Boycott Autism Speaks

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She made a comment that was obviously about a time when she was stress, depressed, desperate, frustrated and at her wits end. She did not go on about a murder plot. Big difference.

Contemplating driving a car off a bridge with your a kid in it, is a murder plot.

Good point. I agree they are like a cult. I'm surprised they are not using their money to hire exorcists to drive this autism demon out of their kids. What ever they are, Autism Speaks needs to be stopped.

No. It's having a suicidal thought. Had she actually prepared to do this, taking those steps would be plotting a murder/suicide. Instead she's disclosed a very personal thought from when she was in a desperate and vulnerable depressed state of mind. There's a big difference between the two and it appears your own perceptions aren't allowing you to see that.

Autism Speaks is not a classic cult. Bob and Suzanne Wright are not trying to convince people to worship them, they do not use traditional brainwashing which I never accused them of, and they are not outsiders. Autism Speaks cult tendencies revolve around the rhetoric you called "nasty stuff". If they just said some people with Autism are miserable they want treatments or a cure we are working to give it to them help us do it by contributing to us it would just be marketing to a worthy cause. Thst is not the case at all here. They perceive Autism as a Satanic like entity that must be destroyed. Many cults use religious/satanic metaphors and a us vs them at all costs mentality. Autism Speaks does this except "them" is not people but Autism. While "normal" marketers search for people who are unhappy with their looks or want status cults search for and attract the truly desperate which Autism Speaks does. Not all cults use brainwashing because they have a ready and willing audience in the lost, lifelong drug addicts etc. Right now nobody is physically forcing you into a cure and Autism Speaks is not at least publicly advocating that, but Autism Speaks is breaking all sorts of boundaries and I can see them convincing themselves forced cure is the best was to stop evil Autism. If authorities and the public become convinced Autism is some sort a satanic entity forced cure will happen and it will be considered a hate crime to speak against that policy.

Your posts are the only place I've seen any reference to Autism being a "satanic entity." when I've browsed it, I have not seen anything on Autism Speaks' website about Autism being a satanic anything. Anything that anyone has cross posted here from Autism Speaks has not referenced anything to do with religion or satan. where is this coming from besides inside your own head? If they do have marketing materials with religious overtones and satanic references, I'd be interested in seeing them for a laugh - because I don't believe Autism is some sort of demon to be exercised.. and that's because I live here and now in 2013, where science can explain "demons," instead of people just simply believing in boogeymen and superstitions as if we're still stuck in the dark ages.

Thinking about killing your daughter counts as a "murder plot" to me. It was homicidal/suicidal ideation with a specific plan. If someone is thinking about killing, and they have a specific plan, and they have the tools they need to carry out that plan, then that's the most dangerous situation short of catching them in the middle of an actual attempt. This woman didn't say she stopped thinking about it because she realized how wrong it would be to kill her autistic child. No, she said she stopped herself because she had another child to take care of.

Of course she was stressed, depressed and desperate. Most people who commit murder-suicide are in that state at the time, either because they've just killed somebody and they know they're going to prison if they don't kill themselves, or because they're suicidal and the person they're thinking about killing is so enmeshed in their own identity that they can't contemplate suicide without also contemplating murder.

That someone is stressed, depressed, desperate, frustrated, and at their wit's end, doesn't keep it from being murder. Most people do not commit murder unless they are either desperate or feeling extremely angry. Unless you're a psychopath (and often not even then), murder is just not something you do in a calm, rational state of mind.

And Autism Speaks is feeding into that depression and frustration. Imagine yourself as the mother of an autistic child, knowing very little about disability or about autism. And then comes Autism Speaks, and talks about how tragic your child's existence is, how horrible your life is going to be now, how much you and your child will suffer. There's no talk about happiness or success; just unrelenting fear, pity, and hate. Your bank account is going to be emptied and your marriage is going to break up. Your child is an empty shell, soulless, unable to love, who will drain your life away like a parasite. It's worse than cancer and AIDS and dying in a car accident.

There are probably some parents who would kill their children regardless of whether they were autistic or not, but the increased murder risk faced by autistic children is not a statistical fluke. It's a lot easier to give in to the temptation to kill your child if you are being told how "normal" it is to think about these things. It's a lot harder to see hope if the biggest autism charity in the country is painting such a bleak picture. Many people don't even know it's possible to challenge the idea that life with a disability is inherently inferior and unhappy. Autism Speaks isn't doing a thing to change that; they're making it worse.

Last edited by Callista on 27 Dec 2013, 4:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

Because you can't cure a neurological condition. Thats just dumb, and a waste of money. It's genetic. You are born with it. Unless you are talking about aborting all autistic babies. In which case the problem could just as easily be solved by aborting all of the neurotypical babies.

Autistic people need help, not a cure. And they can't get it because Autism Speaks is wasting all the money on nothing.

Thats murder-suicide. Man how can you be this much in denial?

