The Pro-Cure Thread

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This thred is dedicated to people who do not wish to live with Autism or Asperger Syndrome. It is devoted to choice. If you do not want to be rid of it, that is absolutely fine too. And you are most welcome in this thread if you also respect other people's choices, including the one to have it gone.

I made this thread as a response to the aggressive anti-''cure'' mentality. Please, do understand that I by no means believe everyone who wishes to retain AS or Autism to be like this. Unfortunately, there is a vocal group of people who demonize pro-cure people. I have seen many people act like we are monsters, and many people treat them as the aggressive ones. Ironically I can't find a single case of this.

I do not enjoy Asperger Syndrome. I find it difficult. I do not like the sinking feeling gained with talking to somebody, or the awkward physical movements. I perfectly respect other people who see a bright side to AS, and I am not passing judgement on their choices.

But I do ask that the same people do not judge mine. I support research towards treatment, and the ability to eventually CHOOSE what you want. Again, you may not want it, and you are welcome to that choice as far as I'm concerned.

I ask only that I be welcome to mine.

I may not enjoy AS, but it is a part of who I am, and I am the one who I am, I am the one who is who I was meant to be, and I wouldn't want to be anything else.

I don't enjoy it and I don't want it. I don't care if it's part of "who i am", who i am sucks and I want to be different.

I truly believe in free choice in a matter like this. I respect DeanFoley, and I respect those who wish to not be cured---provided that cure is out there.

I sincerely wish DeanFoley all the best in his endeavors to achieve this goal. I hope you make it. I know there would be plenty of others who would follow you. I respect your stand DeanFoley. And I will not bash it.

For me, I am more like Padium. For me to get rid of AS would be like a part of me died. I have always vocally said here that I love having it. I brag about it. I know that may sound strange, but it is true. If I had to live over again on this earth, and I got to choose my attributes, I would quickly choose AS. My life has been filled with joy with my interests.

Now, I would like to say this. My therapist has said I have adapted very well to the so-called "normal" world. I have been a public high school teacher for 21 years. I have been happily married for 19 years and have two sons. I am lucky.

As I have read various threads of different forums in the WrongPlanet, I have seen a lot of AS people who are not happy in their lives. If they could find happiness in getting rid of AS---I cannot condemn that. I would say, "go for it." But I on the other hand, like many AS people here, am happy with it. And I thank DeanFoley on his approach here to suggest respect for both sides of this issue.

I will be honest---I have my share of downtimes. But for the most part, I remain upbeat.

Good luck DeanFoley in your quest.

I agree that it is the choice of the individual with AS whether or not they want to improve functioning and thought patterns. My beef is with the parents who do not give the child a choice in therapies or do not take the time to understand the reasons behind the child's behaviors and thoughts.

Just a little antecdotal experience here...we didn't expect this to happen, but our son's echolalia stopped when we put him on CoQ10 supplementation for another medical reason.

You can lose the AS if you want. All you are missing, to have social cognitive function and ToM, is to explicitly build some of those cognitive functions that you don't possess naturally. You have to brute-force construct social skills by building the building blocks that are difficult for our minds, and then using them to build an experience base for social ideas and interactions. Like teaching yourself fly fishing, it takes years and a dedication to the activities that grow the skills.

But along the way, at some time, you have to stop thinking like an AS. AS have some sensory integration dysfunctions and special intelligence ("hidden intelligence"), because they use certain neural circuits for analytical and sensory process. If you want to be truly NT in some of your social mind, you have to switch your mind over from that kind of functioning to an NT's social cognitive model. Then you would be like any other sociable, but shallow and limited guy standing next to you in the grocery store line. You will lose your "special" intelligence, your intensity, your groundedness and you will become a not-particularly-bright NT.

AS is not just the few neural switches here and there, it is a whole way of experiencing Self and the world, that we develop instead of having a social mind. It's a very reality-intensive, sensory-oriented, analytical mind. AS is both a neurological status, but also a kind of mind and world of experience.

