im willing to take the cure IF and ONLY IF

Post Reply New Topic

only one of those is part of being an aspie, the logical thinking,

but if there was a cure for aspergers, youd be an idiot not to take it, don't kid yourself into thinking that being an aspie is a good thing, it aint, just think of all that p**** you would get if you were cured

You can't cure something that's not a disease, or an illness.

I'd never take it. Even if it cured only the negative symptoms.

Some symptoms can be both positives and negatives at the same time. Others can be a positve at one point and a negative at another.

And even if something was purely negative, could you definitively distinguish it from a neutral or positive symptom?

What's negative to a NT might be a positive to an Aspie. So you can't really get rid of AS without seriously violating who a person is, and taking away positives as well.

I would never be cured, because I honestly don't think it's a bad thing. It's part of who I am. Parts are good, parts are bad, and of course it can sometimes make things dificult, but that in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I don't want to end up, like the other females in my family, thank you. That's why I wouldn't take the cure.

I hope that, if I am cured or not, I will never think of other women as 'p****'.

I will never take a cure... PERIOD.

Aspies would say they have enough p**** already anyway,then again,can never have too many.

The funny thing is, the only way they could create a practical cure is just that. People seem to think that the NT world hates us because we're too special, advanced, above them.... I'd argue that this position people have comes from all the things NT's can see that they themselves can't or can't accept. I think in the end if you did change, it might just be because that sense of social justice would expand so far that you'd be constantly seeing things in the social plane that would really infuriate you - even more than now. Lots of NT's have our way of thinking and a lot of our gifts as well, they just don't have the sensory problems or social/coordination issues to make them correlate their own personalities or strengths as being something autistic (which they shouldn't and I wish a lot of people on the spectrum wouldn't either).

Actually, there are consistent autistic strengths that show up in the research over and over again. See another post I made, referencing those repeatedly with sources. They are not illusions and they do not exist to make autistic people feel better about ourselves, they're part of the reality of what autism seems to be.

My own guess is this - when and if they do find a cure it will mostly have to do with enhancing brain plasticity, giving us mental exercises to enlarge or strengthen certain brain regions or connections, and any drugs that would be involved would, IMO, have to be nootropic (nootropics as they are; piracetam, hydergein, pyritinol, picamilon, etc seem to have far fewer side effects than most man-made medications anyway).

I may have spoken too quickly, and you are right that some people have some parts of their minds that have an extremely sharpened level of acuity. Still, a lot of the people who do the most complaining aren't in that position. I know there are a lot of people here who do have those strengths as well.

Truth be told though, I don't know what would happen with that if one was given a cure. For instance, going under the assumption that its some breakthrough discovery in the nootropic class - it may very well strengthen social skill regions and bring them up to par. Then again I don't know whether a person would lose those skills just because long term and short term memory would need to assimilate the brain structures involved in that. I'd think whatever a person's brain at that point decided was its strongest need it would start converting other brain structures that were less needed into working in unison with that to overcome a problem (whether that's a sudden rush of realization just how far behind the eightball someone's life is socially, how much they may want to try and get to know other people or accel in more physically geared hobbies, maybe even just different and more emotionally geared connections to life).

Still, that's a weird scenario to call and its thinking like this - if a person's brain chemistry or resources are stuck at a certain level and pinned down by something too physical to overcome, when the brain rearranges itself by receiving another level of resources, is it a person changing and becoming someone they weren't or is it someone becoming somebody they really always were to begin with but had something physical clamping them down and keeping them from it? For myself the later is how I tend to feel. I've actually experienced that 'out of the bottle' feeling when I tripped or rolled back in my early 20's, I got to know just what I'd be if I could have the mental resources to go 'NT' so to speak and my friends even confirmed what I saw.
It was REALLY liberating, it showed me as well just how much of my own free will over my own life and my own appearance/behavior is eaten up and taken from me, a reality I've had to learn to cope with but I know I'd feel so much better if the person I was on the outside or behaviorally in a lot of ways really was me - in my own case at least this condition doesn't allow that.

The thing is, a lot of the current research suggests that the problems autistic people have in social skills are not from having a deficient "social skills region" in our brains, but from having an entirely different perceptual system that usual that happens to make it more difficult for us to understand typical sorts of social skills, but that also affects all kinds of things in situations that are not social, including our strengths. These strengths are not present in a small number of people, but appear to be there in all or nearly all autistic people, very consistently. If you read the enhanced perceptual functioning paper by Mottron et al, they get into a lot more detail about how this probably works.

But even models that are more deficit-oriented (such as Frith or Happe's models) are saying that it's impossible for autism to be only about social stuff, because of the amount of things that we do differently outside of social situations.

So it'd be hard to take "just the social stuff" out of a broad difference in perception and thinking, and leave the rest.

Its not all about social stuff I know, its the tip of the iceberg and just what people seem to notice more readily.



My thoughts are that if there was a cure, and if it was nootropic in nature, that it would really give you a bit of both - you'd be able to anchor on to other people's emotions, feel where they're coming more readily because you'd have more nerves at your disposal. Due to that, your mind and its perceptual angles as a person on spectrum may stay the same, it may decide to revamp itself in the light of new information and understandings regarding the world around you.

I don't doubt that there are a lot of mechanisms involved with this perceptually that people don't see, I quite often see a lot of weird things in myself. Still, all the values I love and cherish in myself I can see in NT's as readily quite often and a lot of them can see the same angles we can, just that by adapting to their world they're not in that head space as often as it doesn't suite them. So, IMO a cure would only be enhancement of neurology and more mind-over-matter control over our bodies - that sort of freedom is what I've really wanted myself, to choose what I keep and what I don't as well as to choose how I show or manifest what I do keep.

just because you have aspergers doesn't mean you have to act like a little kid, you know what p**** means, so don't like a little kid that giggles when someone says a word, or maybe you are just an idiot and you don't even know what the word p**** means

no thank you.

find a way to cure nt's of their nt-edness.