With powerful words and pictures Florida Frenz chronicles her journey figuring out how to read facial expressions, how to make friends, how to juggle all the social cues that make school feel like a complicated maze. Diagnosed with autism as a two-year-old, Florida is now an articulate 15-year-old whose explorations into how kids make friends, what popularity means, how to handle peer pressure will resonate with any pre-teen. For those wondering what it's like inside an autistic child's head, Florida's book provides amazing insight and understanding. Reading how she learns how to be human makes us all feel a little less alien.

The author, an autistic teenager, explains how other autistic children can make friends, fit in, and deal with such issues as popularity, peer pressure, and bullying.

Performance and medicine are now converging in unprecedented ways. London's theatres reveal an appetite for medical themes – John Boyega is subjected to medical experiments in Jack Thorne's Woycek, while Royal National Theatre produces a novel musical about cancer. At the same time, performance-makers seek to improve our health, using dance to increase mobility for those living with Parkinson's disease or performance magic as physiotherapy for children with paraplegia. Performance, Medicine and the Human surveys this emerging field, providing case studies based on the author's own experience of devising medical performances in collaboration with cancer patients, biomedical scientists and healthcare educators. Examining contemporary medical performance reveals an ancient preoccupation, evident in the practices of both theatre and healing, with the human. Like medicine, theatre puts the human on display in order to understand and, perhaps, alleviate the suffering inherent to the human condition. Medical practice constitutes a sort of theatre in which doctors, nurses and patients perform their humaneness and humanity. This insight has much to offer at a time when established notions of the human are being radically rethought, partly in response to emerging biomedical knowledge. Performance, Medicine and the Human argues that contemporary medical performance can shed new light on what it means to be human – and what we mean by the human, the humane, humanism and the humanities – at a time when these notions are being fundamentally rethought. Its insights are relevant to scholars in performance studies, the medical humanities, healthcare education and beyond.

Precise shifts in the ways people make sense of themselves, others, and social situations can help people flourish. This compelling handbook synthesizes the growing body of research on wise interventions--brief, nonclinical strategies that are "wise" to the impact of social-psychological processes on behavior. Leading authorities describe how maladaptive or pejorative interpretations can undermine people’s functioning and how they can be altered to produce benefits in such areas as academic motivation and achievement, health, well-being, and personal relationships. Consistently formatted chapters review the development of each intervention, how it can be implemented, its evidence base, and implications for solving personal and societal problems.

This informative edition examines the important literary work of writer Anne Frank, whose meticulous diaries, which were kept and updated during her time in hiding, remain a haunting and necessary reminder of the ravaging effects of hatred. Readers are provided with a biographical sketch of Anne Frank, a series of essays that tackle the significance of her diaries as Holocaust documents, and a collection of modern thought on genocide in the twenty-first century.

Autistic-Coded Representation and Autism Stereotypes: Looking for the Spectrum takes a fresh approach to examining autism representation in literature, film, and television by looking particularly at characters who are not directly identified as falling on the Autism Spectrum. As autism becomes an increasingly popular topic to explore in literature and visual media, it is important that representations present people with autism as real humans with complex interior lives. Too often autistic characters fall into broad stereotypes – victims, villains, fools, or heroes – and autism emerges as the defining aspect of their personality. This book looks at autistic-coded characters, both classic and contemporary, to examine the benefits of looking for the spectrum in characters not explicitly labeled. Autistic audiences see a diverse and fully fleshed representation of themselves and neurotypical audiences gain a greater understanding of ASD though exposure to characters who defy stereotypes.

Every 20 minutes a child is diagnosed with a disease on the autism spectrum--including ADD, learning disabilities, Asperger's, Autism, and PDD--making it today's most common childhood disability. While the medical establishment treats autism as a psychiatric condition and prescribes behaviorally based therapies, Dr. Julie A. Buckley argues that it is a physiological disease that must be medically treated. Part personal story of her battle to heal her autistic daughter, part guide for parents, Healing Our Autistic Children explains simply and accessibly the new treatments and diets that have already proven effective for many families. Told through the case studies of her patients, the book is divided into four typical visits to Dr. Buckley's pediatric practice so that parents can see the progression of initial treatment. Written in a warmly engaging voice, parents new to the diagnosis will: - learn about clinical treatments that work - understand how different foods affect the body and how to begin implementing diets - learn to navigate the medical system and advocate for their child - bridge the communication gap with their pediatrician - discover that recovery is possible