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Read pg. 132, solve the activity “What is autism?”

Report your answers in a 2 minute recording.

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Read pg. 142 and answer questions. Write an article to teenagers considering your analysis.

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What is the purpose of the video? What details in the spoken language relate to the big ideas and explicit features of the multimodal text?

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What is the purpose of the video? What details in the spoken language relate to the big ideas and explicit features of the multimodal text?

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The purpose of the video is to show us what autism looks like in people around the world and that autism it is more common than we think. Many people have this condition and the video shows us how they see the world.

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Approximately how many people in the UK have autism?

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Approximately how many people in the UK have autism?

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1 in about 100 people has autism, which means that in the UK there are approximately 700,000 people with autism.

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Autism is a developmental disability that affects our environment when we want to communicate or relate to others.

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What can be confusing for autistic people to understand?

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What can be confusing for autistic people to understand?

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One of the most confusing things for people with autism is that they not understand the body language or metaphors pretty often. It is difficult for them.

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What do you understand by "spectrum condition", based in the explanation provided in the video?

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What do you understand by "spectrum condition", based in the explanation provided in the video?

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I understood that it is a condition in which the person has difficulty socializing with other people and has a different language and a different attitude than other people.

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All autistic people experience the same thing. Is this true or false?. Find evidence to support your answer.

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All autistic people experience the same thing. Is this true or false?. Find evidence to support your answer.

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Every person with autism is different. Some experience difficulty understanding and talking to others. Others experience difficulties with insecurity. Others have problems reading facial expressions, understanding jokes or sarcasm or common phrases.

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Despite being of average or above average intelligence, what do people with Asperger syndrome sometimes have difficulties with?

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Despite being of average or above average intelligence, what do people with Asperger syndrome sometimes have difficulties with?

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They still can have problems understanding and processing language.

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What is autism like? Make notes about what you learn. 

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What is autism like? Make notes about what you learn. 

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Autism can take different forms in different people, so sometimes it is very difficult to understand them.

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What characteristics do people with autism often possess?

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What characteristics do people with autism often possess?

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The most important characteristic is that each person with autism has a different way of communication and this makes him/her different from the others.

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n Dante's time, books were sold in apothecary shops: literature as medicine. I learned this when I was very ill, during an acute episode of manic depression, and I was struck by the profound metaphor behind this commercial fact. The apothecary of literature can heal, and I would need it desperately.

I had experienced a psyche-fracture, which included hallucinations of wings, seeing my own and others', these wings a metaphor for thought, the wings of the mind. Although I felt compelled to enact the urges of mania, I had a greater wish to hold very still and see what would happen if I let this madness take a metaphoric route. What happened? Poetry.

I don't normally write poetry, but in this illness I could write nothing except poetry. I never normally write at night, but I could write only in darkness.

The ancient Greeks thought the gods inspired poets through madness, and in , Plato has Socrates say: "For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses." This furor poeticus was honoured in the Renaissance as the "fine madness" that "should possess a poet's brain", in the words of the Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton.

In the illness I could write nothing except poetry

For me, poetry is medicine. The poet Les Murray writes: "I'd disapproved of using poetry as personal therapy, but the Black Dog taught me better. Get sick enough, and you'll use any remedy you've got." In the 19th century, people in asylums were encouraged to write poetry, while William Cowper (1731-1800) wrote that, in his depressions, "I find writing, especially poetry, my best remedy." Orpheus was both healer and poet and his lyre could vanquish melancholy.

I was also taking psychiatric medication, but in medicine I saw the science of pain, whereas in poetry I saw pain's art. Medicine has an anaesthetic relationship to pain - it wants to rid the patient of it. Poetry's relationship is aesthetic - it wants pain to speak. And the condition that seems to speak more than any other is manic depression. Arguably, it may be the refusal to create one's art that causes distress in the first place. John Keats, a licensed apothecary, as was Dante, trained unhappily as a doctor and experienced depression accordingly: his brother feared that if John didn't become a poet he would kill himself. An unanswered calling can take its revenge, and Gwyneth Lewis's memoir of depression, Sunbathing in the Rain, notes that it was her resistance to writing poetry that made her ill: "If you don't do what your poetry wants you to, it will be out to get you. Unwritten poems are a force to be feared."

The first book I could read in "recovery" was Richard Holmes's biography of Coleridge, and I cried for the poet, born before the modern apothecary of psychiatric medication that could have saved him so much pain. Coleridge, describing Shakespeare 's Mercutio, also describes himself, or indeed many a mercurial writer: "possessing all the elements of a poet: high fancy; rapid thoughts; the whole world was as it were subject to his law of association". Mercutio is moody then soaring; his mind is in flight with the imagery of wings.

