Why would you want to 'cure' Autism?

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I wouldn't want to "cure" my Asperger's. Who would I be if I were neurotypical? Would I have the same interests and strengths? I don't know who I'd be without AS, and I'd rather keep my brain as it is. Some people seem to think there's a clear distinction between disorder and personality, but there's not. My personality traits have, for better or worse, been shaped by AS, and it's impossible to know what characteristics I would have had anyway. AS is a fundamental part of who I am.

Having Asperger's Syndrome means I have to not only figure out how to live with Asperger's, I also have to figure out how to act like a neurotypical so I don't offend their delicate sensibilities. I would only want 'the cure' if I could be blissfully unaware that I am acting like one of them. If I am conscious of being neurotypical I wouldn't even consider it.

Merle

Because it's a terrible disease that detaches you from reality making you a robot unable to correctly express your emotions.
Because of this people misunderstand you, you end up being all alone not being able to connect with anything emotionally besides on a superficial level.

So what we have left is a lonely individual with his autistic brain fog and zoning out issues. Not my idea of a good life.

Yeah... Autism is awesome.

All you guys do is say it's awesome and it would be boring to be normal? How would you know?

Can you state some positive examples that make autism a good thing for you? Instead of just saying it's good to be different and give no actual reason why it is?

It's insulting.

I would not be happy about the idea of a "cure".

I am unsure of the ability of the typical human to cope with a vast change in the way that they think and understand the world around them.

I think that to change from NT to having HFA, LFA, AS would be equally shocking as changing from having AS, LFA or HFA to being NT. I think that the shock to the system would push many people over the edge. Even the most stable and robust person's mind would be likely to crack under the stress.

I think that this change of mind would be a greater shock to the system than the one you would have if without warning you woke up on monday morning in a body of the other gender.

I hate the word "cure" too. I am not ill, if anything, it's neurotypicals who are!
I would not change myself even if i admit social encounters are stressing.
I don't want to turn into a sheep who blindly follows fashion and wastes money on shoes, clothes, make up or whatever pointless habit they may have.
I never really had to work at school, i was great at maths, physics, and English, and that's all I needed to pass I got my A levels with honors, and barely had to work for that the bus ride was all the time i needed for my homework. I would not cure such ability for maths and physics, thanks but no thanks
What should be cured though, is misunderstanding and rejections among NTs.

I would like a pill, which would remove my Autistic traits for around the length of a job interview.

But in general I like my Autistic traits, they make me more individual then most are. But I do hate my complete inability to have a conversation with strangers or one that isn't about my interests.

wow Avarice I have to agree with the job interview part.
I've had many but they all ended up the same...
Sometimes i feel like it went fine but obviously the other person saw something "wrong" about me.
the only interview that lead to a job was because i was the only candidate. you may laugh...

I agree. That's exactly how I feel.

I hear a lot about aspies wanting to "blend in", and put on an act to look like a NT. I don't want to do that, it is illogical. I just try my best to accept the fact that I am an Aspie, and pretending I'm not is just blocking the truth. Besides, I couldn't live with myself, trying to live a lie.

First understand that I'm not one of those people who puts down nonautistic people, says they're boring, or is an aspie or autistic supremacist. That point of view is at least as alien to me as yours. My view is closer to Callista's than anyone else on this thread. I think some people are supposed to be neurotypical, some are supposed to be autistic, and some are supposed to be many other forms of neuro-atypical. I don't want to be nonautistic because that isn't who I'm supposed to be, I have nothing against nonautistics who are also as they should be.

I'm also not someone with only mild problems. I am pretty extremely different from a nonautistic person and can't do a lot of things that are among the more valued in my society despite any talents I may have.

But I wanted to respond to your question from that perspective, as someone who is not an aspie supremacist, doesn't look down on neurotypicals, doesn't have only mild problems, doesn't want to be nonautistic, and does find some aspects of being autistic enjoyable.

I spent quite awhile (after being asked to write something for publication) trying to write about the most meaningful parts of being autistic, for me. And then I realized that in part because of the nature of these things and in part because of who built the language I've pretty much been robbed of an easy way to word these things. So I wrote about that instead.

