Ciaran - Interview 26  

Ciaran - Interview 26

Age at Interview: 53
Sex: Male
Background: Ciaran, a development manager, and his wife have a son aged 21 and daughter aged 18. Ethnic background/nationality: White Irish.

Brief outline:Ciaran’s son was diagnosed with autism eight years ago and also has epilepsy and dyspraxia. He is currently doing a course at a college of further education but Ciaran worries about what he will do next.

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Ciaran describes how, for his son, everything is black or white.

 



That is the thing we don’t know at the moment, but it accounts for things like everything is taken literally. It is either black or it is white. They don’t understand things like sarcasm or reading between the lines, you know, the things that you develop, social skills or communication skills, without knowing you are developing them. Autistic children can’t do that. The brain doesn’t allow them to do that. So that is why they are always asking questions like, “Are you being serious?” You know, they don’t understand jokes or they pretend to, to be socially accepted, but don’t really understand. They read things, great reading skills, but don’t really understand what, no cognitive awareness of what they are actually reading and some of them have tremendous, highly developed skills in certain areas, like photographic memory, and they read, and like my son, anything he reads on football is locked in there for ever and he will recall it to minute detail. But if you send him upstairs to pick something up and he has forgotten by the time he gets upstairs what you sent him for. Short term memory is a big problem, but things of interest he has an enormous capacity for memory. But like I say basic living skills, he has very few.

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