'the Autism Scam' Video

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Okay, probably... but I stand by what I wrote, because the videographer did a piss-poor job of documenting that example and anyone would naturally find it contradictory.

And why would anyone want to be cured? Why should I want to give up my special interests, my perceptions, everything that makes me me or my life worth living, just to participate in vapid, pointless interaction with people I don't even like? Hah! I can learn to not be a social ret*d without destroying my whole mind.

I think they're saying Asperger's is a scam to fake being autistic in order to get money, sympathy or attention.

Im always getting confused by this notion of cure.

Many people keep saying that it means that all the negative factors are destroyed while the individuals personality is completely changed, while others say that it is with regards to having treatment, ie for social anxiety, speech and language therapy etc

The thing is if people say they don't want it for fear of changing your personality, then couldn't you argue that your personality changes everyday, at least to some degree? Each and every experience you receive is likely to impact you in some way. It may only be negligible or temporary but it still affects and changes your perspective.

So even therapy changes your personality, and diverts you to a different "life path" compared to what you would have led if you didn't have it.

So in conclusion Im starting to think its wrong to just have this one word "cure" as it is often being misintepreted to mean something else. Which is where at least some of the conflict arises from between various autism groups.

Of course if somebody wanted to take a drug which would completely overhaul their personality and almost make them into a new person then that is upto them; though they should be the ones who make the choice.

However personally i feel treatment for those parts of autism which negatively affect people is the way forward. This could include social interactions with people. As a result people could have treatment for social anxiety, education to learn how to be more "socially appropriate", maybe learn how to deal with a bit of small talk, and education.
These are available, though maybe not so much in some areas, and imo more investment should be invested in these sorts of things rather than a "magic injection.

Sorry for going off on some tangents, and even though some of it may not make sense, or not really be anything to do wwith the topic, I hope at least some of it is useful and readable!

Don't mind him he's just a fat "educated" pundit, has the same credientials as Limbaugh, and Beck.

There is autism and there is intellectual ability. They are not related. If there was such a measurement as a "Social quotient" which would be an analog to IQ, an autistic would have a very low number and an NT would have a high number. But an IQ is independent of SQ. Thus a CURE for autism would only improve the SQ and wouldn't affect any other quality of the person.

I certainly am getting sick and tired of situations like me saying something innocuous to someone (like "good morning") and then having them yell at me as though I had mutilated their firstborn child and made spaghetti out of his intestines. Or people avoiding me because I am odd.

There currently is no such thing as a cure for autism, but I would definitely get it if a true cure was ever developed.

+1

The problem with Autism and AS (like has been with other disorders) is that there will always be people willing to claim something that isn't true to get something for nothing, and the bad actors come from many directions.

* Government programs get funding based on how much work they do/money they spend. These government agencies will often do what is not in their client's best interest if doing so would result in a loss of funding and possible unemployment of staff. Welfare does not solve poverty because if it ever did, the welfare worker would be out of a job.

* People too lazy to be responsible for themselves will find ways to get stuff for free.

* People too lazy to be responsible parents will want easy excuses to explain why their kids are so screwed up.

The "explosion" of autism and AS can not be the result of real autism and AS cases. A good share of it might be the result of accidental or deliberate misdiagnosis done for a variety of reasons. That unqualified people are allowed to diagnose kids with conditions (school system) is a major part of the problem. Young boys are very energetic and by nature won't sit still in class unless you give them plenty of play time to burn off the excess energy and a willingness to discipline them when they can't behave when it's called for. Well, the schools have all but eliminated recreation for kids and won't discipline them. They treat boys and girls the same even though educators for centuries knew they weren't the same. So, when boys misbehave, the slap the ADD or ADHD label on and force the kid on meds he likely doesn't need....and that label is very destructive for future opportunities in life. The Dx is not given based on long observation and testing by competent professionals...it is often applied by someone with (if you're lucky) minimal training.

The criticism of AS is somewhat deserved. How many parents who are lousy disciplinarians want to say, "my kid has AS and can't help himself" to explain the public temper tantrums? Worse than that, if the kids doesn't have AS and is led to believe he does have it, so much potential is wasted because he doesn't pursue the life he could have if only he was taught some self-control.

I believe I have AS even though I am not formally Dxed. My parents were fairly strict. I was always an odd child, but I was given a fair share of spankings for acting out, and if I do have AS, it certainly was not so pronounced that I didn't learn it was better to suppress my inclinations to avoid a whipping than act out whenever an idea popped into my head. I grew up looking rather NT, but I almost never had friends, never fit in, never got ahead, and no matter how hard I tried to be like everyone else, I never could be. That's why I believe I have AS...it explains why I consistently fail to be like "normal" people in spite of how hard I try (and, yes, I have many of the noted symptoms...thankfully I learned to compensate for many of them).

