Don't cure autism now

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What if he is happy?

Arent you doing the same thing by not being able to see beyond yourself and your viewpoint? You try to imagine yourself in their position and consider how they feel based on how YOU think and would feel and your personality.

But they are not you.

An NT living my life in my condition would hate it.. without years of training they would barely be able to function.

But for me I like it just fine and I wouldnt change a thing. Im happy Im content if I wasnt interested in communicating so didnt speak and you just assumed Im unhappy because you believe you would be in my position your being self-centered.

What gives you the right to decide if the way another person thinks, feels, and lives their life is "correct" and whether or not they need to be "cured"?

As others have stated choice is all good and well but none of us will really be given a choice if there is a cure developed.

There are no laws against murder of personality and identity.

If some random person runs up to you in the street and injects you with the "cure" its questionable whether or not they would even be charged with assault. If it was forcibly done by health care "professionals" or the government people would cheer like the ignorant buffoons they are.

One cannot speak of a choice in cures at the same time pointing to a person who isn't communicating (to an NT) and say they deserve a cure. If they are not asking for a cure, they are not asking for a cure. If they don't and their parents "choose" to give them one, then it's forced.
Willow, you still didn't even respond to the list of cures and treatments that are already forced on people present day. Why is this? You keep referring to a futuristic cure that doesn't exist yet. And then accusing us of speculating on this future circumstance. But we are not speculating when we cite present use of force on autistic children and adolescents.
If you are truly seeing "both sides" like you claim, then you could at least discuss the very real day to day events.
I agree with Fraya when she says that you don't know what the child is thinking or feeling. I had to find a way to teach my son to communicate, because he was nonverbal. That's how I find out what he is thinking and how to better teach him.
There are people here and elsewhere that had years litterally wasted with being cured. You can only really concentrate on a few things at a time. When the adults are only focusing on the medical/pathological aspects, how can they love and teach and nurture?

I certainly don't agree that I'm looking at the issue in my own personal life. I'm modelling success stories from adults that have walked this path before.
You can't assume these things, you either haven't read enough or just choose to assume things about people that you don't understand. The very thing you're accusing people of.

I say don't cure autism now!!

I've said this before and I'll say it again:

My main concern is CAN/FAN/DAN will slide into a bogus cure like the 'cure' that was used for Judaism in WWII. ((Sorry if this offended anyone, it was just what I could think of first.))

I think willow has given a justified opinion based on what she know. Remember, she only took a little glance at this boy, but just be thankful she wasn't naive enough to think 'Oh my goodness, this is the only way this boy feels, how can he be happy?'. We are all right to think that it is up to the individual to decide whether or not they would like a cure (no matter how high or low-functioning they are, I could add). I think the reason why willow is using the 'dream cure' as an example is because currently, none of the cures around now, as far as I know (and I don't know a lot), don't work as much as would be liked. I don't know what the cures are or what they do, but I have gathered that none of them work anywhere NEAR as our wonder cure does.

I'll just copy what you said, because you said it better that I did. thankyou.


amazingly, somehow while I am trying to say that a "live and let live" idea should be flowing, and not the "screw the people who want to cure us!" idea that seems to be rampant, I get labled as being against one thing and for something else. *shakes head*

and the implication that my attention for my children and their needs is lessened by my activism is not only assinine, but DAMNED INSULTING. (that was to you, KimJ)

You're welcome! (I've said this time and time again, but... Not bad for a 16 year-old, eh?)

Okay, I'm reading my statement and I don't know how you gleaned this from it. at all. I don't imply anything and I'm really not sure why you're focusing on something that I didn't even say, while you are still ignoring the things that I did say.
I really try to stay away from subtext online because it turns into a NT battle of "wits", which I can't really handle. I'd rather just address what we were originally discussing in the first place. Of course, I can't make anyone stay on topic.

I found this during a random google search, but it is an interesting report of how social exclusion affect learning. I do not want to be "cured," so much as I want to be accepted. My mom asked me why I refuse to mature...as if I am not trying hard enough to figure things out. You can read the post here. I dunno if it fits in this thread or not, but I think it kind of does, since maybe some of the problems with Autism arise from not interacting with people. (Does that make sense?) (I dunno if it does; I've been up for 3 days writing a paper on the morphing of "public use" into "public purpose" in regards to the structural shift in government responsibilities.

Also--and this is just because it bugs me--ASSININE is really spelled A-S-I-N-I-N-E. It makes me smile when it is misspelled because it makes the person look foolish, and, well, the definition of asinine is, among other things, "foolish." (That's your word play for the day!)

I stayed on topic, and replied to what I felt was relevant. comparing autism research to other things is like apples and oranges, so I chose to not even bother wasting the type.

and since you are clueless, let me help you.


"I had to find a way to teach my son to communicate, because he was nonverbal. That's how I find out what he is thinking and how to better teach him.
There are people here and elsewhere that had years litterally wasted with being cured. You can only really concentrate on a few things at a time. When the adults are only focusing on the medical/pathological aspects, how can they love and teach and nurture?"


I won't respond to you again. I don't like you; go badger someone else.

Just as a note from the 'sidelines', KimJ didn't mean to badger you.

Okay, carry on.

It is really hard to equate that child's problems with my own or those of Dibs. There has to be something else going on because the cases are so different. I don't think it's the autism that needs to be cured. A little self-involvement, a little inward-looking seems like a good thing to me. It's helped me survive. I think that the trouble is that if you have a child who shows autistic traits and actually has a malformed brain, he's defined as an autistic and not as someone who has a malformed brain plus having autistic traits. I don't know that having the traits means the same thing in these different cases any more than having a fever means a person has one exact virus (no offense meant to anyone). Various symptoms can have causes that in ways are parallel without being the same, and not all the symptoms even indicate pathology. A lot of professionals do not know how to deal with precocious children, and I definitely was one.

There must be autistics who have no apparent cause and might be genetic and autistics whose cause can be determined to be post-natal influences. The danger is in deciding that a gene that may actually be beneficial is the cause and in working to eliminate that. Willow, if you don't understand why some of us are so angry, I'm happy that you haven't been through it. I would like those who haven't been through it to understand it. They're the ones we need to help us. But if Aspies are genetically part of the "autistic" spectrum, for all I know they (I might be one also) may actually, overall, be inherently more functional than the general population. The problem that I had was being targeted for abuse because I was precocious. I don't want to be cured of having a mind even if others do not agree with that mind's structure.



Hear, hear.

There are doctors who firmly believe in eugenics - that was very popular in American in medicine and psychiatry before there was a Nazi Germany and that idealogy went underground but has certainly not disappeared in the medical community. There was a debate in an old psychiatric magazine (link below) in which Kanner was DEFENDING those who were considered undesirable. So the idea that there are people who would advocate stuff like this is certainly not out of the question or paranoid. Please note also that the article mentions that parents who would OBJECT to this (eugenics) should be the subject of psychiatric concern.

http://hpy.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/2/171
The 1942 ‘euthanasia’ debate in the American Journal of Psychiatry

Lately, my take on eugenics has been that attempts to selectively breed anything always screw something up.

I often think eugenics was an intellectual smokescreen for just getting rid of people that they didn't like. More than a few in the forced sterilization programs in the US were just poor. So "undesirables" is a convenient word for them to use because it can be applied to lots of situations.

That's the truth for sure.