Is AS worse than cancer?

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I just want to make the point that I doubt you'd come across a single person let alone a group of people with cancer who say they are proud of it and don't want to be cured and don't want anyone to develop a cure for it...but you will come across groups people with ASD's who say this and mean it. I know not every autistic person feels this way....my point is just that some do.

ASD is a disability like being deaf or blind. Like those conditions there is a significant impairment but the person can sometimes have other things enhanced to compensate for the impairment. Also disabilities are somewhat dependent on society and environment...being deaf in a community of all deaf people wouldn't be such an impairment. ASD is a disability you're born with, have your whole life is not progressive and not life threatening and it's cognitive , developmental-not physical . Cancer is often a very severe and life threatening physical disease. They are not comparable.

Hell, and I thought I'd heard some idiotic statements before now.

I should clarify what I mean by my post: I'm aware that cancer is a bad thing that often kills people. I'm more aware than most because it runs very strongly in my family, and some of my relatives die from it. When I think about the very real possibility that I will get cancer sometime in the next twenty years, it scares me, sure, but the fear and pity and general horror surrounding cancer is not something I want people to perpetuate. If I get cancer, I don't want people to get those long faces that say they think I must be the most unlucky person in the world, and they can't imagine how horrible my life is.

Cancer can be a chronic illness. Because it is, that means that a person with cancer will often be living their life, possibly long-term, either with cancer or with the after-effects of successful treatment. Since that is the case, cancer can be categorized as a physical disability, and makes you more likely to experience the problems that people with physical disabilities have--including the infuriating expectation that you cannot do anything but sit around and wait for a magical cure, and, on the other end of the scale, the belief that any form of acknowledgement that you have an illness that limits your energy and possibly requires assistance constitutes "giving up" and is absolutely unacceptable because you must be "inspirational" or else you are a pitiful wreck.

I do not want to minimize how tough it can be to have cancer; like I said, many of my family members have had it, or currently have it, and I expect to have the same experience eventually. It's tiring, painful, and expensive, and people often treat you like you're a fragile porcelain doll instead of a real person; and the fear of death becomes more acute. What I do want to remind everyone of, is that people can and do get through having cancer--that people with cancer are as human as people without, and that, for the most part, people want to be supported when they have to go through a tough time--but they do not want to be pitied and treated as though their experiences are something totally horrifying and foreign to the human experience. Too much fear of cancer, and we alienate people who may be lonely, tired, in pain, or even dying.

Does that sound familiar to you? Remember how people react when they know you have autism, and they have this idea that autism is a horrible monster that steals your soul? Yeah. They do that with cancer, too, with surprisingly few modifications. Perpetuate fear and pity, and you isolate the people who most need to be treated as equals, as people who are part of our world. If you don't like it when it happens to you because you have autism, don't do it to people who have cancer.

I don't find AS as severe as cancer, if I was to compare any of my mental conditions to cancer It would be PTSD...that one has some nasty physical effects as well that are always fun to read up on. But PTSD really can kill or so it feels and so can cancer so PTSD to me is more comparable to cancer than AS. Though obviously PTSD and cancer are quite different as well.

Callista, I think you make very good points here and I respect you and think you write insightful posts in general. I concede the point that cancer can also become a lifelong disability not just a disease.....and also agree that people with cancer don't necessarily want a pity party.

Still, I think that this type of physical disease (which can become an ongoing physical disability) which is often fatal and often progressive (gets worse over it's course-in case someone doesn't know the meaning) is better compared to something like multiple sclerosis than to something like ASD:

From the experiences of my family members I know that cancers range from mild to severe. My grandma died of lung cancer and when she was diagnosed she was told she only had 3 months to live......it was devastating (although at least she was old and had lived a long life-she was still very active and mentally healthy before the cancer). My half-sister got thyroid cancer when she was 20 years old, never needed chemo therapy , just had to have her thyroid removed, had to take a radiation pill one time, and then take pills to regulate thyroid hormones for the rest of her life and she has to keep going to the doctors and checking on her health of the region around her thyroid in case there are any problems. She wrote many books about thyroid cancer, she got her PHD in bioethics and she married a thyroid oncologist who she met at a conference where she was discussing thyroid cancer. Even so she would celebrate if cancer could be eradicated from this planet and anyone who had it (including herself) completely cured or if she could go back and not have it.......she still has to be very careful and concerned with her health. Now this was a very mild case, it is a physical disability for her, she became active in the cancer community and even met her husband through it and yet she still wants cancer eradicated (as any sensible person would- to save many lives and much suffering).

However people with autism and people who are deaf are almost divided 50/50 between those who would want to eradicate the condition and those who are happy living with the defect and any compensatory abilities or positive traits they have along with it and don';t want to be treated or cured even if they could be. This is just not the case with cancer or MS.