Let's differentiate "treatment" and "cure" here, though. We can't cure a neurological condition like autism because it's hard-wired in. But we can treat it. We can help autistic kids learn better. We can figure out which medications may help improve our ability to learn, process information, and deal with sensory input. We can design tools that help autistics communicate, navigate the world, and ward off overload. We can treat comorbid conditions like epilepsy, social anxiety disorder, or depression. We can provide occupational therapy to help people learn how to get along in the world, speech therapy to help them learn how to communicate. We can research ways to adjust schools and workplaces so that autistic people can work and learn alongside their NT peers.

Focusing on a cure is a real problem, even though a cure doesn't exist.

Read this:
Sometimes the things that don't exist hurt us the worst.

I am sure after the Suzanne Wright letter, Elder resignation, and Panera Bread leaving their marketing gurus are screaming at them to back off for awhile. If they started exorcising people that would be so obvious it would cause a massive uproar, other media would start investigating them, money would stop flowing in and their brand would be permanently hurt.

They have backed off before but eventually showed their true face. Slowly peeling away the boundaries is more effective then making a massive leap. We have seen that with privacy rights in the US.

I can easily see science advancing to the point where with an operation can rewire the brain and genetics modified.

What do you call this? What message do you think they are trying to convey?

"I am autism.
I’m visible in your children, but if I can help it, I am invisible to you until it’s too late.
I know where you live.
And guess what? I live there too.
I hover around all of you.
I know no color barrier, no religion, no morality, no currency.
I speak your language fluently.
And with every voice I take away, I acquire yet another language.
I work very quickly.
I work faster than pediatric aids, cancer, and diabetes combined
And if you’re happily married, I will make sure that your marriage fails.
Your money will fall into my hands, and I will bankrupt you for my own self-gain.
I don’t sleep, so I make sure you don’t either.
I will make it virtually impossible for your family to easily attend a temple, birthday party, or public park without a struggle, without embarrassment, without pain.
You have no cure for me.
Your scientists don’t have the resources, and I relish their desperation. Your neighbors are happier to pretend that I don’t exist—of course, until it’s their child.
I am autism. I have no interest in right or wrong. I derive great pleasure out of your loneliness.
I will fight to take away your hope. I will plot to rob you of your children and your dreams. I will make sure that every day you wake up you will cry, wondering who will take care of my child after I die?
And the truth is, I am still winning, and you are scared. And you should be.
I am autism. You ignored me. That was a mistake.
And to autism I say:
I am a father, a mother, a grandparent, a brother, a sister.
We will spend every waking hour trying to weaken you.
We don’t need sleep because we will not rest until you do.
Family can be much stronger than autism ever anticipated, and we will not be intimidated by you, nor will the love and strength of my community.
I am a parent riding toward you, and you can push me off this horse time and time again, but I will get up, climb back on, and ride on with the message.
Autism, you forget who we are. You forget who you are dealing with. You forget the spirit of mothers, and daughters, and fathers and sons.
We are Qatar. We are the United Kingdom. We are the United States. We are China. We are Argentina. We are Russia. We are the Eurpoean Union. We are the United Nations.
We are coming together in all climates. We call on all faiths. We search with technology and voodoo and prayer and herbs and genetic studies and a growing awareness you never anticipated.
We have had challenges, but we are the best when overcoming them. We speak the only language that matters: love for our children.
Our capacity to love is greater than your capacity to overwhelm.
Autism is naïve. You are alone. We are a community of warriors. We have a voice.
You think because some of our children cannot speak, we cannot hear them? That is autism’s weakness.
You think that because my child lives behind a wall, I am afraid to knock it down with my bare hands?
You have not properly been introduced to this community of parents and grandparents, of siblings and friends and schoolteachers and therapists and pediatricians and scientists.
Autism, if you are not scared, you should be.
When you came for my child, you forgot: you came for me.
Autism, are you listening?"

The symptoms are neurological, but you're assuming that the condition is entirely neurological. You're also assuming it can't be cured. It's not dumb nor a waste of money to do research to treat or cure a debilitating condition in humans, especially not for those who suffer from it and want a treatment or cure. You're assuming it's genetic but afaik there is no proof of this, only theory and speculation that there is a genetic component to Autism. Also, I have yet to see anything from Autism Speaks that suggests Autistic babies should be aborted - again, these thoughts have only been expressed by those in this thread.

Again, speak for yourself. Help is nice, but treatments that work or a cure are better, IMO. Autism speaks isn't wasting all the money on nothing. They're spending it on research with the aim of developing treatments or cures. I contacted them about how I've successfully been able to almost completely eliminate symptoms in myself by treating my own intestinal dysbiosis and they responded and informed me that they continue to finance research in the area of Autism & gut dysbiosis. My own experiences with this tell me this is not a waste of money and I hope the research they fund results in empirical data that others will trust vs. my solo success anecdote so that they too may experience much needed relief via natural diet, herbal, and probiotic treatments that balance the gut and in turn relieve Autism symptoms.

Treatments are great, but why assume that a complete and full cure is impossible? If that's the way people, doctors, and medicine approached every ailment of man then we'd have never learned how to cure anything and we'd all still be dying from influenza.

what do you mean what do I call it?

I call it what it is: Personifying Autism in order to make a dramatic statement.

Nowhere in their words do they make any religious or satanic mention. There's no use of the word satan, or demon, or God, or exorcism etc - Only in your posts in this thread have I read any such nonsense about Autism.