Leave the pro-cure groups alone

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Which cure are we talking about? The non-existant magic pills? Or the non-existant prenatal test followed by abortion?

I'd rather have my AS traits than be social. I socialize on my own terms. People either love me or hate me. They can take me or leave me. I don't need someone else telling me how to live my own life. If I am not to someone else's standards, they can just go get lost. I'll hang out with people who matter and accept me for who I am.

Curbies and Psychos have made themselves rich doing nothing. Scams, frauds, fakes, and snake oil.

The Scientific view, but only for the educated, is it cannot be cured or eradicated.

It can be studied, aided, developed, for it is the rich end of thought. It does come with good and bad, but getting rid of inventors, IT, accounting, music, writers, painters, and other places we are found would not be good for the world.

It does seem to be a European thing, and they are the thinnest bloodline on the planet. Almost all from seven mother lines. losing any genetic material could well end them. The reason it exists is because the gene pool is so shallow. It is also the line that has produced the most technology. I like their art too.

The whole is a body, would you remove a gland you did not understand?

The old Greeks wrote of Autism, and how glad they were to have such people among them.

On April 1 of 2009 Alex is going to buy Autism Speaks, when they are sold on the Court House steps. In this economy they wil not be getting $20,000,000, giving half to research, and partying on the rest.

As soon as the paychecks stop, and the rent is due, they will go back to selling swamp land in Florida.

I don't want to get married. I'm asexual.

Anyway, once you stop wanting to be like everybody else, Asperger's is OK. It's not like the normals don't have problems, too.

Dude... you have 9221 posts over 11 months. I only have a couple thousand-something over nearly three years, and autism is one of my obsessions, as in eat/sleep/breathe obsessions... autism's probably a big part of your identity, from how much time you spend here. I'm not putting you down for it. It's kinda like a fish doesn't think about water much, y'know? Actually, IMO, it probably does mean you're comfortable with it, just because you're not constantly aware that you're thinking about it... it's just part of your life in a matter of fact kind of way.

That's the problem I have with the "cure" right now. Many of the so-called cures for autism are ineffective at best and others are outright abusive and dangerous, such as chelation and ABA. If I was growing up now I no doubt would have been subjected to that kind of crap, and I though I had it bad with inappropriate treatments I got such as Prozac, "special schools" and occupational therapy. It's even worse when you factor in the higher percent of those diagnosed as autistic, many who would have not been labeled even a generation ago. Back then those who would now be labeled as autistic were left alone and most of them did perfectly fine without "treatments" or "interventions". Even if they had what would be called "abnormal" behavior today, there was no urgency to "cure" them. Nowadays anyone who is the least bit different in their development such as late-talkers are systematically labeled and pigeonholed into special ed and subject to "early intervention" to attempt to make them "normal", which anyone with a fully functioning brain should know will just not work. Everyone including parents, the schools, and society in general need to learn to except others for who the are instead of trying to change or "fix" them.

Anyway this whole cure thing sounds a lot like this memorable film.

And there is one more thing. Many of the greatest minds we have known belong to those who would be called "autistic" today. This includes scientists, inventors, writers, composers, and a whole lot of those who enable to live the way we do today. Without those brilliant minds we'd all most likely still be living in caves. That just makes the prejudice against those with "abnormal" brains even worse. They certainly were not in need of a cure. Humanity owes much more to autism and it should not be viewed as a "tragedy" or a "disease", except possibly in its most severe form but that only makes up a relatively small portion of the entire community.

What exactly are these folks trying to cure? anything/anyone not NT? Who gets to decide? Personally, I don't want my AS cured. Neither would a LOT of other folks, including NTs, if they knew what we have because of Aspies.

San Jose would be a small suburb if it weren't for Aspies. Redmond would still be a quaint little place where everybody rides a bike and traffic flows smoothly on 520 and 405. That's just a small, though significant, part of life thanks to Aspies.

Meanwhile, I must seriously question the motives of those seeking a "cure" for any form of autism. The name of the group may be Autism Speaks, but they no speaks for me.

They'll generally go for rhetoric something like this:

"But you can't know what it's like for those LFA people who can't communicate! They're way worse off than you; you can't speak for them! Since you can communicate, your viewpoint is obviously invalid, because you aren't severe enough to know how horrible their lives are; and since they can't communicate, we must speak for them and save them from their tragedy."

Yeah, double standard. Assume their lives are horrible because you can't know what their lives are like; assume that they want a cure because you don't know what they want. What else is new?

I've also gotten, "But you don't know what it's like to be the parent of an autistic child". Don't get me started on that one.

No.

It never ceases to amaze me how people can actually believe that autism isn't a disorder. Autism is the epitome of a mental disorder. Ever looked at a person with LFA before? I'd call that pretty ****ing disordered. Sorry, but I fail to see how not being able to speak and suffering from extreme sensory overload are positives. Sure, maybe if they could speak they'd tell us they like being so dysfunctional that they can never live independent lives. But I get the feeling that most people in this world find the prospect of living a successful life with a family and career just a wee bit more appealing than living their lives with all the symptoms and consequences associated with full blown autism.

Saying we shouldn't try to cure autism because it's a "difference" is like saying we shouldn't cure schizophrenia because it's "just a difference". I mean, schizophrenics may be extremely debilitated but they also tend to be very creative people, so why should we cure them? Many of them don't want to be cured, namely the paranoid ones, why should we force that on them?