The whole "accept me" in the AS community (in my opinion) stems from the fact that most of us have really tried to be "normal" and can't. We put on our NT masks to try and blend in (for what good it does) and maybe we get a little bit back from life, but we are never fully accepted. There is no magic pill that will make us NT, and after a certain age (I can safely say 35-40 is where it lies), if there was a "cure" it would do little to improve our quality of life. For people like us, we want acceptance because a little goes a long way. We are as decent a lot of people as the average group of NTs, but we are dismissed because we don't fit in. We don't ask for permission to have fits in public, but we ask that for those of us who are prone to it in spite of efforts to keep it from happening, please don't reject us for something that is truly beyond our control.

I would not condone an atmosphere of "acceptance" that requires the autistic to make no effort to "fit in" with NTs. The "acceptance" must be a two-way street. They become tolerant of our "quirks" and we try to put on an acceptable public face as best we can.

Now, for the classic case of autism, I can't see how we could argue "acceptance" versus a "cure." Many autistic people are trapped by their condition. Modern technology might give them a more effective way to communicate with others, but it's like being in a wheelchair and having a surgery that would enable you to walk and run like anyone else. Who would not want to have that freedom?

I think I disagree with your point in bold.

If you're post was in response in mine then i wasn't really talking about intellectual ability directly. I was more talking about the personality/behavioural traits of the individual.

For instance I'd like to take the point of when i received speech and language therapy when i was about 4. Since receiving it i have learnt to talk verbally to other people, i have developed social skills, okay they're not perfect but i can get by just about, i have made some friends, i have learnt to become more independent, i have gained a sense of humour (at least to some extent), i have gained special interests from people teaching/showing me them, and have since gone to universtiy, and now could get a job.

Now lets look on the other hand. Lets say I wasn't able to get the speech and language therapy when i was younger.
I probably would have ended up at a specialeducation school in my local area. I wouldn't have had the same friends who would have taught me about things which would have given me special interests. I wouldn't have had the same types of friends who taught me about sarcasm. I probably wouldn't have had the same education, and therefore not necessarily learnt the same things. I probably wouldn't have had the same opporunities to become independent, and may have ended up not being able to attend uni or get the same job which i could now get.

I hope that clears it up a little

So therefore if I get "cured" like through an injection which makes me more socially acceptable I believe it is very likely to lead me down a different path with different experiences and therefore develop differnt psychological personality traits than if i didn't get "cured".
I think that was the point i was trying to make

Caged savage topic

Mikey is yesterday's news. He is a Sham. Shame. And his father was right. Still a FOOL.

I'd rather keep my special interests and unique personality traits, than be cured. I also think that video is as bad, as the stupid one, that Autism Speaks has made, in 2006. I hope those kids are okay. Michael Savage should take an autistic pill for a day, to see that autism is real. You don't yell to a kid who's having a meltdown, "Stop crying...be a man...you're acting like a girl...you look like an idiot...stop being an idiot...pull yourself together...be a man!! !" That's just plain verbal, mental and emotional abuse, almost bordering on what I had to go through.

I don't get the scam part - and how the hell does he know that his six-year old wants a "cure" - I doubt a kid understands that term, when most people can't define it. Does a cure mean treatments and therapies to help someone be able to interact with society to the point where their impairment is minimised? Or is it something that seeks to "uncover the hidden NT" underneath the autism? Or is it a genetic test to wipe out autism? etc. I've heard people use the term "cure" to apply to all of these - no wonder there's so much controversy if people can't agree to what they're even fighting over.

As far as Savage goes, he's an ignorant idiot, though sadly people listen to him - I've spend my whole life acting the way I was "supposed to," following all the rules, failing every single time - finding out about AS has given me a way to not be lazy and unproductive because I realise that there's a reason why things don't work for me a standard way. People who want to be irresponsible and lazy will always find something, just because it right now autism is "popular," doesn't make it less real.

Really, no matter how you look at it, the video and it's creator are a confusing, confused, misleading and mislead. I'll give the guy a C+ on this project, but he's only saved from failure by his choice of soundtrack and fine editing.

And this all brings me back to something I have said many times. In the four months that I came out as having AS, I have been ridiculed, insulted, sneered at, and have been exposed to online vitriol much more often and at much higher levels than I have ever experienced in 22 years of being out as gay.