I did it. And then I decided to come back. I was a better person, and had a special, magical existence as an AS. It was like Wizard of Oz, only Dorothy goes from Oz to Kansas, because she is afraid of the Witches and flying monkeys. I'd rather live in Oz, with the Witches and flying monkeys who seem attracted to me, than live in Kansas. If the mind of AS is like Oz, the mind of NT is like Kansas. And I discovered that, if I were NT, I wouldn't even be particularly bright, just ordinary and kind of empty a lot. Then I'd want to do things they do to fill up that emptiness -- buy things to fill my life up with, compete for attention, play head games to fill my head with things. So I decided to come back.

A lot of NTs are happy. But you should not read so much into how great it is to be NT. The biggest most single social skill an NT has is the ability to intentionally project a social surface, or face, to present to the world and it is through that face that they interact so easily. For the same reason, NTs are often quite different under their surfaces than they are at the surface.

I recently acquired the ability to get some insight into the minds of some NTs, using some cognitive behavior analysis techniques I worked out. I'm not really awed and impressed by what I see. They are like inverted icebergs -- 90 percent of their goodness and interestingness is on the surface with little below. AS are opposite, with 90 percent of their goodness and interestingness below the surface where no one else can easily see. Usually, if an NT has a lot of hidden substance under their surfaces, it's not good stuff that they are hiding. It's easy to look at the shiny surfaces of NTs and think they are great, but only because we assume they also have the kind of depth, meaning and intelligence inside as we do. They don't, not as much as AS do. The times when NTs are most like us is when they are children, and see and speak the truth freely. They lose that ability as they enter the grownup world.

In order to have a full social mind, you have to stop being AS, stop thinking like AS and not experience an objective reality. You have to be like Peter Pan leaving Never Never Land and choosing to "grow up" and never go back. You have to center your life around things like a better car than your neighbor and who gets the "in" with the boss and your life has to ride on who wins the deal, because you have little inside. AS enjoy reality more like kids, while NTs are like the grownups, and their grey reality.

I'm sorry if you felt attacked before. But surely there is a way to discuss why you don't want to be AS without making things up to parody or ridicule those who are trying to take pride in their traits ("militant AS")?

I respect people who enjoy AS, but I do not respect treating those without it as inferior to yourself, which is precisely what you are doing.

I still stand by what I said before. You're not ''inferior'', but neither is anyone else. And I have never made anything up. Everything I stated in that thread has been on this forum at some point or another.

Deleted...
See www.wrongplanet.net/postp1930975.html#1930975 for further details.

Last edited by mystyc on 19 Dec 2008, 1:51 am, edited 1 time in total.

This discussion has been incredibly fascinating for me so far. And it has only just begun. I can only imagine the numerous posts that this will generate. I am glad I found it. Thanks DeanFoley.

I have already posted my position that I would not want to be cured of AS. But at the same time, I fully respect those who do want a cure. We each have to decide what is best for us.

ephemerella posed a quite interesting commentary here. She claims to have transgressed from our world of AS to the NT world and come back again. As hard to believe as that sounds, I have heard from experts that you can receive "coaching skills" that will make you appear as a NT socially. And I am open to the possibility that with enough practice, it is possible to leave the spectrum??? But I would think it would always feel awkward in being unawkward socially. To be honest with you, I am receiving some "coaching skills" on issues relating to my being a better husband and father to my family.

I view autism as a type of car such as a Rolls-Royce (let's be a grand car---very few "normal" people understand how a Rolls-Royce operates), and we are supposed to participate in a cross country race. Though it would look out of place, the Rolls-Royce could compete---though it probably wouldn't win---it's just not engineered that way (like the AS brain is not wired to act like a NT). We could take the Rolls-Royce to the garage and make modifications to its engine, and maybe give it some racing stripes. It might perform better---but it would still be a Rolls-Royce under the hood---even though it was modified.

