Offended by the idea of a cure?

Post Reply New Topic

i used to not be offended by it but that was before i accepted my as. I used to wish they would hurry up and get the cure.
But now i am offended because i have accepted my aspergers is part of who i am, without it who would i be? a cure aparintly would also wipe away some cool abilities or strengths they once had.
If someone does find a cure i would not be cured. as does not need curing because it isnt an illness or anything. i used to think it was but now i dont.

I agree with you when it comes to Human Rights.

I agree with NewportBeachDude when it comes to dealing with the major differances.

So that is why I ran. Later it slowed to hiking, did 45 miles one day. Luck had it that I grew up in the country, and ran with the hounds. I did survive, but there was a lot of luck involved.

I also agree that getting by is not enough. I could still use some socal and occupational therapy. I do drive, work, but it was all learned. I am old, life should get better. Some things seem common sense, runners can be taken to the track.

There is a scene in Conan the Barbarian, him and the thief just running through open country, running, running, for a whole day. It makes me want to go out and run.

Aspies do seem like wantabe NTs with an excuse. They do not deal with it because they do not have to. I know it can be dealt with, and it takes work. It is not just the parents of auties that work harder, but auties earn their improvments in life.

Ten months here and I cannot tell you what works, though as I said, I go out and drive. People hate me for it, both hands on the wheel, driving the speed limit. I always use turn signals. I never play the radio.

Danielismyname has mentioned the 13%. I wish I knew why it works for some, and not others. As far as I can figure, auties are maybe 5% of the spectrum, and one out of eight do make it. I am of two minds about everything, another trait? But some things work, speaking to people, working, and running myself into a sweat.

No simple answers. I am 61, still at it. I got by with a talent for fixing machines, then IT, now publishing, fine art printing, and writing books. I am large, male, and get by because I can make people deal with me. It coud be better.

I think auties should be our focus. One spectrum, one problem, and there the most visable. I just learned of running today. It is all the Autism Spectrum. Treating Aspies like Auties would be good.

Now we just need to learn about physical, social, occupational, and not running in traffic.

The numbers might be higher, for the study has not run that long. Developmental Delay, which in my case means growing up about ten years later, but I kept growing, when the early maturing lot stopped.

My thirty to forty was survival, while they had twenty years on the job, and pay to go with it. After forty I kept moving, they stayed put, and now most seem to be dead. I just started a new business.

So there is no study about lifetime, at most it now goes to the college years, and truely, I was not worth much till thirty. I would have most likely been classed as homeless, through my youth.

Being socially blind, and with no one telling me what everyone knew, because everyone was sure everyone knew, it could have been a lot quicker.

I am slow in some ways do to a lack of information, and lead the world in places that there are books about that. I can do Prepress above indusrty standards, am fully up to date, and my kid at fifteen was having to parent me a bit. She told me what everyone but me knew.

It is like today, runners? I take it you are an NT parent, trying to do your best. I too am trying to do my best. Perhaps it is point of view, I have threatened to start a school, Remedial Life 101. The problem goes beyond auties, aspies, as the rise of Life Coaches shows. So you learned social in Third Grade, well time for a refresher.

So as long as you are not dipping you daughter in a vat of acid to get the Mecurey out, I am with you. I am on the inside, and you would be amazed at what I do not know. I can never be an NT, I can function in the world. The Internet really helps, my last tank of gas lasted three months. Little gains have meant a lot to me.

Somehow we can bridge this communication block. I figured 150,000 auties, with 20,000 becoming independant in their twenties. I am one of the other 130,000. It happened later, but it happened. Getting to thirty without being locked up for life seems to be our goal. WP is littered with Aspies, teens, but it is the best support going. It is growing.

On the subject of change, "You can teach a pig to dance, but he will never be good at it, and it makes the pig unhappy." A lot of the cures tried have made for some unhappy pigs. Things that truely help with anxiety, gross motor skills, depression, being social, communication, are always welcome. We might have missed other's version of the developmental years, but better late than never.

As a quality check, try me, what you would dare try on a large biker, would be acceptable for use on small children. Human Rights, and respect, should be the basis for all human interaction.