This is a theoretical cure which does not and cannot exist in reality. You're talking about magic here, not real science. Your "SQ" is not some kind of physical quantity that can be raised.

I'm currently doing research in the area of gene therapy (as an undergraduate, but still enough to force me to read a lot of the journals on the topic). Gene therapy could probably cure autism, but only if done during the first three months of pregnancy or possibly, if we made near-miraculous advances, before the age of two years. After that, you'd still end up with autism, and possibly with brain damage too, if you tried it.

(We haven't yet perfected gene therapy for even simple conditions. This is probably twenty to fifty years in the future because of how complex a disorder autism is, though it is highly unlikely to ever be actually implemented. See below.)

I've also studied neurology a lot; and it has become quite obvious to me that, with all the physical differences between autistic and non-autistic brains, it's almost certainly impossible to turn an autistic person over the age of five or so into a non-autistic one without changing their brain and personality to the point that they would essentially become infants again, and have to re-learn everything. They probably wouldn't have any memories of their former lives, nor retain any of the skills or knowledge. The actual mechanism you'd use to restructure the brain is something we haven't discovered yet; and that's a good thing, because it could also be used to turn an NT into a genius, a homosexual into a heterosexual (at least partly), or a regular brain into a savant one, or to cure many TBIs, cerebral palsy, and Alzheimer's. We probably won't have this technology for a few hundred years yet, if ever. The human brain is that complex.

Realistically, the idea of changing an adult autistic into an NT will never become reality, because what we'll discover before gene therapy is a a way to do prenatal screening. Autism detected in the fetus would be grounds for abortion for about 90% of pregnant women, if the abortion rates for Down's are anything to go by. Genetic testing of the parents is also becoming more popular, and more inexpensive, so that it's not even necessary to abort a pregnancy, just to use sperm selection to fertilize the right egg with the right sperm so that the autistic fetus doesn't exist to begin with.

With a genetic test available, autism research will go to a standstill. We know this because research for most other genetic disorders with genetic tests available has decreased quite dramatically. It is very, very unlikely that there will ever be a cure for autism, because when people can just get tested before they have their children, they'll stop there. When they've had a genetic test for twenty years, and all the autistics aren't cute little kids anymore; when genetic testing is possible and common; when anyone who has an autistic child has them by choice, there won't be any more funding for autism cures.

I'm sorry, I couldn't hear Mike screaming because the Twelve Monkeys theme was stuck in my head.

Da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-da-da-dum!

Here is the thing, and my son by age 11 had already figured it out: if you have a cure, it not only changes the parts you don't like about being AS (the social ret*d part, as you say) but also will change the things you do like about being AS (for my son, the unique way of thinking). NT's do not think the way AS do, and it is the unique thinking that allows so many AS to contribute to the world as inventors and thinkers. Do all AS have those gifts? No, no more than all NT's are gifted socially. But despite all the social issues my son has faced, he can already see the gifts his AS gives him and, no, if the cost to becoming social is to lose those gifts - and all indications are that it would be - he won't take it. He is very clear about that; he loves the moments he gets to shine, and he attributes those to his unique brain wiring. It's all connected. Being "cured" will carry a cost. Some are willing to pay that cost perhaps because their gifts have not brought them enough positive in this life; others, not. But I don't think those that say, "I want to stay who I am" are in the minority.

How one's intellectual ability functions is inherently tied to the AS. We're talking beyond IQ or the ability to be a good science student; we're talking an entirely different way of processing information. In a family like mine where there are many high IQ's as well as a real mix of NT and AS, the difference in thinking becomes pretty apparent. My son would lose his primary talent if his brain were re-wired to resemble an AS brain. He would still have a high IQ, but his uniqueness - the way he thinks far outside the box - would be gone. The uniqueness comes from the AS, just as Temple Gradin will tell you that hers comes from the AS. I do not think in anything remotely resembling the way my son does, and nor does my daughter, even though we both excel at and are interested in the same subjects are my son. We don't have the ability to move beyond currently reality in the same way he does. The loss would be very, very real. Can I prove it? No, I can't. It's all theory, and it probably always will be, because you'll be hard pressed to find an inventive thinker like my son willing to become the test subject to find out. He absolutely refuses to do anything that will risk the loss of his gifts. He sees the difference between him and the rest of us clearly, and he long ago discovered that only those who are also AS can in any way relate to the way he thinks.

Okay, probably... but I stand by what I wrote, because the videographer did a piss-poor job of documenting that example and anyone would naturally find it contradictory.