I view us in the same way. But with enough work to that Rolls-Royce, perhaps it could win a race against the "born to be" race cars. I have to admit that I believe anything is possible these days. Not to change the subject, but it reminds of the story in the news yesterday---a woman with a damaged face has just received the first face transplant!! ! A plastic surgeon placed the face of a deceased woman onto her---and now it should heal as her own face if her body doesn't reject it.

As I said before, I respect all of your opinions on this manner. But I am going to remain content on the autistic spectrum. I have Asperger's, and I don't plan on getting rid of it. The beauty of this discussion as I see it so far lies in the ability of us to express our opinions on this matter while respecting both sides of the discussion.

I'd like something to calm my oversensitive/hyper-sensitive mind and senses. A non-addictive tranquilizer [and also anticonvulsant] would be a good start (which doesn't have the CNS damaging potential of long-term benzodiazepine use).

This above is a symptom of my autism, and it's one that causes pain. My somewhat severe impairment in reciprocal social interaction doesn't bother me.

I dub this thread the X-Men 3 thread, as that is where it constantly seems to be going.

If ignorance of "what is meant by a "cure"" is what is the result of the "Irrationality, fear, antagonistic aggression, culture ... of exclusion and isolation" of AS who don't want a cure, then you can make it all go away by relieving us of the ignorance.

Instead of streaming demeaning, sneering language at AS people who don't want a cure, why don't you simply explain and relieve that ignorance?

What is meant by a "cure"?

Again, it's not the topic of the thread that is offensive, but the demeaning, belittling way AS people are referred to in them.

It is as if the low-self esteem and personal self-hate of the individual who wishes they weren't AS comes out in how the talk about others who don't want a cure, I.e. directing at others the same kind of low language behavior to refer to other AS that they have in their own head's self-talk. You may hate your own AS but don't use the belittling language to project disrespect for others' AS.

"Irrationality, fear, antagonistic aggression; these are all the markings of a culture built out of exclusion and isolation, rather than one of reaffirming some identity" is not constructive language, nor is accusing others of pathological ignorance. We get it, we are scum. We should all commit suicide because we have AS.

Particularly when you don't offer any enlightening information to relieve us of our hateful ignorance.

Unfortunatly the easiest cure for anything of a genetic nature is to eleminate the gene. Same thing with aids, If noone had aids, aids wouldn't be a problem, and like genetics, eleminate the people with aids. But that is called genocide and we all know genocide is wrong, so we spend billions of dollars every year on research into some things that could be use to purge something from a population en masse, but, even with a disorder like autism, we still call it a "cure" when it hits that point. Unfortunatly, if such a cure comes about, it would probably be similar to the plot of xmen 3 what would happen within the community of people under the spectrum. Some of us want it, others do not, and there would be a group trying to force onto the entire "afflicted" group. But as I said earlier, to force a cure that makes "inferior" people normal onto them is almost just as bad as using genocide to eliminate the thing.

I probably should have put this earlier on: What is the first thing people do when they develope a cure for something? Anser: Try to eliminate it. Example: Smallpox. Smallpox was eliminated because of its undesirable effect. Another more genetic example: The Holocaust was an attempt to rid the world of inferior genetics, and how would a cure for an autistic spectrum disorder be any different, apart from it would either be from legal abortion of disabled children or medicating them to the point that they are "normal". I am not trying to be offensive with the Holocaust reference, I am just using a strong example to make a point, please don't take offence to that.

Yes, it is true, that is one way to appear NT, is to build the skills and integrate it into your own mind.

But to become truly NT, in the sense of having a real-time social mind, you run into "bandwidth" problems. We are all limited by cognitive bandwidth. We can only process so much information at a certain rate, and integrate it into memory and procedural memory fetches and real time execution of an online "personality". All the routines that support external interaction, moreover, are loaded with sensorimotor process time limitations, or windows in time where certain sensorimotor processes are designed by nature to hook into (say) a speech process so that speech can happen. If timing is off, like the tongue doesn't form shapes so we can make sounds within the window of time that we have to create a syllable, the word gets mangled. The timing and coordination of our selves, and how we interact with the external world, is very complex and very sophisticated. In order to run the system, our brains are essentially self-programming, adaptive computers with distributed processing centers.