That being said, do keep that kid of yours out of the street.

I am not offended by people who want to be cured.

I am offended by a cure through prenatal screening.

Also, it's possible that we can't learn things in the same order as other people, any more than other people can learn things in the same order we do.

I have noticed something interesting about my life, which... well I've already written it so I'll repost.

Sorry for all the long reposts by the way but I can't explain my point of view shortly very easily. This is because in order to be short, it is often necessary to be working with the same ideas as everyone else. In order to express a view that is very different than most other people, you don't just have to say what your point of view is, you also have to say what it is not, and explain it in more depth. Otherwise people think you mean something you don't. (At least this is how I've experienced it, although I've also experienced people just refusing to read the amount of time it takes to really explain something, and/or not being all that interested in what I mean to begin with.)

Everything past here is a quote from my other writing. I had to stop abruptly because of a toothache when I originally wrote it, so I did not go back and recheck it. Also the italics have been removed by the cut-and-paste nature of this. :-/

...

When your child is born, you don’t have any idea what she’s going to grow up to be like. Sure, if you’re fanatically controlling enough, you might have some idea of what you want to force her to be like (I knew kids whose parents insisted they would be doctors, that’s the sort of thing I mean) but you don’t really know. You don’t know what her strengths or weaknesses are going to be. And that’s, basically, okay. Most parents are fine with finding that out, they know the approximate time schedule on which they’re likely to find out, and so forth.

When the child is autistic, that somehow changes. What does not change is that parents don’t know who their child is going to be. What does change is that they often suddenly think they know, and they think they know early, what their child will and will not be able to do. Being from an ableist society (and therefore almost undoubtedly displaying more than a little of this ableism themselves), they proceed to freak out, equating inability to do certain things with inability to live a happy enough or worthwhile enough life.

But back to those assumptions on what children will and will not be able to do.

First off, the uncertainty of what even an ordinary child will and will not be able to do, is rarely acknowledged as fully as it should be. Children do not come with specifications saying what they’ll be good at. They also don’t come with warranties or guarantees as to the fact that they will always be as good at things as they are now. They could get hit over the head, contract a disease, lose a limb, and so forth, and suddenly be unable to do things that most people can do (or most people can do at some point in their lives, at any rate). This is rarely acknowledged, though, and when it is, it’s seen as really too unpleasant to think about. Disability is so thoroughly equated with something unspeakably bad in life that most people don’t like to think about the fact that nearly everyone on the planet will be disabled at some point, including their own children.

But back to autistic children, for whom the opposite mis-estimate of our abilities is common. Not only can’t people tell what their autistic children might be able to do in the future, it’s been my observation that most people are unable to tell what their autistic child can do right now. And minus the roadmap of a schedule, a lot of people get disoriented and imagine something that they think would be the worst.

So then they get freaked out and start plugging away at trying to shove as many skills into their autistic child as possible, thinking this might cause the autistic child to somehow beat what they see as the odds, and live what they see as a better life. (All of this is on a very individual level, since our society views disability as an individual thing rather than being the product of an interaction of certain individuals with a heavily biased society.)

I think I must be a fairly prototypical example of why that approach doesn’t work very well.

I have had a lot of people try to shove a lot of skills into me for a lot of reasons. What they got, was short-term performance, if anything. After an hour, a day, a week, a year, or even several years, this performance inevitably broke down. It was the equivalent of running marathons on a daily basis, it simply could not be sustained even by someone who was used to it.

I at times very much wanted to earn the rewards (this includes the rewards offered to non-disabled children as well as the less standard ones offered to disabled children in return for certain behavior) but simply could no longer force my brain to do something that it couldn’t really do or understand in the first place. Many of the things I was doing were things I had little to no understanding of, I just knew bad things happened if you didn’t do them, and good things happened if you did. And most of the things I was doing were ill-suited to my brain and totally unsustainable.

Of course, when an autistic person can no longer sustain the unsustainable, this gets called regression, a term that itself exemplifies the “forward forward forward must always be moving forward and we damn sure know which way forward is” mentality that many non-autistic people get into around autistic people.

