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willow
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24 Nov 2006, 12:48 am

I still say that you all only seeing at it from your *own* viewpoint...and fail to see people much more affected.

I respect everyone's rights. hell....I don't want a cure for myself.

but I fully believe everyone deserves the choice. my sons...they have the right to know what makes them tick. they are beautiful, to me....but to them, I doubt my belief matters all that much. I am a "mom".

I love them...more than anything. ANYTHING. and they should have a choice.


so many, when responding to this topic, answer for themselves. they are happy. so screw the people who want a cure.

please....see outside the box you are looking into.



I love my boys....more than anything. I could talk for a year and you could never understand how much I love them. I feel they deserve a choice I didn't have. a CHOICE.

would I have opted to stay me? probably. then again, I am not that "socially" abnormal.


everyone deserves a choice, dammit. right or wrong, yes or no. people should be able to choose.


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Marrshu
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24 Nov 2006, 12:56 am

I only support a cure for adults, and ONLY for adults. Children cannot make such a decision on their own, and parents have no right to force a child to take a cure that he or she may regret down the line.

An Adult can make such a decision, a child cannot. When someone does not have the mental ability to make a decision, can it be called anything other then forced abuse?



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24 Nov 2006, 12:58 am

What about a teenager making the decision?


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SteveK
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24 Nov 2006, 10:49 am

FRANKLY, I think a CURE latter in life isn't possible. If it WAS, I would say that teenagers and adults should do it over the span of a month or more, people under 2 should NOT have it done unless PROFOUNDLY affected adversly, and others should be by a consensus of AS people.

That would be the only fair thing.

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24 Nov 2006, 10:52 am

Yeh, most cures, once introduced aren't ever voluntary. My second reason against. My first I have already stated.


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24 Nov 2006, 11:08 am

I'm more nationaly abormal, than anything else. It doesn't bug me. If people want a cure, than they can get it. I pesonally don't want to be cured.



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24 Nov 2006, 11:12 am

This reminds me that I was given odd drugs to try to help me sleep when I was a teenager. None of the geniuses involved found out that I was drinking tea in the evenings, which is high in caffeine and theophylline, both of which keep me awake.

When they, that is my mother and the psychologists approached me with the suggestion that I take drugs, they approached like people who were aware that I had good reasons to refuse. It wasn't with the self-assurance of people who knew I was wrong if I refused. They acted like people who knew that I should refuse but they were going to persuade or force me anyway. What is a teenager supposed to think when he knows that they know that their behavior is unconscionable and that they will do it no matter how much force they have to use?



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24 Nov 2006, 11:18 am

I think we all have variations in how it manifests with us and your personality has a lot to do with it. Some people really may be at peace with it or love the way they are and never want to gain that NT ability even if they tried. For me I pretty much feel as though I'm some kind of crippled and disgraced NT, I have some degree of dysmorphia over the way it effects my nonverbals, and like my life is completely forfeit (no, like I deserve to get dissed and dissed hard by life) unless I can fix on my own everything that my AS is holding me back in. Its not that I hate myself, I just see how the world is and from my perspective I have it emotionally locked in to who I am that if I'm not meeting at its level I'm just rotting away, getting older, pretty much giving in to my worst nightmares in terms of everything that I vowed to myself I'd never be when I got older. That feeling of sickness wiht my current state has always been there and probably always will be as long as who I am, at least when filtered through my AS, will never be realistically good enough.



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24 Nov 2006, 11:47 am

willow wrote:
I still say that you all only seeing at it from your *own* viewpoint...and fail to see people much more affected.

I respect everyone's rights. hell....I don't want a cure for myself.

but I fully believe everyone deserves the choice. my sons...they have the right to know what makes them tick. they are beautiful, to me....but to them, I doubt my belief matters all that much. I am a "mom".

I love them...more than anything. ANYTHING. and they should have a choice.


so many, when responding to this topic, answer for themselves. they are happy. so screw the people who want a cure.

please....see outside the box you are looking into.



