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Do You Believe Autism Can Be 'Cured'?

Daniel

I keep coming across parents dangling bunches of herbs in front of parents saying "This is the cure to autism!" 

Every time I hear parents promoting the lie that they can cure autism I feel so hated and unwanted by this world, it is autism that makes me who I am, if it were not for my Dad's unconditional love giving me a sense of belonging I would probably be dead by now. 

It hurts and depresses me so much that parents so willfully hate their child's identity and think it needs to be 'cured'. It's disgraceful they so carelessly fall for lies and love to promote them, especially as it can increase the liklihood of suicide. 

Parents Reply
  • in reply to Fleur

    Well said Fleur, I’m just getting used to being the 1 in 100 and I’m finally starting to like me. We aren’t broken, I’ve most probably said this before, as children we weren’t the ugly duckling, it turns out that we are actually swans. The rest of the pond will always just be ducks!

Children
  • in reply to Daniel

    Yes I often think autistic people (and I'm speaking from my own exoerience) are less likely to be bound by social conventions - authenticity has always been very important to me and its something I struggle with when I don't see it in others. (Eg someone likes something because it's a trend and not because they have a true affinity with it...this isn't authentic) But then there's the double bind of masking where we are not being authentic to oursrlves and yes it causes a heck of a lot of anxiety. I don't think masking is pretending in the social sense but a built in and often unconscious mechanism to get by.

  • in reply to Deleted User

    By a condition of authenticity I mean it may be a condition that makes us more willing to live as our authentic selves, live as who we really are. 

    I've noticed through things like masking autistic people suffer stress and anxiety when we pretend to be someone we're not. I've read some studies showing autistic people as more reflective of standard norms and don't sacrifice their personal values to adopt the social values. We are not so unconsciously compliant. 

    Basically it makes us live by our own values and not be pretenders. 

  • in reply to Daniel

    I am inclined to agree and am finding this "shift" within how i see autism as a whole and in myself. Because what we know about autism is only what we can observe in behaviour  ("symptoms") but this can be different amongst all autistic people. For instance, hyper focus could manifest as  "special interests" or just being able to get on with your job at work. For some people, they have a very "internal" experience of autism. I think monotropism and autistic inertia are key components. These maybe could have been seen in the past (or still are) as "disordered thinking" / "black and white thinking" when actually it's about a shifting of focus or attention. Ive explained this in quite a basic way as im still finding a way for how it all settles in my brain and my own understanding. Could you explain more what you think about a condition of authenticity? I'm not sure if I'm taking this too literally.

  • in reply to Deleted User

    I actually have my own theory concerning autism, I think it’s possibly a condition of authenticity that underlays what we assume to be symptoms. Some physiologists have come to the point that the symptoms are not part of the condition but just associated with autism that they can remove through treating the physiology, but they don’t know what the autism itself is yet. They are having a paradigm shift of how we think about autism.

  • in reply to Roy

    I'm pretty sure there are many different neurotypes it's just that autism is a collection of certain traits and there's a name for it to be labelled with. I'm pretty sure most of the population have at least one trait or another. Or something which deviates from the norm. What is normal anyway? Do we cure everyone? Homosexuality was a disorder to be cured and look how far we have come with that.  There will be a shift eventually but it'll take time.