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turtleoverhare
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06 Aug 2013, 12:51 am

I hope so I hate Asperger's it has single handedly ruined my social life.



benh72
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06 Aug 2013, 1:10 am

There will never be a cure in our lifetime.
If you are only concerned about the impact of autism on your social life you are very lucky.
At your age there is much more support and assistance available to you than there is for those of us diagnosed later in life, and we've had to fight tooth and nail to get to where we are.
Don't concern yourself so much with how to get rid of autism, instead concentrate on working out how to assist you where you have deficits, and build your strengths.
As they say, if life gives you lemons, make lemonade.



turtleoverhare
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06 Aug 2013, 1:13 am

im sick of people just thinking im some loner psycho dude that is negative and that because its bs if only they could see into me... also seems the harder I try to fit in to society the more it failed...



turtleoverhare
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06 Aug 2013, 1:19 am

well I don't exactly get treated like a psycho more like I don't matter like im a ghost nearly



Dannyboy271
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06 Aug 2013, 1:29 am

Though I understand your frustration with the social scene, benh72 is right, try not to see the negative aspects of it, because for now you have aspergers and your going to still have aspergers for a very long time, so the only thing reasonable to do is just work with it! Personally, after I butchered my social life, I decided that there were much more important things for me to do. It's a pretty hard process forgetting everyone and trying to stop being concerned about people in general.

The way I did is was finding something I loved to do. It really ended up doing what I already did my whole life, art and engineering/invention. This may or may not be the same for you, but take something you love to do, or find something, and when you find the right thing, you will literally be able to do it for hours/days/weeks at a time without giving a single thought of the social scene, and your abilities will flourish.

Doing this also increases confidence as you learn more or get better at whatever your passion may be. As a result, it will directly affect your social life. If you are a confident person in the social world, and uphold yourself in the social world regardless of any experience you have in it, and people see you as a weird person, as long as you aren't hurting them in any real way, they will doubt their own dislike and end up trusting your own confidence; thereby making THEM attract to YOU, because most NT's rely on the confidence of others to tell them what is right or wrong. (In a social mentality kind of way.)

If your unconfident and people think your weird, then people will see that, and just won't like you. If your unconfident in your own presentability, people mirror that and end up disliking YOU because you dislike you.

Now... personally I see the social scene as a big superficial game. After I butchered my social life, I reallized what I was wasting my time on, decided to act however I wanted wherever I wanted (Though I was mindful of others.) and people suddenly thought I was an interesting or cool person.

Weird how it works, but I think aspergers is much more than your giving it credit for.



Dannyboy271
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06 Aug 2013, 1:47 am

You said that the more you try to fit into society the more you failed, which is perfectly correct. The social game doesn't need any more people to succumb to it, as there's plenty of that. What people want to see is originality and people who are willing to provide the confidence that society doesn't have.
The common "follower" follows he or she who is positive they know what they are doing, and when they don't get that, they just follow what they see around them because they want to belong, and are afraid to be wrong. This is what a social clique basically is.

In us with aspergers, basically we somewhat have the same need, but we don't see what everyone else is doing, or what is considered socially acceptable, which is WHY;;;;

We don't fit in.

So people push us away because they''ve created social bubbles founded on rules of what is okay and not okay, and when you violate these rules, and try to enter the bubble, they agressively try to remove you.

To basically undermine all this, you have to present yourself as the fulfillment of the orignal need that founded these cliques. --> A leader.

The leader must be confident in themselves, and their decisions, and never think twice about whether they are right or wrong in front of the group, thus giving the group a higher sense of moral and making them feel they're in the right place, or following you is what is going to make them happy/accepted.

Confidence is what gives you an identity. It's what makes you ignore the next mans decisions, and what makes you stand out- but in a good way.

Anyway... yeah.

A leader doesn't have to actively lead, but their own confidence is what makes people do what they do, and go where they go. Nobody will officially give you the title of "leader" you'll just know when people think your cool for seemingly no reason.



Last edited by Dannyboy271 on 06 Aug 2013, 1:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

nominalist
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06 Aug 2013, 1:51 am

I assume that there will be one or more cures eventually. A lot of scientists are working on the issue.


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qawer
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06 Aug 2013, 4:17 am

The big issue with finding a cure is that it's a hardwiring difference, not just a temporary condition.

With AS your brain is from birth completely differently wired. Were you a computer, it would not be enough to just reinstall the operating system, you would have to change the hardware of the computer. And then it would no longer be you, right?

