“Finding Amanda” aired on CNN last night. (Sadly, no links are available as of now. If anyone finds one, I hope you’ll let me know.)

Medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta visits with self-advocate Amanda Baggs, as well as with author Ralph Savarese and his son D.J. Their message: people with autism deserve to be respected and celebrated, not treated as a problem that needs to be “fixed.” Estee Klar-Wolfond, executive director of The Autism Acceptance Project, is also featured.

Since I can’t present the link to last night’s show, here’s one to an earlier blog post by Gupta about Amanda, a young woman from Vermont who lives independently and communicates via computer. Her message is a powerful one:

“Listen to other autistic people. In fact, expose autistic children to a wide variety of autistic adults. It may be the autistic adults who do have either typing or speech who are far more equipped to be able to communicate with other autistic people.”

And here’s a Youtube video called “Autism in the media” that critiques coverage of autism as biased in favor of language calling for cure rather than acceptance. Definitely worth a watch.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 9:08 am and is filed under autism, personal finances, public attitudes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.