Autism has always fascinated me. From the time I worked as a carer for people with disabilities, to reading the remarkable Curious incident of the dog in the night-time to watching the beautiful, harrowing, raw Aussie film about family life with a severely autistic brother – The Black Balloon.
Now they are calling it the fastest-growing developmental disorder in the industrialized world, having increased by over 600 percent in the last 20 years.
I’ve wondered – do people with autism have a slightly ‘less than human’ existence? With a common aversion to touch, a difficulty with intimacy and showing or processing human emotions..? Or do they have a heightened sense of humanness that is just too much to bear? A hypersensitivity to the ‘human’ perceptions that needs to be turned down in volume if it can be absorbed without a wild reaction.
Autism and aspergers help us to ponder the definition of humanness. Kathy Hoopman’s book – All Cats Have Aspergers is a playful analysis of the connection between feline and asperger characteristics. Fun, but with a serious bent too…
With my love of spectrums of the human ‘condition’, I love that it is called an ‘autistic spectrum’, and I love the fact that in some ways we are all on this autistic spectrum. Perhaps all cats have aspergers, and perhaps all of us have it too!