I don't wish to be cured.

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Cheers to you CR! I'm right there with you, lady. No cure for me either. Happy Autism Awareness Month to you as well. I think I will make a nice batch of celebratory cupcakes for the occasion

I don't wish for a "cure" in the traditional sense per se and neither does my AS son. However, if there were ways to alleviate some of the social anxiety and inattentiveness that both me and my son share, I would be interested in that. To me, AS is the story of un-even skills. If I could improve the skills in which I myself consider lacking and bring them to the level of the skills I myself consider proficient, then I suppose I could consider myself "cured". Would I be an NT? No, I don't think so, just an Aspie who pays attention and can make small talk.

I believe scientists SHOULD be trying to cure Autism.

1. The vast majority of people with Autism are deprived of the opportunity to experience life as it should be lived (careers, relationships, etc.) - to swim in the ocean of life, not just wade in it. Even if they don't want to do these things they should have the opportunity. And even if they personally aren't suffering too much (as they're unaware of how restrictive their life is) their parents go through hell.

WP represents the VERY mild end of the Autistic spectrum. Most people on here aren't restricted too much (except perhaps socially) and don't consider how much suffering exists across the ENTIRE Autistic spectrum.

My own case is unusual as my Autism was pretty significant at one point (worse than most people on WP), but it's improved so much that I'm now effectively NT. I can tell you from experience that it's MUCH better to be NT than have an ASD. The things that Cockney Rebel and others enjoy about having Aspergers - eccentricities, quirky hobbies, etc. - are NOT things you're banned from enjoying if you're NT. I'm sure there are plenty of NTs who attend the annual Battlestar Gallactica convention, or whatever, dressed in silly costumes!

2. The argument that Autistic people have higher IQs/are more gifted keeps getting peddled, but where is the evidence to support this? Autistics aren't less intelligent (as Autism doesn't effect IQ), but they're not more intelligent either. The notion that Einstein/Mozart/Newton etc. had Autism is just speculation (Mozart, for example, was married and seemingly very extroverted). I've met some extremely intelligent people in my life (including my business partner who has an Oxbridge PhD), and NONE of them have Autism.

If anyone has some actual evidence (not another theory by Simon Baron-Cohen) demonstrating a widespread correlation between Autism and high intelligence I'd love to see it.

Sure, more options are great. But I fear people would never hear of the cons of taking the cure, and I am against treatment taken in ignorance.

WP represents the VERY mild end of the Autistic spectrum. Most people on here aren't restricted too much (except perhaps socially) and don't consider how much suffering exists across the ENTIRE Autistic spectrum.



Not banned, but yet a relatively small weighted percent of the NT population has the quirks that make ASD's somewhat more tolerable. Besides, an NT would just swoon to social pressure 9 times out of 10.

Besides, when you say "better", you are talking in emotional terms. I place far higher value on my intellect than on my abusive, stupid emotions. My better isn't synonymous with "happier".



What about the Autistic Savants? I dislike all the "Newton was an aspie" style speculation, but there are undoubtably a lot of abnormally gifted aspies, with skills not found in the general population.

I think when people make room for those who do want a cure, they shouldn't specify the "functioning level" or other specific traits of said people. Because any kind of autistic person can want a cure, and any kind of autistic person can not want one. It's not just the "aspies" who don't want a cure, and it's not just the "low functioning" who do. (Those categories exist in other people's minds, not mine, but they still have an effect on our lives.)

Personally, there was a time people would have sometimes called me high functioning and now a time when a lot of people call me low functioning, but that's their categories, I don't see myself as having changed in the ways that many people would (all their perceptions are based on a combination of superficial traits and expectations that allow them to ignore certain aspects of my life at their will -- such that I could be very blatantly sensory-seeking, for instance, and not be remembered for it because everyone had a word besides autism they put to it... like "crazy"). But anyway. I do have some pretty severe issues that are autism-related, and I don't want a cure, and I get irritated watching people assume everyone put into the same categories as me would want one. We're as diverse as everyone else, we have as many opinions about autism as there are people (yes, including those who can't use words to communicate, so don't try to make a division there... after some learn to communicate, they say exactly what they were thinking all along and some of them loved being autistic and some of them hated it and most have a mixture of both).

