Why "therapy" is not the same as "cure"

Post Reply New Topic

Some people consider "therapy" to be tantamount to a "cure".

But think of this way. If everyone were autistic then a great deal of therapies such as applied behavioral therapy wouldn't be called "Therapy" they would be called "education" and would probably be a great deal more advanced than they are now since we would've spent our entire history perfecting it. In fact with neurotypical education undeveloped what ever we'd have there would probably be called "therapy" and neurotypicals would be considered to have "social codependency syndrome" or something along those lines.

"Therapy" is necessary because "education" is designed for neurotypicals.

I think what people don't understand whatsoever is that when a person with Asperger's or Autism 'learns' social skills and their social skills, in the raw, get as good as those of the people around them, it's still not nearly enough to make it go away.

People who believe that learning social skills waves a wand over autism don't understand just how much is involved with communication. If your nonverbal communication is clipped for instance in any way that goes beyond your muscle control - good luck getting a normal response on your social import from people. There's also the fact that a person with autism won't think the way the group thinks. No matter how well you can play it off, the group can only have wanted to shift the conversation right and you shift it left (even while staying on related topic in both cases) so many times until they realize you're just simply/fundamentally different from them and they start putting up a wall and taking a disliking to you for it.

That's also going nowhere near the hypersensitivities, neurological bottlenecks, slow-downs, speed-ups, and all the other anomalies that can fundamentally make our experience of reality very different, shape our way of thinking differently, and in society at large the name of the game is effortless conformity - something we don't do well at all.