But, in all this, hold on a minute.

There was a lot of information I processed on my own, a lot of stuff I learned without knowing I was learning it, a lot of background information that was getting stored and people in all their effort to foreground all the wrong ways of doing and learning things, were trampling all over my ability to access.

Most of this stuff has come to light in adulthood, and I don’t think it’s totally a coincidence that a lot of this has come along with avoiding “skills training programs” (and anything resembling them, including school) and having plenty of exposure to other autistic people in natural (non-institutional) settings.

The things I have become able to do in adulthood are extremely varied. I have more understanding of my environment, including my body. I have more ability to do various things, including things that I was horrible at as a child. I have things like lasting friendships that I never really had before. And, as I pointed out, I can blow my nose now.

I learn on a different wavelength than most people. You put the information into me, you let it sit there in the back of my head somewhere, and it eventually sorts itself out. This takes time. Sometimes it takes a lot of time. Sometimes everyone is very impatient and wants to take shortcuts.

Have you ever tried to take a route that looks shorter, but ended up with so many obstacles in the way that you had to turn around and take another route that in the end took twice as long as your original route would have to take? That’s what these shortcuts people try to impose are like. They may look good to some people in the short run, but in the long run, they are the very long way around. You can succeed in pushing someone to do something well beyond their capacity, but eventually they’re going to crack under the strain and you’re going to have to work with their actual (rather than imagined) capacities.

I can see why the way so many autistic people do learn is not very popular. There’s no quick results. There’s no snazzy teaching style with a cool-sounding name or acronym. There’s no money to be made in this. There’s no nifty theories backed up by bizarre notions about our development having got off-track at some point and needing to be pushed back on track. And there’s not even an illusory guarantee of normalcy at the end. In short, there’s nothing in this learning style for money-makers to capitalize upon or parents to feel like they’re doing something doing something doing something doing something doing something “for their child”.

Plus, it’s slow. You won’t have your imagined timetable for development, we may even learn things in a totally different order than you expect (my brother was even seen at a developmental disabilities clinic for “going through the stages of development in the wrong order”). You have a child who’s quite possibly going to be learning, in adulthood, things that non-autistic babies know when they’re born, and you’re not going to be able to speed up that process.

But it’s also notable that we do often learn these things in adulthood, provided we’re not prevented from doing so. (Self-fulfilling prophecies can be really interesting things.) And provided we do these things at our own rate.

I’m sure someone’s going to come along and say, “She’s anti-intervention, she’s for doing nothing, etc.” in response to this. I have another post coming about which parts of that are and are not true.

Whether or not we acquire certain skills does not determine our happiness. Otherwise I would be much more unhappy about who I am, and some people I know who fit a much more “functional” stereotype would be much more happy about who they are.

But regardless of whether these skills are tied to happiness, childhood estimates of our skills are not only inaccurate but ridiculously so given the amount of time we spend learning these things in adulthood, and the fact that we are synchronized to a totally different rhythm (of learning and nearly everything else) than the rest of the world. I’m currently going through a period of a lot of things “clicking” that had never “clicked” before (some of which “click” for most people at a very young age), and it’s becoming apparent to me yet again that all the forced-training in the world can’t override my natural learning style, and that common estimates of what we will become like in terms of skills are out of touch with reality.

(Written on June 11, 2006)

Am think one of the problems is when aspies who have become used to using the labels of autistic,and autism on selves, a pro curist says they want to cure autism,aspies assume they are talking about aspergers to,
but a lot of pro curists do not know of any other strength of autism than what their child has,and don't know what aspergers is or assume it's not part of autism because aspies are more able than their child.



Am not sure on idea of cure,although am would like to be able to reverse,improve and strengthen down various accute traits of kanners in self, as these do cause am suffering on a daily basis [although it's worse when those traits have reaction with unsuitable environment/situations].
Am also do not like the idea of there ever being a test for autism before the baby is born,am believe that everything living has a right to their chance at life regardless of any challenges they have to deal with along the way,am do not think anyone has the right to take that chance away from life,when it hasn't even had a go at it.

