What's wrong with Autism speaks?

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I hear aspies talk bad about it. What's the big deal?

To put it simply. Autism Speaks feeds off the fears of parents of autistic kids. It's not about helping autistic people.

I couldn't really see anything wrong with it either, at least not from its website. Read the article linked to in this thread and see if that changes your mind. It did mine.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt269492.html

for your information - here is the infamous Autism Speaks, "I am Autism" commercial - One doesn't have to be a politically correct neurodiversity activist to see why most people with autism might find this deeply offensive:



http://youtu.be/8mycxSJ3-_Q

They tell the worse cases about it to scare parents about autism to push for a cure. But I hear lot of the money doesn't go to that. They also don't let people on the spectrum speak for themselves.

I dislike autism speaks as it trys to scare people into giving money for autism, also it does not tolerate people with autism poking fun at it.

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Health is a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity I am not a jigsaw, I am a free man !

Diagnosed under the DSM5 rules with autism spectrum disorder, under DSM4 psychologist said would have been AS (299.80) but I suspect that I am somewhere between 299.80 and 299.00 (Autism) under DSM4.

Did I also mention that Autism Speaks run ads here on WP as well. Right now the only ad that been showing up on WP is from Adobe. Apparently, their trying to shove there Creative Cloud suite down my throat for over a month new and there is no end in site.

Imagine if a bunch of heterosexuals got together and started campaigning for a cure for homosexuality. Then instead of using the money to cure homosexuality, or better yet, actually help homosexuals, they spent a small amount on curing homosexuality, a lot on anti-homosexual propaganda to solicit donations, and a lot on paying themselves money.

Those characters should change their name to Intolerance Speaks.

They still don't help anyone. More often than not today, they have commercials proclaiming the odds for autism > becoming famous/winning the lottery. They paint a picture of hopelessness, but I don't feel that way. They never bother to ask how we feel.

Imagine a woman's rights group. Now imagine that it doesn't have any women in it.

They solicit millions and millions of dollars from donors each year - and only 4% goes to support families and family support programmes.
4% is an appallingly low figure in the soliciting-for-charity industry. So they are self serving. That's one of the reasons people hate them for sure.

There a number of things wrong with Autism Speaks. One of the issues is that they often portray autism as a disease in their advertising campaigns rather than opting for acceptance.

Other issues include the fact that only 4% of their earnings go into actually helping people who living with autism and their families and most of their funds goes into researching a "cure" for autism despite the fact that there'll never be a cure and the research is often about developing pre-natal tests for autism which is also pretty meaningless to people currently living with it.

There was also a period where they actually supported the idea that vaccines could cause autism despite the fact that there's never been any scientific support of this and that Andrew Wakefield who wrote the original paper describing the supposed link was eventually exposed as a fraud. All this anti-vaccine movement achieved in the end was millions of children getting preventable diseases that should really of been eradicated in the developed world all because their parents feared that vaccines would "give" their children autism but, not surprisingly, the rate autism never lowered. Autism Speaks was a part of spreading the myth that vaccines could cause autism for while, though, to be fair, they no longer support that.