In just more than a week, ABC is premiering “The Good Doctor,” a show which follows a young surgeon with autism and savant syndrome joining a prestigious hospital’s surgical unit.

The show is a latest in a pattern that’s been emerging in the last few years, a stark shift in how people with autism and other disabilities are portrayed in the media, compared to old favorites such as “Forest Gump,” “I am Sam” and “Rain Man.” While those are critically acclaimed, Academy-Award winning films, it’s impossible to divorce these characters from the disability that defines them.

It’s important for [people with autism] to see characters in media that have autism, to see how it’s portrayed … to see that it’s just one of their personality traits.

But there’s a new model for writing characters with autism spectrum disorder — characterized by difficulty in communicating and forming relationships with other people and in using language and abstract concepts — seen most recently in Netflix’s “Atypical” (released earlier this month) and the newest “Power Rangers” film (released in March). (If you’re wondering, the Blue Ranger mentions briefly in one scene he has autism.)

It was a hot day, almost reaching 100 degrees, when 17-year-old Theresa Benoit Ciaccio walked herself into St. Vincent’s Hospital for Unwed Mothers in the summer of 1945.

Now 88, the Bourbonnais resident still recalls that being pregnant and unmarried from a large Catholic family meant keeping her baby was not an option.

Ciaccio and the father of her unborn child tried to marry; they even made it to the church before her brother and father stopped the ceremony.

“We were kids, I was a kid,” Ciaccio recalled. “No job and too young, they said. I did the best I could. I didn’t have a husband so I didn’t think I could raise him.”

At seven months pregnant, she was sent to St. Vincent’s, an orphanage and hospital where girls often put their babies up for adoption in those days.

Her dad drove with her, but wouldn’t go in.

“I walked into the hospital myself with my suitcase,” Ciaccio said. “Just walked in. Kind of crazy. Kind of scary.”

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“Que es lo que mas le gusta de vivir en Kankakee?” Lorenia Lara asked the gathering of about 10 on the fourth floor of the Kankakee Public Library last Thursday night. “What do you like best about living here?”

“Kankakee has been good to me,” Jose Martinez replied. Martinez, of Limestone, and one of the four owners of Martinez Tacos, immigrated from Mexico in his 20s, found a job and raised his family here. He picked up English and construction skills on the job, burrowing 25 feet under the ground in many local subdivisions to lay plumbing lines.

The next question — about difficulties living in Kankakee — garnered other responses.