It's such a fundamental part of who you are that you cannot just "erase it and put some social skills in there instead". I don't believe that to ever be possible.



turtleoverhare
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06 Aug 2013, 4:36 am

nominalist wrote:
I assume that there will be one or more cures eventually. A lot of scientists are working on the issue.


stay positive I believe as well



lucious
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06 Aug 2013, 4:56 am

It's largely genetic. until we have massive breakthroughs in gene therapy, i doubt it.


anyway, I wouldnt want to be relieved of the benefits of aspergers. The only difficulties are social, and socialising is a lower order cognitive function. I wouldnt trade my proclivity for science and logic in for the world.



DynamiteMonkey
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06 Aug 2013, 6:44 am

Somebody wants you to change just to fit in with their ridiculous rules? Forget them. They're not worth it. Im never accepting a cure, because there is nothing to cure, just the attitudes of other people.



CockneyRebel
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06 Aug 2013, 8:01 am

I hope not. I don't want any NT authority forcing the cure on me. My parents tried to raise the autism out of me and that's why the thought of a cure is a sensitive button for me.


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Last edited by CockneyRebel on 06 Aug 2013, 9:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

Pondering
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06 Aug 2013, 8:50 am

There's probably an Autistic person in a labcoat dying for a cure, located in their basement lab, fixing it up right now.
Image


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turtleoverhare
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06 Aug 2013, 9:17 am

DynamiteMonkey wrote:
Somebody wants you to change just to fit in with their ridiculous rules? Forget them. They're not worth it. Im never accepting a cure, because there is nothing to cure, just the attitudes of other people.


Actually yes you're pretty much right.



Jonov
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06 Aug 2013, 9:33 am

I rather see people working harder on actual acceptance of autistic people in society, while working on a "cure" ( or whatever that means) in the background.
There needs to be way more education for parents to understand their children and for professionals to understand their patients, so we can work towards better school settings and workplaces for the current generations of autistic people, rather than trying to find a cure for the next 150-200 years while forgetting about the people who actually have autism right now.

I'd like to see less making a magic pill research and more experimental therapy research, but that's just my 2 cents.

Just imagine the consequences if we find out 50 years from now we cannot cure autism, and all those valuable people have fallen trough the cracks, because we were too busy doing something more important than actually caring about their lives.

A lot of people who made a difference in certain fields of industry are / were autistic, and a cure would most likely be enforced upon the entire generation of children that grows up while the cure has been created, all the Temple Grandin's of that generation lost forever because we couldn't work towards fitting them in because they were too strange, all that knowledge lost, all that logic vanished because it came in a "damaged" package.



Callista
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06 Aug 2013, 10:16 am

No. There will never be a cure for autism.

Here's why:

To create a cure, we would have to know the genetic basis for autism. When we know the genetic basis for autism, a prenatal test will be developed that would allow autistic fetuses to be aborted. When that happens, funding for cure will vanish. This is a known pattern: When a prenatal test is found, research for cure stops.

Secondly. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder. Autistic brains are different from neurotypical at every level, microscopic and macroscopic. Your brain, and the way it connects, is YOU--your memories, your personality. To change that at such a global level, to remove the autistic connections and add in neurotypical ones, would also erase all your memories, all your skills, all of your personality traits. You would end up with a blank brain, a second infancy, and a neurotypical person wearing your face. If a person is the sum of the information stored in their brain, then to change an autistic person to a neurotypical one would be like killing the autistic person and letting the NT grow in their place.

We do not have the technology to change the brain at that level. We probably never will, at least not in our lifetimes. It may be possible with nanotechnology, but by the time that is possible, it will also be possible to do things like copy yourself from one brain into another. At that point we'll have more trouble than just the question of whether to cure autism.

But long before that, autism will be addressed by a prenatal test and widespread eugenic abortion. There will always be autistic people, because quite a few people won't get tested or won't abort just because their child might become autistic. But there will be fewer of us. Unless, that is, we can impress on the world that being autistic is okay--that aborting someone because they're autistic is about as bad as aborting because they're a girl.

The focus on a cure really hurts autistic people. If we sit around wanting a cure, we aren't living our lives. We let people tell us that we can't really live until we're magically NT. The focus on a cure means that therapy tries to normalize children instead of teaching them useful things. It causes people to devalue themselves for being disabled, as though disability were shameful. We can be happy just as we are, but the belief that a cure is a prerequisite for happiness will block us from even understanding that the possibility of happiness exists.


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