Anyway, I get irritated when people have opinions and then go "except Those People" as if they even understand the variety of people they're putting in that category of "Those People". "Those People" have just as many varied opinions of autism as anyone on this board does (even those who can't conceptualize "autism" still have feelings and internal reactions showing how they feel, even if others can't interpret it). And I get equally irritated when anyone blames their opinion of autism on "functioning level" (regardless of their opinion of it and regardless of their supposed functioning level) because that presumes that people's opinions are decided for us by our autism rather than by our diverse ways of looking at the world and at ourselves. I know a lot of people in the mainstream disability community far beyond autism. And their opinions of themselves (and of whether they want a cure, which believe it or not even many people with purely physical disabilities reject, even if their impairments are severe, autistic people did not invent this concept) have little to do with the severity of their physical conditions. Autism is no different.

Why not? Don't you have freedom of speech?

I wish I knew a good way to get people to stop using "severely autistic" people of any age as rhetorical devices.

I basically agree with Another_Alien. Intelligence as it relates to autism, should be understood as there being a huge disparity among individuals on the spectrum in IQ/functioning levels. Saying that autism is only associated with low or high aptitude wouldn't describe the way it really is.

Viewpoints on cure aren't arbitrary or unrelated to functioning level. I can't help but realize that the really high-functioning who don't want cure don't seem to need a cure, as they have so much aptitude/functioning already. And cure should be understood as bringing mental capacity to someone who didn't have it to start with, to increase ability. Diverse opinions aren't random, and are heavily influenced by the circumstances that are lived under.

Wanting to cure Autism is like wanting to take the wet out of water!! ...or something like that.

I'd describe it as wanting to take the sun out of the sky on an overbearingly stifling day so you could finally breathe easier.

I hate these threads. I'm not pro or anti cure because I find both sides just as annoying.

Sure I have some skills but that won't get me a job. I continuously give up on friends because people irritate me and I don't know how to deal with them. I'm going to live with my mother for the rest of my life even if she drives me crazy. My sensory issues are severe. Most of my issues are misunderstood and I'm told I'm overreacting.
I'll never have the life I want.

I think functioning labels are important. What right has anyone to say that autism shouldn't be cured when they most probably have no experience of having severe autism or raising someone with it? You think it's a good thing to be dependent on people for your whole life? And none of that BS about how no one is truly independent. Those that work and live on their own or in share housing are independent.

Anyway, cure it, don't cure it. I don't care.

I never said they were random. I just said that people of all purported functioning levels have just about every opinion on cure that there is possible, so blaming "functioning level" (which most people do, regardless of opinion on cure) doesn't even close to tell the whole story. Really, what seems to influence these opinions far more than "functioning level", is attitude towards self, attitude towards life, attitude towards disability, and ability or inability to see positives or negatives in a situation (or in autism in particular). You can get five people of roughly the same abilities and five totally different opinions on cure. There's nothing random about it, but attitude causes it a lot more than abilities do, both in autism and in other conditions.

I don't actually believe it's possible to rank autistic people in a line from high functioning people who have no real problems to low functioning people who have nothing but problems. No real problems and nothing but problems are both myths when related to autism, although some people see themselves as either one (but both would not stand up to a more scientific analysis of the person's abilities, as autistic people have both characteristic strengths and characteristic weaknesses -- whether any individual finds that the strengths don't make up for the weaknesses or the weaknesses don't make up for the strengths is another story and has to do with attitude and personality among other things).

In my case, I have a great many difficulties that very few people here have (including when I actually poll people on them, expecting more to have these issues). Professionals in the offline world have regarded me as low functioning or severe, and while I reject these labels, I don't reject them because I consider myself high functioning, I reject them because they're misleading when applied to anyone. I currently am in a situation that's considered a residential program despite having my own apartment, because in addition to regular staff I have surveillance normally used in nursing homes, that allows people to help me at practically any time I need it (this has been used locally to replace roommate situations for people who otherwise need 24-hour care, it also saves money). In real life, I currently cannot speak. Most of the time I can't use typing either, that's something that only happens for a small part of the day most days. Similarly, most of the time I cannot use concepts -- I have to work really hard to get into words and concepts the way I am doing now.