And saying " I don't want my autism cured" is a very selfish reason to be against a cure. What about the people who do want a cure? What about LFAs where the difference between a cure and not having a cure is their entire quality of life?

Again, I really can't believe how people can be against a cure for something like autism. I think it really goes to show how much some people rely on their AS/HFA diagnosis to feel good about themselves (I'm sure we've all seen the "I'm superior to NTs because I'm different" philosophy espoused on these forums at least once).

Then leave us alone, and stop asking us dont you want to be cured and junk like that

*shrug*

Roe vs. Wade happened a long, long time ago. A lot of us had the potential to be destroyed at our mother's whims. Just because autistic fetuses could be identified doesn't mean that they'd be aborted. There are still women who keep downs syndrome babies. I know that my mother would have kept me and I'd keep a fetus on the spectrum.

Even though I'm pro-choice and hate kids.

Plenty of people labeled LFA are against cures. Actually, it's kind of funny... so far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority on this site, just like the Aspies with jobs and families, don't want cures.

We aren't saying "don't cure autism because it isn't a disability". That's bull; we all know it's a disability for some people, even for many Aspies. (Like me, incidentally, and I don't want a cure. Latest GAF is 55 on a 100 point scale, so that'd make me "moderate" at that particular point in time.) And only a very few say that Aspies are superior--a viewpoint that's just as bigoted as saying NTs are superior.

The problem is that when you look to change somebody into a "normal person" (or change LFA to Aspie) is that you're ignoring who they are in favor of making them look more normal. You're ignoring whether they're happy or comfortable, what they want, their personalities... their minds. You're forcing normality, in most cases at the expense of function and individuality.

When you try to turn an autistic into a normal person, you end up with a neurotic, possibly brain-injured or physically ill, autistic person. Focus on normality, and you lose every opportunity you get to actually teach something useful.

There are lots more important things than "normal". One of which is being allowed to be who you are, learn the way you were meant to learn, communicate in the way that's easiest for you, look as odd as you need to look... When you try to make an autistic person "normal", you sacrifice a lot of what makes them who they are. That's just plain abusive.

Why do we not want a cure even though autism is a disability? Because taking autism means changing us into different people.... and because a cure, even theoretically, would mean sacrificing our strengths and our unique ways of seeing the world... the person at the end wouldn't be the same person you started with. To cure an adult autistic, you would have to change the brain so completely that it would make a lobotomy look like a minor procedure. Autism is how our brains are made, not something you can just detach and leave a person intact.

Just because *some* DS kids are born (even if something like 80-90% of the rest are aborted), doesn't mean that it was right to do this. Same thing with regards to the prevention of AS kids. Especially since so many people get the idea (largely from organizations like Autism Speaks and media articles) that autism is such a devastating tragedy.

And why is it that daily living skills and speech are supposed to be the be-all and end-all of autistic quality of life? Even someone with a lot of disability stereotypes doesn't generally question the quality of life of a wheelchair-user (who may share many of the barriers as an autistic person without accommodation or assistance) to the degree as an autistic person, even though autistic people have measured intelligence all across the board.

As far as autism being disorder, disability, whatever word you use, I agree it's a disability; heck I'm being assessed for vocational services for independent living (but they have to get me to go to a freaking neuropsych. even though I had a report at my school).

Just because *some* DS kids are born (even if something like 80-90% of the rest are aborted), doesn't mean that it was right to do this. Same thing with regards to the prevention of AS kids. Especially since so many people get the idea (largely from organizations like Autism Speaks and media articles) that autism is such a devastating tragedy.

And why is it that daily living skills and speech are supposed to be the be-all and end-all of autistic quality of life? Even someone with a lot of disability stereotypes doesn't generally question the quality of life of a wheelchair-user (who may share many of the barriers as an autistic person without accommodation or assistance) to the degree as an autistic person, even though autistic people have measured intelligence all across the board.

As far as autism being disorder, disability, whatever word you use, I agree it's a disability; heck I'm being assessed for vocational services for independent living (but they have to get me to go to a freaking neuropsych. even though I had a report at my school). (I see Callista covered things well.)

I think that you are right, I recall one "cure" for autism which is gamma knife radiosurgery. I saw a photo of one man being got ready for the "treatment" and I recall thinking that the man looked to me like the condemed man getting ready for his depature from this moral plane.

While the big gamma dose to part of this brain might make him seem more normal, I suspect that he will not just lose the autism & AS but change in other ways. I also think that after living for many years with autism & AS the man will have a great deal of trouble adjusting to being NT even if the "cure" is able to make him NT.

The other problem is that what is normal. Does Callista or another of the others have an idea of what is normal and healthy.

It might be possible to get data for the "average" woman. She might own X handbags, have X kids, have sex X times a month,, read X books a month, own X cars in her life etc etc etc but just becuase a different woman owns Y handbags, have Y kids, have sex Y times a month, read Y books a month, own Y cars in her life etc etc does not make her abnormal. Even if Y is so different to X that (X-Y) > 3 ESD it does not mean that she is abnormal all it means is that the woman has a significant difference from the norm.

You can do the same thing for a man, just becuase (X-Y) > 3 ESD does not mean he is abnormal.