Transcript

ARABELLA:

Iris is my daughter, and she's six years old. And she was diagnosed with autism at two, but even before that, I realised that things with Iris were different from normal babies. She was very into herself, and she didn't want to look at us. When she was a very young baby, if I was cradling her in my arms, she wouldn't even look into my face or at my eyes. So being a photographer, I realised that something was going on there. And people try and comfort you, and they say, oh, everything's fine. She'll develop. It's just, you know, her-- her character.

But as time went on, I saw other differences as well. And it was things like she was very sensitive to noise. In fact, she's very sensitive, full stop. So her senses may be different to how we feel things.

She's very tactile. She'll touch everything that she comes into contact with. And she's very interested in it. It's almost as if the texture gives her more information than, say, it would for you and I. And noises is other thing. It can be very painful to hear certain noises, like if a glass clinks with another glass, or we put away some cutlery in the drawer. So over time, I just noticed these little things, and it sort of began to build up a profile on her. And I researched it and everything, and then found out that it could be autism, so we got her formally diagnosed.