as small as a world and as large as alone, As a prerequisite to this ask, I am in no way...

11:35am June 19, 2014

Anonymous asked: As a prerequisite to this ask, I am in no way trying to be offensive, I am simply curious. I don't quite understand why people are getting upset over trying to cure autism. It is a mental disorder like anxiety and depression, and no one seems to be upset over that, so why are people upset over using therapy and medication to control autism? I personally feel like therapy and meds etc would be good for helping people with autism (esp v. serious autism) to help communication and things like that

madeofpatterns:

withasmoothroundstone:

It’s a complicated issue, and not one that I can do justice to while on anxiety meds and dealing with my dad dying and trying to sleep and stuff.

I’m personally not offended that some autistic people want to be cured. I have found, however, that people’s desire to be cured is not tied to how severe their autism is. There are people who barely qualify as autistic who desperately want a cure, and there are people who are considered severely autistic who are fine staying severely autistic. (Note that autism isn’t simple enough to divide into mild and severe, high and low functioning, I’m using shorthand here.)

People who want to remain autistic usually want to remain so because autism is not like anxiety or depression. Autism affects every level of cognition, perception, and movement, all the way down to the core of how a person thinks. Some autistic people are quite attached to some of the experiences that come with being autistic and would not trade those for anything, not even the ability to communicate better or function more independently. Other autistic people are more focused on what they can’t do, and believe a cure is a ticket to a better life. Again, these are independent of real or perceived functioning level. They have a lot more to do with how a person views themselves.

Different people also use the word cure differently.

I use the word cure to mean, take an autistic person and change them into a non-autistic person. I don’t want a cure because there are aspects of autism that I would not trade for all the increased functioning in the world. (And I’m someone who communicates only by keyboard, sometimes can’t do that, and requires a good deal of help to get through an ordinary day. There are just things that are worth that, things I can’t explain if you haven’t experienced them.)

Other people use the word cure more like treatment. They use it to mean anything that helps an autistic person function better or helps us in ways that we want to be helped, whatever those are. I don’t object to that kind of thing, as long as it’s freely chosen by the person involved.

Like… there’s an herbal medication I used to be able to take (can’t now, it clashes with my gastroparesis too heavily) that helped me deal with sensory overload in a way that nothing else before or since can do. It quieted down the overload and also any anxiety that built up around it, and built a cocoon of silence around me so that I could regroup. It took words offline so I didn’t have to be overloaded by words. It was perfect.

Some people might call that a cure, I wouldn’t. I just call it something that helped me a lot with a particular aspect of autism that I didn’t happen to like.

But any time you have a condition that goes to the core of awareness, movement, perception, action, and cognition, then you’re going to have people who are going to want to stay that way. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not the same as depression or anxiety, which are much different — I’ve had both, severely, there’s no comparison between them and autism. They affect who you are from the outside, almost. Autism is who you are, from the inside out. It can’t be separated from who you are — at least, that is the experience of a large number of autistic people. Some autistic people do separate it from who they are, but even they can’t claim it’s something akin to anxiety. (And sometimes these are people who do take one symptom, such as Tourette’s tics, and call it “autism”.)

Anyway I can’t do this justice. It’s complicated. I have no issue with people who personally want a cure for themselves, I believe that it is everyone’s right to choose. I do have an issue with looking for a cure because I feel that this would be forced on many of us, including people like me who need extensive supports. And that would be terrible, because we would be losing things that are important to us, that we could never get back.

And people need to stop referring to single-symptom treatments as cures, because that clouds the issue. High dose kava kava does not cure autism, it helps some autistic people (some) during overload and helps prevent meltdown. It isn’t a cure, it’s a treatment for a specific autistic trait. Lorazepam doesn’t cure anxiety, either, it just treats it.

But anxiety is one thing, or a collection of closely related things.

Autism is fifty things all cooperating together to form a huge unified whole that’s hard to understand or explain.

Curing autism means taking all those fifty things and rearranging them until they look like a nonautistic person. I’m not even sure that’s possible, but that’s not what most autistic people are looking for.

The best thing is to look for treatments and remedies for the specific things that autistic people ourselves complain about the most often: Overload, shutdown, speech problems, language problems, comprehension problems, anxiety, and all these other things that go along with being autistic. You’ll be hard pressed to find an autistic person who’s against that. But those aren’t cures.

Clear as mud yet? Sorry I haven’t been more coherent but I’m typing this with my head flopped onto my chest in exhaustion. Take it or leave it. But there are really good reasons for cure to be controversial, because autism is not just like anxiety or depression. It’s not one-sided, it’s not simple, and it’s not 100% bad. Neither are anxiety or depression, but they are far closer to those things than autism will ever be.

This may give some of the view of why I can’t want a cure for myself despite extreme limitations:

http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1052/1238

But maybe it won’t explain anything at all.

Maybe I haven’t explained anything at all.

I’ve done my best. I can’t think very well right now. I wish I could’ve done this justice.
you explained it better before:

http://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/2006/10/22/hey-watch-it-thats-attached-2/