I accept myself for who I am and want others to accept me the way I am also. However, I also very much want to be cured. If mercury or an infection is what's making it hard for me to understand other people, read body language, make eye contact, and keep up conversations then I would want to take something to remove the mercury or cure the infections. Every neurotypical person is different with their own personality, ways of doing things, special interests, etc. so you can still be the person you want to be even if you are cured of autism or AS. Instead of being limited due to problems you were born with, you would have a choice. You could still act the same way you do now if you want. Being cured would make it easier to make friends, get a girlfriend, have a family, get a good job, etc. I would have a lot more opportunities and enjoy my life more if I wasn't held back by autism. That's why I definitely want to be cured.

1. I like to think of it as a gift because I want to keep a positive attitude... so stop it... you're spoiling things

2. I tend to think as it as a natural evolutionary thing. We all have some purpose... it might not be the same as others but it's A purpose.

3. Anyone that can be cured and wants to be cured - go for it. I just hate people telling me what to do - saying I have to eat fish oil, watch less tv whatever.... when they have no proof.

4. If curing means being like a lot of normal people I know, I'd rather keep my personality.

Remember... they used to talk about lobotomies as cures?

i don't like the idea of peeps thinking i am some kind of flawed person that should be wiped off the face of the earth(as in no positive features to speak of)

it would be good if there were some way for peeps to fix the problems they have with say the sensory issues, or the problems with social phobia. but it would not be fair to make everybody the same , the planet would be inhabited by a dull race of stepford wives.

as for this pre birth test it kind of worries me as it would not be fair to abort a baby just cos it is different from the rest.

If I ever sounded like an AS elitist in any post, I apologize. I have said before I would favor a cure for people who are unable to communicate or care for themselves. After reading these posts, I have to admit I was wrong to think that way. I knew there was more going on in these peoples' brains than most people suspected. I didn't know the ways they were finding to express themselves. The last time I posted something like that is the last time I ever will.

WrongPlanet is slowly curing my ignorance. Not always an easy pill to swallow, but worth whatever it takes to wash it down. Thanks for the insights.

I don't really get offended.

I wouldn't mind, as I've said before, some sedative that allows me to stand in the presence of people I don't know without the usual god-awful pain I experience; for the simple reason that there are things I want to do, but I cannot. I don't care for society and what they think of me, and what they want me to do.

As I see it, however a person is constituted is a gift. It just depends on what that person does with it.

Thank you Ambuend and Inventor, like your thoughts and opinions. They really help.

Great input from the others, too. I liked what I read.

I don't know, maybe I just don't get it. I mean, is it about being politically correct? That's kind of what it's sounding like to me. I don't want to have to dace around the word "ailment" or "cure" but I'd never mean to insult anyone by "attacking" someone's personality traits.

Very few things offend me personally. However, I simply don't relate the comments made by other people to myself. To do so would imply that they are a part of my reference group.

What I'd like to see first and foremost is a cure for prejudice and discrimination against anyone who is different from a quite narrow norm.

I'm not just trotting out the trite PC stuff here (the NT fallacy that you can send people to a few equalities and diversity classes to learn the right, PC jargon and then everything will be ok sort of thing!).

The very notion of a cure arises from this prejudice and discrimination. And that's what I take offence at.

Of course I'd like things in my life to be as smooth as NTs seem to experience. I'd like to be able to do things that NT people take for granted.

But until we get out of the box that the majority group (NT) has constructed for us I'll be avoiding their construction of me as disabled and in need of curing.

I'm not offended by it because one cannot be offended by something that doesn't exist, and is unlikely to come into existence in the near (and probably not so near) future.

But I am offended when ugly things are being done to children in the name of "cure". Or when I come across a parent whose child has died as a result of the "therapy" he/she was subjected to say that she has no regrets, and would have done the exact same thing, were her child resurrected (read: I'd rather kill my child than see them autistic).

I have an urge to just go, buy a plane ticket and give a sound bashing to certain individuals, except of course that wouldn't help them develop a conscience.