Cure for AS as impossible as converting a chimpanzee into a

Post Reply New Topic

I think that's what people thought about me while I was growing up put her with normal kids and she will end up normal. That must have been the strategy. Problem was, I was never normal enough to be accepted by them so I stuck out like a sore thumb. When I complained, the ones in charge always turned it around on me, asking me what I was doing to make the others treat me like that. Basically, they blamed me for it. I got the message nothing I did mattered, everything that was going wrong was my fault, there was no way to win. Learned helplessness. If you can find the right NTs to be around, it can help. Being around mean people can make it much worse.

The OP was using a device known as analogy. Analogies have a scope of reference. By their very nature, some aspects of an analogy will differ from the actual thing the analogy is being used to communicate about. To understand an analogy you need to interpret the scope of reference to exclude non relevant differences.

The analogy (used by the OP) is not attempting to convey some similarity between persons with AS and chimpanzees that does not equally apply to persons without AS and chimpanzees. The significance of the analogy (and it's scope of reference) is the implausibility of transforming a chimpanzee into a human.

Another analogy that would have communicated the same thing is to suggest that curing ASDs is as likely as transforming bananas into lemons. In fact the inverse of the OP's analogy would also communicate the same message; "curing AS is as likely as changing a human into a chimpanzee".

So the point the analogy is intended to communicate, is not that people with an ASD are more chimp-like than people without, but rather that, whatever similarities exist between people with an ASD and people without, it is not possible to transform someone with an ASD into someone who does not have an ASD.

^Exactly.

And......exactly.

The way I did it was by working in a public setting. I was a bagger in a grocery store (still at that store, just not bagging). It was easy for me because I kept busy a lot of the time. I got a lot of practice with social interaction by working with customers, as I was required to make conversation when the time was right. And I eventually got a lot better with my peers.

Except I pissed another Aspie off when I recommended this to her; she compared that to telling someone with cerebral palsy to get up out of their wheelchair.

Probably best to give that kind of a suggestion with a "What worked for me is...".

I think for me to working in a public setting, serving the public, had helped my social skills.

Hopefully someday, they'll have a cure or at least better treatment. I don't want to say anything is impossible.

A person could modify their brain or body which could potentially change them, but the technology is not around, not practical, has to many ethical problems one being the destruction of humanity at east that is what I could think of at the moment.

I stated in the post you quoted that I didn't think it's a very good analogy and I gave reasons why I think that. Chimpanzees have a more sophisticated non verbal communication structure in place than us humans. Comparing people with AS to chimpanzees who are better at non verbal communication than humans is an inaccurate analogy. It's more fitting to think of the person with AS being the human and being cured of AS would turn them into a chimpanzee, thus giving them the advanced non verbal communication skills. Comprende?

That would make sense if the original post had compared people with AS to chimpanzees. But it didn't. It compared to types of change. It took something impossible, and said curing AS is equally impossible. One could say as impossible as human interstellar travel, and the analogy still works.

They're not cures, though. I've been on both, for depression and ADHD; and what they did is more like changing a computer's settings than changing its CPU. Set your default font to something else; set your screen saver to start in half an hour instead of three minutes; it's still the same computer. Same with Ritalin and the several antidepressants I've been on--they didn't change my thoughts or my personality, and they didn't cure either the ADHD or the depression. What the antidepressants did, when they worked, was to allow me to survive the depression and more easily modify my own thoughts. The Ritalin didn't work at all, but from what I can tell, for people with ADHD, it allows more attention regulation but also doesn't change thoughts or personality. Many people with ADHD go off their stimulants on weekends because they find benefits to the way their brains work without them.

Medication developed for autism may dampen over-active processing of sensory information (won't work for people who are hyposensitive or both hypo- and hyper), or stimulate whatever area of the brain is responsible for the mimicking of others' emotions; but there's no way it can change the basic wiring that makes you autistic in the first place, nor the basic way your brain is set up to process social and environmental stimuli. Those are established long before the diagnosis is made; probably before birth. Oxytocin may be like Ritalin for Aspies. Or it may just be a bad idea to make AS people who are already gullible want to communicate with other people more...

The only thing I've seen so far that people here claim to "cure" AS has always been something that essentially decreases social anxiety and allows you to socialize freely. But even if you don't have social anxiety--I have very little, about as much as most NTs have--you still have Asperger's. Many autistic people don't have social anxiety, either because they're too young to know rejection or because they're simply more confident than most. The effects of such a substance seem to be to reduce the shyness and inhibition, and then the embarrassment when the inevitable mistakes occur. This isn't curing AS: it's curing social phobia. That many Aspies find social phobia to be the most distressing co-morbid of AS is perhaps why this sort of thing is called a "cure".

I know what you mean but I still disagree. It's more accurate to say:

Curing AS is like trying to change a human into a chimpanzee.

That's much more accurate. Chimps are actually better at non verbal communication than humans! Many species that rely on social bonds are. People falsely assume that chimps are kind of idiotic and clumsy and socially inept. The opposite is true. It's not so. They are extremely social and not as verbal as humans. In fact, they are more social than humans.

I might try that next time. Explain it with computer terminology.

When I explain that people often just don't understand what I'm trying to say.

I understand that you think you know what I mean, but honestly, reading your reply, I think you don't. The way you argue your point to me suggests to me that you don't get what I'm saying. Either that or you've failed to take into account my perspective when replying and instead just repeated your point from your own perspective.

That's okay, though.

I go with the two who said learning NT is the simple answer.

One of the hardest things to learn, other people are not like me, and dealing with who they are works.

Impersonal interaction worked for me, I was great at customer service.

Once I had their range, a clear purpose, I could get them what they wanted.

So pick a place with limited roles, and get used to them. Then you can build on that.

I have had no luck converting NT to AS, but have gotten to get along with them.