Living with Autism

An intimate discussion with Ron Suskind author of the book Life, Animated which is now a film. Panel discussion with Ron Suskind, Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist, his son Owen Suskind, Dr. James Weinstein; CEO DHMC, moderated by Professor Aine Donovan, Director of the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth.

In Ron's words...Two and a half years ago, my family and I locked arms and stepped into the spotlight when I published Life, Animated. This summer, that book became a nationally-released documentary, directed by Academy Award-winner Roger Ross Williams. You may know the story — my son’s the late-onset autism kid who silently memorized dozens of Disney films; if you threw Owen a line, he’d throw you back the next one. We realized we could only communicate with him by speaking in Disney dialogue. That began a decade-long adventure, where we became animated characters. Using his passion as a pathway, Owen got his speech back, learned to read by reading credits, and invented his own emotional language drawn from favorite lines and lyrics.

On Saturday, Dartmouth will be screening Life, Animated at the Hopkins Center's Spaulding Auditorium. This story can start a university-wide discussion framed by the challenge that my wife, Cornelia, so elegantly articulates (neatly paraphrasing her husband's lengthy pronouncements, as she so often does): "Who decides what a meaningful life is?" By using "who," she suggests that it may not be each of us who independently make that assessment, but society's norms, dictates of culture or judgments that flow subtly through our values.