I love my boys....more than anything. I could talk for a year and you could never understand how much I love them. I feel they deserve a choice I didn't have. a CHOICE.

would I have opted to stay me? probably. then again, I am not that "socially" abnormal.


everyone deserves a choice, dammit. right or wrong, yes or no. people should be able to choose.


What makes you think that no one here can think outside the box like apparently YOU can. Perhaps it is that you are looking at this from your own persepctive and can not see outside YOUR own box. I have done plenty of research as others on here have - because I was almost convinced about the mercury/autism connection until I noticed that some of their facts didn't ring true and the very innapropriate way they refer to people with autism really reflected on their sincerity. It is NOT opinion as others have pointed out when kids ARE being submitted to dangerous therapies pushed by these organizations. There have been many "opinion" pieces apparently showing how another group advised chelators to use an innapropriate medication in their protocal and another where the describe Lupron (a hormone treatment as completely safe) when it is NOT only not approved for what they are using it for but it is has a list of side effects for what it IS approved for. Just because others want autism eradicated doesn't mean they have the right to do so by any means necessary and turn their kids into lab experiements. Do all parents who are involved with curebie groups do this - no - but they provide the information often not presented unbiasedly.

When my son first started regressing it was not like it was a wonderful bonding moment because he was freaking out and screaming over what others thought was something imaginary but I KNEW was something sensory. However, things like speech therapy and quite different from supplements and injections to make them normal. That is the difference here - these groups push normal and indistinguishable from their peers not maximinzing your potential. That is both psychologically damaging to both the person with autism and their families. If these curebie groups wanted to start handing out money for traditional services and started adding people on the spectrum as contributing members to their boards and stopped making "cure" their goal then they might garner some respect. However when they have PR campaigns that say "it is mercury" and "where are all the adult autistics" they deny the very existance of people being on the spectrum before the mid 1980's - because before that mostly only those with "autism" would have received a label. They want to include all the Aspies in the numbers for their fear inducing epidemic campaigns but then it becomes counterproductive for them to show those with AS as being successful individuals.

So it is alot more than people's personal opinions - I am on a couple of groups where they are vastly curebie oriented and I do not say the parents are not nice - some of them are very sincere. The organizations however often have ties to snake oil salesmen who manipulate parents into thinking they need to remortgage their houses for a "cure" for their child's autism. If they are misleading them then are they really offering them a "choice".



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24 Nov 2006, 7:02 pm

Just a note, walk-in-the-rain: willow doesn't assume that she's the only one outside the box. Of course she isn't the only one outside of it. Everyone has a box they think in, and some boxes are considered outside the ones of others.


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anbuend
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24 Nov 2006, 7:10 pm

willow wrote:
I am thrilled that my sons hug me and tell me that they love me. over the weekend, I saw a child with severe autism...he sat on the ground and stared blank-faced into the air, until someone spoke of lawn mowers (a favorite of his). then he grunted to show his pleasure.

does that child not deserve the right to be "cured"?

do you honestly think, in his grunting, that he is content with his communication? happy? feels loved?

I can see both sides...I truly can.


People have said, about me, that just looking at me makes them understand why autism should be cured. That I have... let me think... one of the typical blank stares characteristic of autism, that people would be absolutely crazy to want their children to grow up to look "profoundly autistic" like I apparently look (not my descriptor, but theirs), etc.

This is after seeing me, and seeing my opinion about cure, apparently my appearance totally overrides listening to what I have to say. So I tend to take stories that start with "I saw an autistic person, and now I know why some people need to be cured" with a grain of salt: I do not enjoy having my appearance used as justification for cure, and I would not want to impose that view on anyone else.

I have known a large number of autistic people who, like me, have spent time, some longer than others, unable to communicate certain things in ways that other people understand. Very few of us have resented having our communication recognized, or learning communication others understand, whichever one happened. (A small number, by the way, have resented that. I'm not among them.) But this does not seem to correlate to any particular belief in cure.

