The Autistic Generation Gap

Post Reply New Topic

Quite different then an NT who wants to be cool like Sheldon.

Oh, yeah, media-perpetuated stereotypes are definitely a problem. It's not just a matter of the media making autism seem more high-functioning or cool; people have also run into problems because someone expects all autistic people to be like the Rain Man guy.

(Sherlock from Sherlock seems like a weird example for autism. He is totally non-disabled in every way except his social interaction and nicotine addition, and his social interaction problems seem so different from what most autistic people seem to deal with. There were a couple examples where he was confused, but for the most part, it seemed like his social skills and communication skills were great and he was just apathetic about other people's feelings.)



You might've been thinking of where I said this?

"Well, I do think that there should be a non-diagnostic autism-like personality-related identity label, as ZombieBride made a topic about. The point where I disagreed was that I don't think such a label should apply to high-functioning ASD people INSTEAD OF a diagnosis. It would be for diagnosed people in addition to their diagnosis, hypothetically for ASD people who are cured (if such a thing ever happened), and for non-disordered people. It would also be an non-ideal "next best thing" for disordered people who aren't quite impaired enough for a diagnosis of ASD. Compare introversion or Highly Sensitive Person."

I don't think it's a common opinion, so if you disagree, don't worry, I'm just a single loon.

Might as well talk about it now though. I think someone with ASD or other autism-related disorders who is actually cured of said would become BAP, as opposed to becoming a non-BAP NT.

Let me specify what I mean by "actually cured"... (This is all completely hypothetical, because a cure does not currently exist. However, I don't believe there's any magical property of autism that makes it inherently uncurable. Yes, it's a biological difference, but most curable things are biological differences.)

A cure is not an adaptation or coping technique. To continue with the analogy on deafness, a cure would be a deaf person becoming capable of hearing normally--not reading lips, not using a crappy hearing aid that doesn't even let you distinguish certain sounds, but actually just hearing.

Lots of charities/researchers/etc who talk about wanting a cure for autism are not aiming for what I'd consider an actual cure. By analogy, it's like they say they want to cure deafness, but they actually just want a deaf child to convincingly act like he can hear. He needs to be able to understand speech (by lip reading or any other method), talk normally, not make weird vocal sounds, and never use sign language. Whether or not he can hear is irrelevant. Or sometimes, they are looking for ways to do prenatal genetic testing so they could abort deaf fetuses.

An actual cure would get rid of your actual problems. Having normal sensitivity instead of hypersensitivity. Being able to focus on things normally as opposed to either lack of focus or over-focusing. Being able to plan and organize about as well as most people can. Once you have a topic to talk about, being able to speak isn't hard. Cooking, cleaning, and self-care stop might still be a bit of a hassle, but no more than they are to typical people. You can "switch gears" okay. You have adequate "spoons." Working memory actually works.

With both deafness and autism-related disorders, a cure would still naturally leave a person in a different situation than if they never had the condition. There's the whole Deaf culture thing. I've heard in Deaf culture, people are often more direct and open (what would be considered indiscreet and rude to most hearing people), which I think is a side effect of having ASL as a first language. Likewise, autistic people often have bad social anxiety from all the bad social experiences they've had in the past. Even if the underlying brain problem that makes communication so hard were to be fixed, it'd probably take a long time to recover from that anxiety.

The analogy is less applicable here: There are a lot of positive or neutral personality traits associated with autism. Introversion. Being logical. Fondness for consistancy. Disinclined to social chit-chat. Disinclined to eye contact. Unusual imagination. Like to collect and organize things and information. A lot of autistic people don't have all those traits, but I THINK they are more common in autistic people. Some of these are established BAP traits. You can have these traits without having autism; I actually know a lot of "normal" people who have a couple. If you have a lot of these traits but you live in an area where the traits are rare, you're probably going to feel a little abnormal and people may even be mean to you. (I've heard of NT introverts having a hard time because they're surrounded by people who just freakin' hate introverts for some reason, but where I live, introversion is common and advantageous.) I don't think that getting rid of hypersensitivity, executive dysfunction, and communication impairments would erase these traits. In other words, if you have ASD but get cured, your score on the aspiequiz probably wouldn't change much.

(All this could also apply to some types of treatment.)

There are supposedly many types of autism, with similar symptoms, but perhaps dissimilar brains. The only thing I can think of as a practical cure is using the plasticity of the brain to make changes through mental exercises over long periods of time. Even then, it would probably not be a full cure. This idea is actually being researched at the moment with high-functioning ASD adults as the subjects.

Based on reading posts here IMHO the percentage of Autistic NT wannabes is way way higher then the percentage of neurotypical Aspie wannabes.

The above is true if you go by the technical defintion which is "want to be". But the term has always had a negative connotation since it was first applied to teenage girls and young women who dressed exactly like singer Madonna in the mid 1980's. People who are described as wannabes are thought to be shallow, a follower of fads and trends. Autistic people who want to be neurotypical tend to do it out of a desperation to unburden themselves of thier Autism "curse" in order to be "normal". Quite different then an NT who wants to be cool like Sheldon.

@Eloa...

Love da Bees!! ! That was so freakin' cool!!

Thanks!
I understand now, it's about the connotation of the term.
I did not know where that term came from, and I had no awareness of Madonna in the 1980's (or 1990's).
After I had awareness but no interest in having awareness.
Interesting fact though.

Or the superhero quality of some of these characters. There's aplenty out there now with Scorpion, Sherlock, etc. But, what is funny, is that all those characters are never identified as Autistic. It's the audience, through bad information, labeling them as such.

That is the kind of sensationalism and anecdotal evidence stuff I was talking about in sources like social media.