In Shakespeare I feel understood, for he catches the signatures of manic depression in many of his characters, from Cleopatra to Timon, Lear to Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. Touchstone, merry-mad in motley, suggests mania, while Jaques, melancholy in his black, stands for depression. The most deft description of mania I have ever read - "frantic-mad with evermore unrest" - is Shakespeare's, while his love for puns and word creation, his tender empathy, his connotative mind, word association and lapidary compression all suggest to me that he either experienced it or understood it intimately in another. If not Shakespeare himself, my money is on the actor Robert Armin, Shakespeare's clever clown, the probable author of A Pill to Purge Melancholy.

Jay Griffiths. Photograph: Graham Turner/The Guardian

During my long months of convalescence, I walked alone across Spain on the Camino de Santiago. I took with me as little as possible, but the single most essential thing was an anthology of poems created for me by my friends, who had each chosen one that they cherished and that would console, including work by Rumi, Rilke, Borges, Yeats, Lorca, Edip Cansever, Alice Oswald, Mary Oliver, EE Cummings, Frank O'Hara and Tomas Tranströmer. Every day, I would read one, learning some of each by heart, not just to understand but to be understood. Poetry heals the reader as well as the writer.

To heal is, etymologically, to make whole, and poetry can heal the connective tissues of the mind, making it whole and reuniting it with the world. In the awful loneliness of depression, poetry is the kindest companion when one is keening to be comprehended. The contemporary practice of bibliotherapy makes this explicit, asking people to read specific texts as medicine, and in Black Rainbow, Rachel Kelly explores the curative power of poetry for her savage depression. Sufi stories have long been used as remedies and in Australia I met an indigenous "story‑doctor" who would diagnose someone's psychological state and prescribe a particular story for them to cure their situation.

Coming home, I bought all three anthologies Staying Alive, Being Alive and Being Human, so I could read a poem chosen by Neil Astley every day. Astley saves lives, I thought, many times. The subtitle of Staying Alive is "real poems for unreal times": crisis, grief, love and, yes, madness, that state of unreality or - as I prefer - irreality.

For me, writing poetry at night was an enactment of a metaphoric truth: I could see better in the dark.

Jay Griffiths is the author of Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression, published by Hamish Hamilton.

In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.

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Poetry can heal - it helped me through depression

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n Dante's time, books were sold in apothecary shops: literature as medicine. I learned this when I was very ill, during an acute episode of manic depression, and I was struck by the profound metaphor behind this commercial fact. The apothecary of literature can heal, and I would need it desperately.

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Use an internet search engine to find out about when the poemas were written and why. Consider the obstacles the two men where up against. One of the poets is thought to have been depressed. 

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Use an internet search engine to find out about when the poemas were written and why. Consider the obstacles the two men where up against. One of the poets is thought to have been depressed. 

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Alone: Edgar Allan Poe wrote this poem when he was 21 years old (1830). This poem is written from the perspective of an adult who remembers the problematic childhood that made him sad. The author says that he has been different from others since childhood and did not grow up in a typical family atmosphere.
Invictus: William Ernest Henley wrote this poem in 1875. It is a tribute to liberty and human resistance in the most difficult moments of existence. It was an expression of his attitude to the difficulties of life. Henley had tuberculosis as a child, had to spend a year in bed and had to have a leg amputated as a result of the condition.

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Evaluate the poems and decide which one: 1) gives you the best insight into depression and 2) could be used to help someone throught their depression.

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Evaluate the poems and decide which one: 1) gives you the best insight into depression and 2) could be used to help someone throught their depression.

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Gives you the best insight into depression: Alone, Edgar Allan Poe.
Could be used to help someone throught their depression: Invictus, William Ernest Henley.

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Bearing in mind your response to Question 2, identify and analyse the language and stylistic choices made by the writers to convey their point of view. Consider how the writers create empathy.

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Bearing in mind your response to Question 2, identify and analyse the language and stylistic choices made by the writers to convey their point of view. Consider how the writers create empathy.

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Writers create empathy through the words they use and also their way of expressing their opinions with their own experiences that they have. This makes the reader feel more attracted for the poems, because they are reading someone else's experience and not something invented.

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Which poem do you like most? Discuss this with a partner and make sure you can justify your choice.

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Which poem do you like most? Discuss this with a partner and make sure you can justify your choice.

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In my opinion, the poem that I like the most is "Invictus", because I feel that it shows the strength that people should have when they have difficulties they may have in their lives. Never give up and keep going. There will be happy and sad moments.

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What connections can you make between the poems and the two online articles?

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What connections can you make between the poems and the two online articles?

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The poems with the two online articles are related to depression. The articles basically talk about many people's experiences with depression and the poems were a big help for them.

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Dark Gray and White Simple Editor Note Magazine Article 