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Actress Angie Dickinson, 78, writes a powerful story of her only child's struggle with Asperger's syndrome, in the new Los Angeles magazine, part of a package of stories about autism.
Newsweek has a summary: "Nikki Bacharach, Dickinson's daughter with composer Burt Bacharach, was born three months premature in the summer of 1966. She weighed 1 pound, 10 ounces. The baby was immediately put into a preemie isolette and no one was allowed to touch her—a fate Dickinson believes was linked to her daughter's lifelong sense of isolation."
"Even the doctors back then didn't know the value of touch, that if you never get touched or hear a loving voice or get held in those first months, you won't ever feel real or feel connected to anything."
Dickinson writes of her battle to find a diagnosis for her demanding child, who didn't talk until she was three, but developed into an athlete and who, at 4, "could play piano like a prodigy." Nikki started seeing psychiatrists when she was about 8, but they offered little help. Meanwhile, Dickinson writes, she had disturbing behaviors — she cut the hair off her dolls and the tails of her toy horses. And she saved everything, including an old battery and dog poo, on top of a dresser in her closet.
In 1976, after 11 years of marriage, she and Bacharach split. "It's really, really hard and I don't blame anyone for leaving," she writes. Nikki was eventually sent to an adolescent psychiatric treatment center in Minnesota, where she lived for 10 years. In 2007, Nikki Bacharach committed suicide by suffocating herself using a plastic bag and helium.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From USA Today:
