If you understood what caused autism.

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How would you tell the rest of the world?

Who would you tell so that it mattered?

I have studied psychology, so I'd run off to do my PhD on it, and get it published as a journal article, in Science.

... nice thought, but then the reasoning in your PhD might be so different and new, and go against common understanding of autism, despite being the real truth, so how would you convince academic authorities that they should spend money doing the necessary surveys and tests on people to get your PhD backed up by evidence.
Depending on how exotic-sounding is the real cause for autism, your professors might just laugh at it and throw it back at you.

I just wonder how long it will be before someone comes along onto this thread and replies with something like
"if I were handed a note with the real cause(s) of autism then I would burn it up immediately" ; or something along those lines.
Brace yourselves.

Wow, so much concentrated negativity, especially about other people.

If I knew what the cause was, I'd face tremendous difficulty getting it recognized due to my complete lack of credentials.

I'd probably write about it, though, in the hopes of improved understanding.

True. For my honours thesis I asked the only staff member at my uni who specialised in AS if he would be willing to supervise me, and he said no due to not knowing much about the particular area I wanted to study. Then unfortunately he turned out to be one of my markers, and he marked me poorly because he didn't like my ideas! Well if he thinks he knows better, he could have supervised me! Gah.

I don't think that the "cause of autism" could be too different to what we already know. I think we just haven't pieced it all together properly. So I wouldn't be too worried about my understanding being new or exotic.

If i could find proof to what caused autism, id find as much collective data to back my findings, run more tests on that, and then go to a number of autism forums, such as this one, and other scientifit journals, news papers and magazine's and see if i can get a response. Maybe someone will fund more research into this new discovery and such. Though it may take 20 years for someone to listen. In the 1980's they discovered leeky bowl, does infact cause some forms of Autism, that the toxins enter the blood stream and attack and damage the brain, thus causing Autism. Though this was discovered in the 80's noone untill recently begand to believe the findings and the data and give any funding to the researchers.

So yeah that's what i'd do...

If I found the cause of autism, I would keep it to myself. It would be my little secret that no one would know about. Why the hell would I want to tell other human beings, it would be a waste of my time anyway.

Last edited by humanhatred on 08 Jul 2012, 7:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

If you understood what caused autism.

I think advancement in technology to better map and understand the brain would be required.

It's analogous to explorers having discovered the location of the Titanic. They had a very good idea where the ship had sunk BUT it took them decades to create the technology to go deeper and actually see what was on board.


What is available is a wealth of information relating to cognition and behavior of the Autist that needs disseminating inorder to better understand and educate Autists. This is where the answers are found, right now.




TheSunAlsoRises

If I discovered the cause, I think I wouldn't really care to tell the world. Sure, I would publish it in a scientific journal and hope people would read about it, but after that I would most likely not be very interested in it anymore. Perhaps I would be interested of making it accepted inside the scientific community, but I wouldn't care to inform the common people (i.e. non-scientists).

I think autism is caused by so many different things - it may not even be a single condition, but a family of different (genetic and physiological) conditions with similar symptoms - that I don't believe in "the cause of autism", I believe more in "the varying causes of different autisms". So I don't really believe there can be one magic answer to the causal problem. And we already know the causes of quite a few varieties of autism - they just don't account for many cases: just google "syndromic autism".

I have a feeling that if I could discover the exact cause, it would be something so profound and horrible, that it should better be kept a secret...

I believe the cause is mostly genetics, but that is such a broad area and the effects are so broad it doesn't exactly help anyone. The only way to "cure" autism would be to screen for it and abort the fetus...although if you eliminated it you would also eliminate forms of genius and neurodiversity.

I don't think there is a "cause" . It's just a happenstance. It would be like trying to find out the "cause" of homo vs. heterosexuality, or the "cause" of blond hair. Too much focus on the difference of someone from the masses, and too little focus on the contributions to society unique to those who are not in the majority.

Charles

I'm with you charles. Why should there be a cause to autism? We are all made different.

Although cause and effect does apply to pretty much everything, it doesn't mean the cause of autism is a bad thing.
it shouldn't be a under lined issue.

^This.

Until I knew the causes of all of the autisms and how to tell them apart conclusively, I think I'd keep it to myself and find some eccentric billionaire to fund my research.

My personal experience is that the vast majority of people (both on and off the spectrum) are highly emotionally vested in their own opinion of the origins of autism, many times to the exclusion of the experiences and realities of others. Therefore, if I knew the answer, I'd have to be very careful in how I shared it so that people could hear what I was saying.

I'd keep it a secret from the big, bad world out there.