I have talked to a large amount of autistic people, from all over the 'spectrum', over time. This includes "aspies", it includes people who spent years or decades with IQs presumed to be under 40 because of communication clashes of various sorts, it includes everyone in between. I have seen no particular correlation between "severity" of a person's autism and desire to become non-autistic. I have seen autistic people using either being "very mildly" autistic or "very severely" autistic as an excuse for whatever position they hold on cure (I've seen both used, in both directions), but actually looking at people's opinions, I have not seen any huge correlation between "severity" as most people see it, and desire to become non-autistic.

And notably, a person does not need to become non-autistic in order to learn these things. I communicate very well in writing -- some of the time on some topics -- and I am still as autistic as I ever have been. (As evidenced, among other things, by the amount of people who still say, of me, "Just look at her and any sane person would want to cure her.") A desire for a communication system is not identical to a desire for cure.

My views on cure, by the way, are not based just on my personal experiences, they're based on an entire way of viewing the world, including how I view disability. I do not believe autistic people should be cured. If a cure were available (I do not think a real one is actually possible, or desirable), of course people should be able to choose to take it, but I'm also fully aware that there would be no choice for most people, and I have a real problem with that.

I don't think that looking at someone, even seeing someone really struggling with something, is a good argument for cure. Because I have been used as such an argument so often, and people have been so wrong. I also dislike the catch-22 situation where there have been times when I have been used as a "severely affected" example to say that people like me should be cured -- and couldn't talk back -- and now that I can talk back, I'm apparently not severely affected enough to understand. (And this is not just "I", it is just about every person who has ever been in this position, knows what I mean.) There's something wrong when people can define "those who need a cure" in terms of those who aren't currently able to resist this definition-from-on-high. It's quite the contrary, the idea that I don't think of those "severely affected" -- I think often about how we are used to suit the agendas of primarily non-autistic people who think we ought to be like them, and who define us in ways that make it impossible for us to have a say in anything.


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walk-in-the-rain
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24 Nov 2006, 7:21 pm

KBABZ wrote:
Just a note, walk-in-the-rain: willow doesn't assume that she's the only one outside the box. Of course she isn't the only one outside of it. Everyone has a box they think in, and some boxes are considered outside the ones of others.


Agreed that we all have our own perceptions - just terms like "you all" tend to sound very much like meaning you all = everyone.



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24 Nov 2006, 8:40 pm

I agree with everything anbuend said. It totally sucks that we are treated like this, almost as if we are objects until we are cured. It's a subject that I'm putting into my story because of how I feel about it and its relevance to us. If any of you feel inclined, read the first post on this page for what could be the thoughts of someone deciding whether or not they would want to be cured: http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php? ... 8&start=30
It is of little relevance here, but hey, at it has some relevance. Okay, back to the discussion.


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SteveK
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24 Nov 2006, 8:55 pm

anbuend,

WOW! I have never seen or heard of anyone that had a "vacant stare" all the time, but yet was communicative as you obviously are. Is it just that you can't, or won't, control muscles to make certain expressions, or what?

Anyway, that isn't a reason to force you to change. If you are ok, and can be productive, who else should care?

Steve



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24 Nov 2006, 9:10 pm

willow wrote:
everyone deserves a choice, dammit. right or wrong, yes or no. people should be able to choose.


That choice of cure shouldn't even exist if people simply learned to accept us and accommodate to our needs, we're more than capable of advancing for ourselves, if you simply provide a supportive environment and educate us to cope in life in a way that suits us. You're implying we're subhuman by even suggesting an idea of a 'cure'. After all 'cure' means to fix an aliment causing problems, and I doubt Autism is an aliment, it's only seen and treated as one, because cure group NTs are so bloody lazy, ignorant or stupid to think beyond their own mindsets. When will people realize that Autism is a different state of mind and not a disease?