The problem is that the only way to describe these things is as the lack of one thing rather than the presence of something else. So I end up having to say that the things that are meaningful to me are underneath language, before what most people see as thought, before movement, under comprehension, before feeling, under regular perception.

And where does that leave me? It frequently means that, to quote Jim Sinclair talking about another subject entirely, "It is when someone who has not even bothered to look at my world dismisses it as a barren rock. (...) It is when my unique faculties are thrown back at me as hopeless inadequacies."

But it doesn't mean those things are not there. No, they're not universal among autistic people. But they're common enough that at least some people can tell what I'm pointing at when I mention things like this. These experiences don't make all people want to stay autistic, there is no good thing about autism that forces people to like it any more than there is any bad thing about autism that forces people to dislike it. It's our thoughts, feelings, and attitudes that make us like or dislike autism. The lists of things we like and dislike could never do it on their own.

Anyway, to me and many others there is a rich and beautiful world that doesn't involve words, conventional thought, conventional perception, etc. I say world but I mean more that it's an entirely different way of perceiving the same world everyone lives in. I say world more in the sense of "there's a world underneath there" to give a sense of size. Because most people think that the part where words and thought and etc. end is the bottom, and a very ugly and uninviting bottom at that. But it's not. And my particular variant of autism allows me that experience. (There are plenty of people who have that experience and it's not enough for them and they hate being autistic though. As I said, it's not our good and bad experiences that decide us even when it feels like it is.)

Here's the article I published where I talked about that stuff, although I don't know if I did any better than I am doing here:

http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1052/1238

Anyway, another thing is that my variant of autism is the sort that involves sensory-based interests rather than just conceptual ones (I have both but the sensory ones give me much more pleasure). A friend just made me a string of tigerseye beads. I can move them between my fingers, rub them across my face, or watch them turning in the light for hours. Or I can burn incense (I like frankincense burned on top of charcoal the best). Or I can watch a cuckoo clock tick. Or any other thing like that. Those are not just ways to handle overload, they are wonderfully pleasant in their own right and every single sensation is slightly but obviously different than the last so I rarely get bored.

Having senses that sensitive also of course means it's easy to overload me to the point of cognitive pain, I have trouble recognizing or differentiating objects from each other, including differentiating my body from my surroundings, and I often find myself unable to do things most people find easy, or even to hold onto what most people call thought. Just to make sure you're aware there's a flipside.

But to me the ability to get so completely lost in sensation, to experience the world as patterns of sensation, to get under thought and words into that whole world under there... that stuff is as important to me as more typically nonautistic things are to nonautistic people. I used to fight every inch of this, I "won" for a few years of "success" in standard terms, but I was miserable. And I was doubly miserable as my act slowly fell apart and the abilities that had (while "impressive") always hung by a hair began to fall apart.

But I eventually found that this is who I am supposed to be, that fighting it helps nobody least of all myself. I get far more success pushing myself a little in what are already my areas of strength than I did pushing as hard as I possibly could in my areas of weakness. And I was doing myself and the world no favors trying to be something I wasn't. I can see that there is a small niche exactly my size and shape and I do my best to fill it even if nobody ever recognizes what I do as important.

But anyway, those things I have no words for are really important to me. So is the ability to experience objects the way I do, and all the rest of the things I talked about.. Both of them are intimately tied to my particular variant of autism.

But the reason I would rather stay autistic has to do more with what I said about my particular niche in life. I think everyone has one. And even when fulfilling that niche takes effort, it shouldn't generally require a person to become a totally different sort of person. That's not my only reason but it's part of it. And that's something a person can either believe or not believe regardless of abilities, difficulties, or other traits, it doesn't require a person to be "ultra high functioning" or any of the other myths about autistic people who don't wish to be nonautistic.

Their should not be a cure people think they are making it better by trying to make a cure.

Why waste time findiing a cure? It would be better if the people trying to find a cure were using their time on trying to find coping strategies and making society more open to aspies. I said this in my first post, but to me, AS is a gift. I agree that NTs, aspies, and others on the Spectrum should not be teased or bullied by anyone, but instead accepted by all. That is the way it should be.

Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, and even people who are Aspies are still very diverse in their behaviors, and their strengths.

For instance, some Aspies can remember very long numbers, I cannot. Some Aspies are better at socialising than others. Some Aspies have 'repetitive behaviors' more than others. It is a very wide range of traits, and no two people are exactly the same, and that includes people on the Spectrum.

