Addiction Unplugged

Thouroughly addicted to videos, one autistic child after another will go without eating, sleeping, washing, dressing, schooling, even the toilet to reply, just one more millionth time their favorite Disney, Thomas The Tank or Bob The Builder video. Like addicts some of the worst affected will self injure, rage against their teachers in the special ed class and parents at home, to fixate frame by frame on their primed emotional triggers, escalating themselves into states of euphoria, agitation or glued even with anxiety to the idiot box as the years tick by and the carers give in and development is lost. Some of these kids who by ten may be unable to speak in sentences, brush their teeth or tie their shoes can operate a DVD player, video game and computer with ease, know exactly what order their precious drugs are stored in, and be masters in exactly how to emotionally manage their relatively redundant secondary human family in order to ensure their supply, through their teens, twenties, fourties, fifties.

This is not all people with autism but it is the new breed in our consumer age in which we are pursued by repetitive advertising, encouraged to form addictions to people on voyeuristic so called ‘reality TV’ programs and strive to be physicially one size fits all at any cost whilst buying Coke and Mac Donalds as Big Brother prescribed for us in his infinite wisdom.

But twenty years from now, we may well find DVD players come with warning labels; “Repetitive playing of formulaic programs designed to trigger particular patterns of extreme emotion may lead to chemical addiction”.

Could it be? Could it be that with the idiot box as baby sitter, and co-dependency passing as love and passivity passing as education that we could really so desperately enjoy the belonging of our favorite DVD a million times over that we’d become hooked on the chemical highs of the emotions it triggered so systematically, with such perfect delivery each guaranteed time?

It has long been known that behaviours can produce particular chemical highs. Risk taking,watching sports and fights, rescue programs, the news, horrors, thrillers, and now slasher films are designed to give us regular fixes of adrenaline. Comedies are designer drugs for those into endorphins from laughter (but generally fail to deliver). Soaps, and formulaic children’s programs lull us just like a sedative. Pick your drug, the more guaranteed the delivery the better so predictable if you please… hey get it on DVD and WATCH IT AS MANY TIMES AS YOU ‘LIKE’…. and start them young.

Those with autism are the canaries in the mines. What primes addiction in those with autism today, is perhaps the reality of the majority tomorrow. After all, how removed is the autistic DVD addict and his or her ‘junkie’ couch potato or computer game teenager? Such choice! Such choice? You tell me what parent ever unplugged the drug dealer and gave it a three month holiday so the household could find boredom long enough to discover mind, self, creativity and perhaps even a need for communication, for relationship?

Autism in the 1960s was almost unheard of. Statistics in the 1980s said 1 in 10,000. Today is it 1 in 160 people.

What is the mind, identity, development, neurology of an adult who has spent 20 years as an addict to an invisible, behaviourally induced drug?

Would it seem a whole new ‘culture’?

People who can fixate to the exclusion of all else, at any cost?

We meet their every need, how could they develop a developmental disability.

The answer may be staring some people right in the face.

Sit back, relax, settle in. Trigger fingers ready. The remote, ironically, is always so so very close.

Donna Williams *)

author, artist, screenwriter, surrealist.