Autism Documentary Offers Hope

When Tracy Thresher has something to say, he uses his right index finger — and a special computer that gives voice to what he types. Hunched over the device, he begins.
Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap....
Autism silences the 43-year-old Vermont man. He doesn't speak. But he has a message for the world about how people should think of people like him. So he taps it out.
"To think intelligence, even if you see wacky, goofy behavior. We are simply intelligence, shown in a different way," comes the robotic voice, broadcast out of his computer.
Thresher and friend Larry Bissonnette, 53, who have been advocates for 10 years for people with autism and the disabled community at large, are about to get a new platform for spreading their can-do message: They're the focus of "Wretches and Jabberers," a documentary film opening next week in 40 cities that makes the point that "disabled" doesn't mean "dumb."

PBS documentary tells story of local man who was patient at Rosewood

Owings Mills, Md - Steven Corderman, a Washington County resident who was a patient at the now-closed Rosewood Center, went through “hell,” his father recalls in a documentary film about the troubled state mental-health facility.
Corderman was sometimes put in a straitjacket, and other times he would fight people, requiring at least three people to control him, said his father, Nelson Corderman.
“I think about Jesus up in heaven. And I pray about Jesus to get me out of this place,” Steven Corderman said in the documentary about the closing of the Rosewood Center.