Big Pharm ready to cure us apparently

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Exactly, that's what big pharma does too. That's all they're interested in, money. it has nothing to do with making our lives easier or better in any way, it's about selling us drugs so they can make money. Even if they had a pill that could lessen aspie traits, guaranteed it would do other things to you as well, things you don't want it to. ALL drugs have side effects. And I don't exactly want to put something in my body that's gonna mess with my brain anyway. It's my brain, and I like it the way it is.

Too bad these "medications" for asperger's and austism will probably have many unpleasant side effects attached to them. Hopefully they don't cause your pecker to fall off.

Alcohol and occasionally cannibus seem to be the best medication for those traits and less side effects than the other medication.

Why are you assuming that severely autistic/Aspie people don't live fulfilled lives? Who told you that there's "no hope or progression"? I think you need to seriously re-think those ideas. Yes, they're what a lot of NTs believe, but just because a lot of NTs believe them doesn't mean they can't be false stereotypes. As far as I can tell, that's exactly what they are. You can only come up with "unfulfilled, hopeless lives" if you ignore all that's good about life with autism and exaggerate all that's bad. If you look at it without first making the assumption that normal must be automatically superior, you should come up with the conclusion that autism makes life neither better nor worse, just different; and that the worst distress any autistic person suffers tends to come from lack of acceptance.

I am tired of seeing people shift the goalposts toward people they assume can't make their needs, desires, or wishes known and then speak for them. Every time someone starts saying "We need a cure for all those autistic people who cannot communicate at all" it just sounds so convenient.

If people want to support a cure, do so. Don't try to dress it up as concern for those whom you assume can't advocate on their own behalf. A constant problem for autistic people in general - and this means verbal and nonverbal, able to communicate or not able to communicate in ways the people around them pay attention to* - is that people constantly take it upon themselves to speak over us. This is why Autism Network International (ANI) exists, and why ASAN exists.

Anyway, I don't even mean that people who want a cure should never say so. Say as often as you want (as if you even needed my permission). There are enough of you who communicate that this is what you want that you don't have to invoke a very specifically defined portion of the autistic population whom you believe cannot speak up on their own behalf.

* I don't think that anyone is completely incapable of communication. I think instead that the ways they communicate are discounted.

Chris71 wrote:

DerStadtschutz wrote:

Oh dear, my attempt at a sense of humour dropped like a lead balloon again.

Best if I just go back to Aspie mode then; in which case I would feel compelled to point out that 'stopwatch' is one single word, not 'stop watch'. Maybe someone would like to write a thesis on the uses and misuses of compound nouns?

Just give us the red pill already!

$$$$FUNDING$$$$$BOLLOCKS$$$$$CUSTOMER$$FOR$$$LIFE$$$$

Medication that alleviates autistic symptoms would be a license to print money,

No, I don't plan on writing any thesis. Sorry, it's kinda hard to tell if you're being serious or not by simply reading text, as if it isn't hard enough when I can hear you already. Plus, I honestly ask myself many times why things are named the way they are because a lot of names we have for things are complete misnomers: Like eye contact, for instance, apparently has nothing to do with actually looking into someone's eyes. "Eye contact," instead, refers to looking at the space between the eyes(3rd eye, it has another name that has eluded me at this moment), then scanning the corners of the mouth, and back again to the 3rd eye, repetitively.

Just make one thing clear Callista, before I start ranting: I was diagnosed with low-functioning autism at the age of 2 and a half.

Basically, this is not an NT opinion, this an opinion based on what I have learned about NT's and how I have learned to communicate throughout my life. I understand that some autistic or Aspie people lead fulfilled lives, but they're usually on the more high-functioning scale. I was thinking more about low-functioning autistic people, many of whom never have the chance to learn how to communicate, read, write or do anything for themselves. If I had been left the way I was, there would have been no hope or progression, indeed. If I'd never had the opportunity to learn, I would have missed out on so much enjoyment it boggles me.

I agree that there are certain abilities or talents that Aspies/Auties have that make them very happy and special (if it's OK to use that word). For example, good maths skills, ability to learn music just by hearing it once... I admire these talents. But at the same time, I've gained much more enjoyment by learning more about the world around me, even if it's displeasing stuff, because it makes me feel like a more fulfilled, educated person. I'm sure many Aspies/Auties who have been given coaching and good guidance in life feel this way as well and feel grateful that people have made an effort to teach them about the ways of neurologically typical people.

These companies have done what all profit making companies do. They have identified a gap in the market and are going to embark on a development project to see if they can come up with something to help. The problem here is that they are treating ASD as an illness, when really it isn't.

I cannot think of any way that a drug would "cure" my AS, only relieve it for a time. I have already taken such a drug. It was called MDMA.

Big Pharm can just leave me alone, than.

Your experiences--while they are valuable--are the experiences of one person. You can't speak for other autistic people any more than I can. There's this little catch-22 that people use to try to take the voices away from autistic people: "If you can speak, you aren't affected enough to know what you're talking about, so what you're saying doesn't matter. And if you can't speak, we have to speak for you." When you try to speak for anybody else with autism, that's what you're implying; and that you have autism yourself doesn't really affect that. You can speak for yourself; you can say, "I wish I could have a cure," but you can't continue with, "and that means everybody else in my position must also want a cure."

What I say when I say that autistic people learn, is that there are more people who are like you--who started out "low-functioning" and progressed just fine--than people who made very little progress. I'm saying that, in fact, making progress is the default course for autistic people. That's backed up by research on autistic children: Progress seems to be inevitable, given that the children have access to good education and therapy. And that's what research should be focusing on: Learning how we learn. Learning how to teach us. All the money is going to cause-and-cure instead because of the cure-focused view that people take on autism. By the way: Neurodiversity would not have "left you as you were". Just like we teach NT children useful skills, we should teach autistic children. That means therapy, and medication if necessary if it'll help you learn better. I've yet to meet anybody who is against a cure, who believes that autistic children should also not receive any therapy. I myself have benefited from therapy and from medication; without it I would not be holding on to the tenuous edge of independence, as I am.

I don't hold to the idea that "It's okay to be autistic because I have skills X, Y, and Z." I don't feel like my skills justify my existence. I don't feel like they make me superior, or that they make my life worth it. If I suddenly lost all the skills I have, I wouldn't change my point of view on whether I wanted a cure. The issue of cure is more like this: Autism is part of me. It's the framework around which my brain developed. It's part of my identity, and I don't think of it as something negative despite the disability. In fact, I don't think of disability as necessarily negative. When the world says that I ought to become NT, they are essentially telling me, "Who you are is not okay. You need to be someone else. We don't want people like you in the world." Autism is so integral to who I am that if you were to try to remove it, you would have to erase me and replace me with someone else. I don't have a sick NT brain; I have a healthy autistic brain. I am not meant to work like an NT does. To me, there are more important things than not being disabled; being myself is one of them.