Background & Baseline

Chelsey has autism and developmental disabilities, but she has normal intelligence and no history of mental illness beyond the OCD associated with autism. She went through mainstream high school with some help. She loves video games, movies, stories, and music. She reads about psychology and religion, and she often talks about motivation and choice vs. conditioning. She seems fascinated by meditation and ideas like astral projection. She loves talking about philosophy and make-believe, often in a framework of elaborate stories related to movies and games.

Like other people do song mash-ups, Chelsey does movie mash-ups. For example, she talks about moral ambiguity related to actions of programmed characters in the Dollhouse (TV show) who help an evil Dr. Merrick grow clones (from a movie, The Island), further complicated by time travel and mitichlorians that influence the strength of the Force in kids like Annikin Skywalker (Star Wars). Her vocabulary and ability to weave together complex ideas is stunning. It’s also often draining and time consuming, particularly because her speech is very hard to understand. Only a handful of people on the planet can converse with her, and we only capture about 90%.

She has always liked make-believe topics more than reality, but she has previously always known the difference. She spends most of her free time on video games, stories, and movie clips. She has always had imaginary friends and occasional brief exchanges with them, but she always knew it was pretending. It was just fun and creative. We saw no harm in it, especially since she has very few relationships outside the immediate family.