If I could magically decide to have either great treatment to help those with AS and cures for those who want it or the same for those with cancer-I would chose cancer treatment or cures in an instant.....without even thinking about it. In that sense I still think cancer is a more serious condition than AS (although they are probably too different to compare in the first place).

Another way of looking at this: many people are against cochlear implants which could prevent a child from growing up deaf, many oppose developing technology to determine if a child will be born with autism or not - to abort of the child is going to be autistic - and I'm sure many would oppose something that could cure a child of autism at or before birth- but NO-ONE would oppose something that could cure a child of cancer at or before birth-it would be a miraculous discovery celebrated by all.

Last edited by daydreamer84 on 06 Oct 2012, 7:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I thought there is a movement to treat Asperger as neurodiversity rather than a disability, that its a different cognitive style rather than an impairment, what say you to that.

I will put forth my personal opinion as it relates to my autism. I am happily autistic. I try to enjoy all the gifts autism has given to me---special intense interests and talents. Sure, I have challenges---but doesn't everybody? So, for me, autism is much better than cancer would be. I would not want my autism taken away from me if it were possible.

Well one of the points I made is that you find these kinds of movements with ASD and not with something like cancer. Still I think of it as a disability which has defects as well as compensatory benefits and which is at least partially only a disability because of the nature of the society we live in-which is true of most if not all disabilities. I don't think AS is just a different cognitive style any more than an intellectual disability (aka mental retardation) or a learning disability is.

Uh, NO. Absolutely NOT.

Well it depends upon the severity of the asperger/asd on the afflicted individual, many aspies do not have mind blindness like others do nor do others have sensory issues like the most severely afflicted aspie, so I think that neurodiversity should apply only to the least affected or those who have the mildest forms of aspergers and not those who has its severe form and definitely not the lower functioning ones.

I think that AS is actually worse than cancer. At least if i had cancer i would be able to get some sympathy.

Let me consider the worst aspects of cancer and autism:

- Some of my great-uncles and great-aunts died of cancer (I did not really know any of them, so, please, do not waste your breath telling me you are sorry). Mostly throat and lung cancer, since they were all heavy smokers. I did not see any of them, but my grandmother told me about their situations and it was pretty bad. None of them lasted more than a few months and those few months were very unpleasant to them.

- As for autism, which I suspect I have, the worst thing about it is the feeling that there is something different about me that makes it nearly impossible for me to relate to other people (and vice versa). Nobody has the patience to keep talking about my narrow interests and I do not have the patience to talk about their broad interests, which makes communication very difficult. My loneliness and boredom are sometimes unbearable, but after a while I usually find something interesting to do and take my mind off of my problems for a few weeks.

In autism's case, my biggest problem will probably be solved if I am lucky enough to find a girlfriend or something very interesting and time-consuming to do. A difficult task, but there is hope.

Cancer, on the other hand, will most likely lead to a slow, painful death, depending on the type of cancer and the treatments you can afford. There is not much you can do, except for accepting that you do not have much time left.

Conclusion: between an unpleasant situation that you have a chance to improve (or simply get used to) and a painful disease that will surely kill you, I choose the first option.

This seems condescending. Couldn't these people decide and speak for themselves whether they consider themselves to be part of neurodiversity? Why do they need people to speak up and say they should be excluded because of severity or any other arbitrary factor?

Neurodiversity does not always mean the belief that being autistic is not impairing, too.

I consider neurodiversity to be a sub-category of the disability rights movement... most neurodiversity advocates will agree that autism is a disability by definition, and practically everybody agrees that at least some cases of autism constitute disability. Even if you take this view--that only some autism is a disability--"neurodiversity" still means you believe that these people have the right to exist, be included, have equal access to health care, education, therapy, and employment; to keep their identity and their neurology, to be allowed to be who they are rather than taught that the way their brains work is bad and wrong.

In terms of the social definition of disability (as the difference between what you can do and what you are expected to be able to do), autism need not be a disability, if society in general is changed so that autistics routinely receive the accommodations they need much in the same way that someone who cannot fix a car receives the "accommodation" of going to a mechanic and paying him to fix it. But that's true of every disability, and autism is far from that point. I think the Deaf community probably comes closest to having truly become "not a disability"--because in a world set up for people who use sign language and visual cues instead of auditory ones, it's the person who relies on hearing who is disabled. Autism, though? I'd say it's only "not a disability" if your case is very mild, you have no self-care lapses or executive dysfunction, and you spend all of your time in an ASD-friendly community like Silicon Valley, an engineering school, or similar. Very few people with ASDs are lucky enough for their skill set to match their environment so closely.

Absolutely, me too.

Technically, nobody has a choice of life or death. Death comes inevitably to all.