One limitation that affects social function is bandwidth. Because of all the tight timing and close coordination needed to run the machine and process all the information, we can only process a certain amount of external information at a time. Yet, social interaction involves a lot of abstract information and heavy processing that is very fluid and real time. How do you add social interaction to a system that is so complex without running out of bandwidth?

I have a theory. That is basically that pack animals and humans have developed identity and personality functions that enable them to have a firewall between the outside world and their backend processing. They don't interact with direct, immersive reality in the way non-pack animals (say, cats or AS people) do. They interact with personality and identity functions and these functions mediate both social skills execution and the flow of information from the outside world. An extra stage, like a filter. It is a kind of recognition system design that has the identity and personality as "agents" mediating with the outside world.

I.e. NT's don't deal with a direct, objective reality as we do. They live in and through their identities and personalities, and through these maintain low-bandwidth connections to external sensory experiences. This is why their egos are so important to them, because their egos is now they define the world and their place in it. Their egos and their personalities and identities are the boats with which they navigate through life.

All you really have to do is spend a lot of time with deep neuropsychological training on how to develop certain jumpers and "wire" in low level cognitive behaviors you have trouble with, spend a lot of time training on social skills and the thinking behaviors of people, and then transfer the seat of consciousness from the AS immersive reality into living through your world of Ego and use that to connect to other people.

I did that when my mother was dying of cancer, because she was having a really hard time and I was at the stage in my developmental experiments where I could attempt something like that. Before she died, she told me I was "so much better" and that it was as if I had been "locked away inside myself" my whole life.

But I was never "locked away inside myself". I was always there, with her. It was just before I never knew how to see what she needed to hear from me in order to value the things I said. By connecting to her through Ego mind, I was simply able to see, for the first time, that she needed to see and hear certain things from me, and I supplied her with those things to make her happy. But I was always there, with her, as a child, never "locked away". She was just not in a place where she could see that I was there.

Leaving a mind that exists in an immersive, objective reality and moving into a world of Ego and identity and personality isn't something that I liked. Maybe it's something others would do -- destroy the mind that you have in order to learn how to be and say things that others recognize as important. I can leave the mind of AS and shoehorn my mind into the mind of Ego, but why? The minds of NTs aren't better minds, just different. And they are not suited to me.

The fact that I prefer myself as an AS, that I prefer the mind of AS to the mind of NT, doesn't mean that I'm ignorant, xenophobic, fearful, hateful or militant. Those are the words of someone who hates his/her AS, and themselves for having it.

Edited to add: The stuff I learned has not gone away... I am just not using it. Presumably, if I ever had to think like an NT again, I could do it again. But there's nothing there that is worth staying in the world dominated (mediated) by my identity and personality functions (Ego). All the things I like to do and think about are in my AS mind. I would not trade that to be "popular" and socially appreciated. And someone who ceases to be himself and herself just to be popular and socially appreciated, is not going to find what they are seeking because there is nothing meaningful at the end of that shallow rainbow.

Last edited by ephemerella on 18 Dec 2008, 11:18 am, edited 1 time in total.

a crowd of Aspies! Just think of it, a of Aspies. . . and united enough to have an opinion on a non existant situation ( a cure) Ad to take a united stand on it enough to be known as a anti-cure crowd.

I think some people are just making it up things to be huffy about and to feel superior to.

( I love dangling participles!)

Merle

I take exception to being told that I do not understand what is meant by cure. While I support therapeutic treatment and support, the nature of the cure itself leaves me with a lot of questions and concerns. Are we looking at the "cure" model brought about with testing for Down's Syndrome? If so, then I am vehemently against such a cure and would fight against it. If we are looking a whole and complete treatment that allowed individuals who chose such a change to seek a life more suited to their desires? That is a principle I can support, even if it is not something that I would choose for myself. Your declaration of my ignorance on the basis that I do not seek a cure is a sad generalization, and I take some offense at your implications.


M.