And I don't happen to want a cure. This is certainly not because life is somehow easy for me or because autism causes me no problems. To think such things would be ridiculous. It's because of my particular values, my attitude towards disability, my attitude towards myself, and most of all my feelings. Those things are individual to each person, and those are not random yet they influence these decisions far more than abilities do. (In fact, thinking that abilities are the main or only reason why a person, oneself or others, has made such a decision, is in itself an outgrowth of one particular understanding of disability. So is believing in functioning levels.)

There are other people whose abilities are similar to mine, not in "functioning level" (which is mostly too simplistic to describe autism in any useful way) but in type. And such people may make totally different decisions about cure than I do. I accept this and have no problem with it. My only problem is when people assume that having these difficulties means I must want a cure. And my lack of desire for a cure has nothing to do with my communication abilities, I can say totally honestly that while being unable to communicate is horrible in many ways, it wouldn't make me want to become nonautistic. So please don't tell me that my ability to communicate some of the time affects my decision in any way. It doesn't. If I were in the same mode all of the time that I'm in most of the time, I wouldn't even be able to conceptualize autism or cure, but I know that I wouldn't feel the need for one if I could climb out of it and make such a decision (because I know myself when I am like that, and I can interpret the feelings the right way, something that nobody can do for someone else regardless of which opinion they have).

So I don't like simplistic answers to things like this. And blaming people's attitudes to cure primarily on functioning levels is simplistic, and simply does not look into the many things related to attitude and understanding of disability, that influence people as well (both autistic and nonautistic disabled people). Especially knowing that the first real resistance to cure in the disability community came from people who were considered severely impaired... and that even in the autistic community it also came from people who would not be considered "mild" by most terms (it was really hard to be considered "mild" and diagnosed back then, and definitely AS wasn't in any of the diagnostic handbooks at the time). Many even had low IQs, inability to speak (or speech that cut out all the time), and other things that many people see as markers of "low functioning". That sort of thing couldn't happen if being an "aspie" or having a "high functioning level" (by standard terms) was the main reason for all this opposition to cure.

I doubt that attitude about all those things isn't influenced by their situation within society and relationship with society, and think that their view would be shaped by their consciousness of those things. I don't know how much difference in opinion there is about disability/cure among those of the same abilities, and wonder if it would depend on how thoughtful and informed they've been about the issues, and even on what they think their responsibility as a person is and how they think society should be. When someone experiences a massive disability with its consequences, it seems natural that their attitude towards disability and positives/negatives would be influenced accordingly, as they have to deal with the negatives coming from disability.



Even if scientific analysis wouldn't really clear any autistic of weaknesses, that doesn't mean that there are individuals who are basically not disabled. And psychology is an imperfect science. Functioning labels aren't that clear cut of course, but there are observable and pertinent aspects to consider, such as ability to do the basic tasks of living and providing for oneself, or level of capacity for intellectual pursuits. And there still is a tremendous gap among autistics in levels of those abilities.



I won't deny that your attitudes toward disability and yourself have caused your viewpoint. From what I've seen of many individuals, many of those out there with lots of aptitude have attitudes that lead them to perceive themselves as benevolent and proper and therefore deserving of their privilege, alongside thinking they are providers of wholesome opportunities for those of low aptitude as they care for them. They don't want to think of themselves as someone who prospers based on someone else's comparative disadvantage. Many other individuals wouldn't necessarily approve of such a point of view, and personal viewpoints don't necessarily reflect reality as it is by explaining what is truly occuring in society. Understandings of disability should verify what actually occurs in society.



But getting the ability to communicate and getting abilities to stop those difficulties, wouldn't necessarily make you nonautistic. Cure isn't about some abstract idea of becoming nonautistic.

You can't cure something that's not a disease! Who wants to be "cured" of what makes them special?

If you have a disorder that is crippling, like making you afraid to leave the house or talk to a person, then you may want help do deal with the anxieties, but that's not the same thing.

Besides, if we "cured" AS, we'd soon be faced with a severe shortage of engineers and scientists.

I wouldn't want to be cured, personally. AS is part of my personality.

Thank you for all of your replies so far. I've read them all and I like threads like these, because we are all different and we want different things for ourselves and the autism community. I hope this thread stays alive for a while, so that I can keep hearing from all of you and others who would like to have their say, as well.