Since I was actually LFA when I was a child, I know what it was like to live in a world where I couldn't communicate or express myself (so don't say it's opinion, I have actual experience FIRST HAND!). I was frustrated however I felt it was everyone else's problem because they didn't want to understand me or tell me bluntly what I was doing was wrong and give me a valid verbal/visual example to verify it. I was ignorant as well as a child and was relatively happy when I heard, saw or touched what I wanted, I wasn't sad because I couldn't communicate properly (as the saying goes, ignorance is bliss). The only reason why I 'suffered' was because of society's intolerance to understand me or help me in the way I needed (but luckily that was rare for me to encounter such problems in my case). As I got older, I progressed to HFA status when I finally learned how things function and now when I walk down a street, you'd think I was an NT, because I mask my Autism so flawlessly. In fact by becoming more high functioning, I feel more miserable because I became aware of what insults, hatred and xenophobia meant, and not because I was not able to socialize perfectly (hell last night I went to a big party with my neighbors and socialize with them rather well and was still able to retain my Autistic thinking. So I'm not sad because I can't communicate, I was taught by my parents and learned for myself how to do that when I was a child. Also to add, I was given encouragement and confidence to do things as well.). Since I was LFA as a child with communication problems, who are you going to listen to more, CAN (who have no real-life experience being an Autistic person) or someone who actually has or had LFA (who can tell you what it was like first hand, providing insight)?

I KNOW NOT ALL Autistic people are as able or as happy as I am, but even so, if you support and embrace their potential and let them be who they are, you could help them immensely that way! I mean it doesn't help telling them they're sick or negatively different to society at all (by even saying words like disorder, disease, etc), let them be who they are and encourage them to be different. I mean if you tell your child there's a cure for who they are, they'll wonder what's wrong with them; and they're going to be demoralized and feel miserable since they'll think they're sick and will of course take it, because you implied they're sick. A false perception of choice in my opinion if they're manipulated into their decision by negative representation of Autism.

I had a few moments where I wished for a cure when I was a child because of the discrimination I received, but as a I got older, I realized, I could comply with society if I simply learned for myself or someone simply helped me when I ask, and then I could keep my advantages of Autism and function reasonably well in society; providing that society gives me a chance to make mistakes to learn from without being branded a ret*d.

Besides even with that, even if I wanted to give people such a choice, a cure WILL be abused for financial gain and all Autistic people will be forced to be cured. I mean do you really think governments will waste time and money to accommodate Autistic people, if it's easier and cheaper to simply cure them instead?

To conclude, giving such a choice is dangerous and playing god with us, and the ONLY way I'd EVER support a so-called 'cure' notion is IF legislation is enforced to protect the rights of Autistic people, and force government to retain support services for Autistic people so we can decide without pressure; and force the cure to be only available as a purely last resort option (and must be consented by the individual with Autism at a acceptable age). Also it would be needed to develop positive understanding about Autism to the broad community, and such a thing needs to be enforced and protected by law.

I mean I'm strongly anti-cure because I feel there's nothing needed to be cured at all and we're NOT sick or inferior. It's only what NTs think of us that makes us look abnormal to their so-called standards (which I find their standards of society rather dumbed down, pathetic, greedy, hateful, inefficient and primitive compare to what my standards are). However I'm willing to weaken my stance for those who feel their own state of mind is debilitating beyond a point of help (and not the parent's decision or by any manipulation to the Autistic individual to be cured, BY ANY MEANS! This includes persuasion, teaching negative values of Autism without including ALL the positives, financially or social forced, anything!); IF I knew a 'cure' wouldn't likely be used like a weapon on ALL of us by any organization or government.


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25 Nov 2006, 1:16 am

I don't view my expression as a vacant stare, other people do. They put that interpretation over the top of it. All it is is my face does not usually move very much, and my eyes often get fixed in place, or else move all over the place, and I often look at things indirectly. I bet a lot of people on here look like that, or at least more than you'd expect. It's an interpretation of a facial posture, not a reality, there's nothing all that vacant about me.


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