My name is Chloe and I have autism. For this edition I wanted to write an article about how autism is represented in the media, because I love watching TV programmes!!! And in my research, I stumbled across some really interesting articles about what people think they can do about autism…and some ENRAGED me so much I thought I would share them with you.

I have been watching programs with characters with autism and I have seen all the ways that autism can be portrayed. One of the ways I have seen is sesame street and the character Julia, I see myself in Julia in the way that she has a meltdown and has to take herself away to calm down (but I don’t do the flappy arm thing!) and I think that sesame street has handled the subject well because her characteristics haven’t been portrayed negatively – just as an eccentric character.

The good doctor is a medical show and has a main character with autism and savant syndrome. This show has good and bad representations of autism. The bad side is that it makes people think that people with autism can’t be accepted at work, because his colleagues reject him from their social and professional groups. However, the good side is that it portrays him as being really good at his job because of his condition and the higher attention to details that he has because of it.

The English soap EastEnders is doing a storyline witch the character called Ollie Carter who is a toddler. The characters in that show have just had a pre-diagnosis for him because they think he had developmental issues.

From this point it made me want to research what they think they can do about autism, and this is where my research made me rage!

For a while now, many partents arugued that the MMR vaccine caused autism, even though this has been disproved. But this stuff is another level! A semi-famous person called Jenny McCarthy said in a blog post “I fixed my son's autism”, and another blog I found even said that cutting out dairy products and gluten from your childrens diet made their autism go away ( https://www.parents.com/health/autism/parenting/we-cured-our-sons-autism/ ) This crack-pot science that milk causes autism is just ridiculous!

YEAH RIGHT! What part of developmental do you don’t understand?!? It infuriates me to see these articles saying that their child had autism and they were cured of it, when it is a lifelong developmental condition. So yes, we can develop and use techniques to get better at doing things, but it’s always going to be there.

You can’t change the way you were born, so if you don’t like it, you can shove it where the sun don’t shine!

I would much rather people focus on me as a person, rather than a condition that needs to be cured. I do have needs, but I also have aspirations, eccentricities, and opinions, and I would hate to think people wish these things away just because I have autism. The way that people think about individuals with autism and the way that is portrayed in media is getting batter but still needs improvement and batter understanding.