This is going to sound really weird but I've read descriptions similar to this describing two other experiences: an LSD/other hallucinogen trip and an advanced zen meditative state. Some of what you've written here reminds me of "The Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley. I wonder if there is something in the very core of human neural architecture that is made accessable by autism, hallucinogenic drugs and meditation. I've tried meditation and it did quiet what they call "the monkey mind" (talkative, conceptual part of the mind) but I didn't get anywhere near what both the zen masters and you describe as this other mode of perception. And I'm not about to try hallucinogens. But some of your description did sound somehwat like the accounts of literate people who have (Aldous Huxley, Carlos Castaneda). And no matter how much I meditate I'll never be a zen master, so I can't get there that way. But it does make me wonder about this "other mode of perception" that gets described similarly for autism, hallucinogens and meditation.

Or maybe it's just that language can't properly convey it so people who have "stepped outside" of conventional human perception all wind up giving similar descriptions because language is so limited and forces a certain way of describing.

Becoming "Cured" will NOT solve all of your problems. You'll look people in the eye. You won't flap or rock. You won't bash your head against things. But you'll still be an unemployed, unhappy, uncharismatic goon living in your mother's basement. Doesn't anyone see that autism is so much more then these things?

I see the people who want a cure are generally unhappy or unsuccessful with themselves or some aspect of their lives. Accommodation has taught us that disabled people are competent workers, friends, and family members. And while my heart goes out to anyone on this site and this thread who have these issues, perhaps it isn't your autism. Perhaps it's something else.

Which isn't to say that anyone who is disabled by their autism is simply feigning their issues. Disability, by it's very nature puts you at a great disadvantage in life. But remember that you're only ever advantaged in society if you're a white, rich, heterosexual, adult, neurotypical, able-bodied male. And even then, complete success is not a given.

Nobody will ever say to you, "Get a sex change, A skin bleaching operation, A million dollars, Ignore your feelings, Ignore your disabilities, get a little older, cure your autism, and then you can be just as successful and happy as I am!" unless their opinions are not worth hearing in the first place. Even your more standard brothers and sisters get teased, picked at, thrown out of places, and ostracized. Having none of these things ever happen to you is a myth. Leave it behind and you'll be so much happier. Trust me. (Autism seems far to complex to ever be cured, anyways. If you supposedly 'Cure' autism that is apparently caused by chemicals, you leave the genetic auties. If you cure the chemical-auties and the genetic auties, then you leave behind those of us that are autistic due to a difficult birth, Ect.)

Well people always told me I must be on LSD, and so I eventually got intrigued and tried it and mostly it made me more normal. So I always figured whatever I a
is the opposite of LSD. (I also noticed LSD causing in emough quantity what I could only call a bad counterfeit of some things I experienced without it. It was very form without substance but it had a strong emotional quality that made it seem more substantial than it was. That's one reason I stopped taking it, I couldn't stand that. And I really distrust most so-called insights from that sort of thing. Always subtly distorted. It often seems to me that when you get to a certain point, you can use the exact same words to describe something profoundly real and something profoundly unreal. And the things acid does are on the profoundly unreal end even if people would use similar words to mine. Same words but the things the words point to are worlds apart.)

I've read that book but it was a long time ago. I don't remember it resembling my experiences (although all I really remember of it is a discussion of "istigkeit" or something like that. And I also think Zen is different although it's another one people always bring up. I think there is something fundamentally different between an experience that comes from a lifetime of spiritual practice and an experience that comes from an unusual brain.

By the way others with similar experiences due to autism have told me people compared their experiences to LSD and some of them went on to try it but it really seemed different for us than for most people. I think part of the problem is that "stuff that comes before language" covers a huge amount of territory and both autistic people's experiences and drug experiences cover different parts of that really vast territory. Add to that stimming on objects all the time and people will believe you're on drugs past a certain age, and some such people may eventually offer you some (or demand to get some of what you're supposedly on, which I got a lot of too). But... yeah, I think it must be fundamentally different if LSD made me experience that less

To me the concept of not wanting to be cured is like someone saying they enjoy having cancer, or they like being handicapped (as in inability to walk).