autism with Jack and other youth council members helping to debunk common misconceptions and stereotypes.

Ambitious about Autisms youth council contacted Channel 4 while the documentary was in development to offer their views on its content.

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Programme makers subsequently invited members of the council to play a key role ensuring the experience of young people with autism is represented throughout the documentary.

Jack, a performance poet and musician, who works as a creative practitioner in the South West was diagnosed with autism 10 years ago.

He said: Im really looking forward to seeing our range of autism ambassadors spearheading the movement for an authentic autism voice in the media.

I hope people watching the documentary will see beyond the stigmatic stereotypes of autism and improve their understanding so that autistic people can realise their full potential in society.

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Are You Autistic Review: Autism Is An Important Topic That Deserves Better Than This Mediocre Documentary

Autism is at an all-time high, with one in 100 of us once thought to lie somewhere on the spectrum. Yet experts now believe that the true number is much higher, with a lost generation of thousands missed by a system struggling to understand the condition.

Are You Autistic? saw campaigners Georgia Harper and Sam Ahern, who both have autism, set out to dispel the myths and uncover its true face in the UK today. They gleefully referred to people without autism as neurotypicals, which Harper insisted wasnt a special autistic swearword but still sounded suspiciously like it.

The programmes centrepiece was the testing of two adults convinced that they were part of a lost generation of hitherto undiagnosed sufferers: mother-of-three Jo, who found social interaction a struggle, and musician JP, whose nine-year-old son was autistic and who recognised similar traits in himself. After extensive examinations of their personal skills, rigid routines and sensory issues, the pair were diagnosed with Aspergers and autism respectively. Having been lonely and even suicidal in the past, both were relieved to get closure.

There were surveys, stunts, whizzy graphics, a speed-dating night, a cutesy robot and the obligatory Rain Man clips. Five different experts were consulted. Programme-makers threw everything at the screen to see what stuck. The more they did so, the weaker it became.

Is There An Autism Test

The only way to know for certain if someone is autistic is to get a formal diagnosis.

If they think they might be, they will need to visit their GP and ask for a referral to a specialist.

Most adults see a psychiatrist, clinical psychologist or multi-disciplinary team for their diagnosis and children see a paediatrician.

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Whats The Difference Between Autism And Aspergers

Unlike many other children with autism, children and young people with Aspergers dont generally show delays in early language development.

They might actually be well ahead of their peers in some ways reading very young or talking like an adult when theyre still a pre-schooler.

They start to struggle when their social world becomes more complex and they can find it hard to deal with subtleties of conversation like jokes, sarcasm, tone and backwards and forwards discussion.

Sometimes they can come across as clumsy.

TV presenter Chris Packham has spoken of how his own Asperger’s causes him to experience the world in hyper-reality with sensory overload.

Paddy And Christine Mcguinness To Front Bbc Autism Documentary

Paddy McGuinness and Christine McGuinness are to front a new BBC documentary about autism.

Our Family and Autism will air on BBC One and stream online via the BBC iPlayer.

The one-off documentary film will follow Paddy and Christine McGuinness after their three children were diagnosed with autism.

The BBC share: “What is autism in medical terms? When a child is diagnosed, what do you do? What support is out there? What does the future have in store? Is there ever a right way to react and deal with the news of a diagnosis? And what is the impact on the family?

“Paddy and Christine will meet with other parents of autistic children to see how their experiences differ and whether they can learn from them. They will also meet leading paediatricians and cutting-edge child-development experts to discover more about their childrens autism – and the condition in general.

“Intimate, emotional and refreshingly candid, this is the portrait of a family so many assume they know, but seen here like never before. The film aims to challenge peoples preconceptions and kickstart a national conversation about an increasingly common condition that so few of us really understand.”

The documentary will be released on Wednesday, 1 December at 9PM on BBC One and iPlayer.

Meanwhile the BBC has also announced a special documentary celebrating the diversity of the NHS workforce.

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What Are The Signs Of Autism

No one person with autism is the same. You may have heard the expression: If youve met one person with autism, youve met one person with autism.

However, people on the autistic spectrum are broadly seen to have difference to neurotypical people in four areas, these are:

• Social interaction the way an adult or child plays, interacts and develops relationships. For example, they may have difficulty interpreting social cues.
• Social imagination this could include a person having a special interest, sticking to fixed routine, or struggling to adapt to change.
• Social communication having little or no speech or delayed language development, or understanding language very literally.
• Sensory differences – this could include under or over sensitivity in any of the senses including sight, hearing, balance. For example, sensitivity to noises or bright lights.

Episode Two Last Chance School

The school operates on the basis that reliving and working through these early traumas allows these children to move on. But this approach can be challenging, when many of the children can’t last for more than a few minutes without a violent or abusive outburst. The film will follow the work of the staff of this unique school as they educate and treat their pupils and prepare them, where possible, for reintegration into mainstream secondary education. The film is also directed by Peter Beard.

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In The Largest Reported Survey Of Its Kind More Than Half Of The Participants Whose Results Indicated They Met Criteria For An Autism Diagnosis Were Female

The new one-off Channel 4 documentary, Are You Autistic has revealed unprecedented results from the largest every survey of its kind. Aired on 28th March 2018, the documentary sets out to change our perceptions of autism. As part of the hour long show featuring presentor Anna Richardson, new research was released by world leading autism expert Professor Simon Baron Cohen and the University of Cambridge.

The online survey, completed by over 750,000 adults across the UK, aimed to see how autistic traits are spread out across the British population, and to see if expert theories around a lost generation of autistic adults may have statistical backing.

Of the three quarters of a million who completed the survey, 87,000 secured above the cutoff pointing towards a diagnosis of autism . With figures previously estimating 1 in 100 adults in the UK are autistic, these new figures suggest the numbers could be significantly higher.

More surprising still to researchers, of the 87,000 who scored above the diagnostic threshold, 54% were women. Current estimates vary widely, putting the male to female ratio of diagnosed individuals on the autism spectrum at anywhere between 2:1 males to females through to 16:1.

Why is a diagnosis important?

Georgia said Autistic people arent broken or weird or anything to be scared of. Our brains are just wired a bit differently

Are You Autistic?

New diagnostic criteria coming into effect from 2018 within the UK was also raised.

Best Documentaries About Autism Spectrum Disorder

As the number of autism spectrum disorder diagnoses climb worldwide, its inevitable that the experience of folks living with autismboth patients and their familieswill become more and more well-documented.

Of course there is no single best film about ASDas a spectrum with a wide range of symptoms, degrees, and circumstances, it is a wide-ranging source of stories both horrifying and heartwarming.

Every new documentary on the subject of ASD has an opportunity to provide a glimpse into the lives of those affected by the disorder, something that helps contribute to more awareness, understanding and compassion.

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