Experimental treatment cost John Elder Robison his marriage

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New York Times

I wonder if this is how NTs read others. I understand that this is also an empath thing where emotions affect you from other people because you can feel them but it's to a higher degree than the norm. I was like him where I couldn't feel emotion that much. But be careful what you wish for.

I can't remember where I saw this, but there was this story about a man who was blind from birth, and whey where able to do surgery on him to restore his eyesight. And after they did the surgery on him. He was just horrify of it and had no way to mentally handle the added sensory input that he got from being able to see for the first time in his entire life.

There was also a pop musician named Stevie Wonder who was in a similar situation. Except, he refused to get the surgery because he felt that being able to see would ruin his music talent.

That, wouldn't be very good. It's not sounding like something I would do. What a change.

Be careful what you wish for.

How does he know it was the TMS that caused it?
Maybe it was him having certain beliefs about TMS and those suggesting these new feelings?
Other people who underwent the same may not experience what he did.
Some people undergoing TMS or other procedures that they are told affect brain activity develop psychosomatic reactions, even when the procedure is sham.

Hi, I'm the John Robison in the study.

Actually, a number of other autistic people have since had results similar to my own. The whole thing is described in my book SWITCHED ON, which goes on sale next week. The problem so far has been figuring out how to replicate the effects. For example, one stimulation that had a particularly striking effect on me was repeated twice, with diminished effect and no effect the other times. Was that because the coil was oriented differently? Was that because earlier stimulations "set the stage" for the impactful one? Or something else? They don't know.

When you read the book you will find introductions and afterwords from the scientists involved in the work. In every case, they have published papers you can track down and read. The stuff they are doing is really science-fiction type stuff. Alvaro Pascual Leone used TMS and brain imagine to transmit thoughts from a person here to a person in a lab halfway round the world. Marcel Just is showing people pictures of dogs and houses in a scanner, and by patterns of brain activation, the computer is correctly identifying what the people see.

One of you suggested "If it worked, there would be more press" That is a curious thing. Where was the press for TMS for depression? These same scientists got that done, and there was no fanfare, yet there are 1,000 clinics doing TMS for depression today in the USA. I think the fact that there is no pill, and no big pharma marketing push has a lot to do with that.

In addition, the government has moved in and classified some of this work. So when you read my book and ask "what's next?" Some of those answers are gone dark, but be assured folks like Dr. Just have come a long way from this story and I don't know when the story will break.

All the more reason I would not be interested in this.

1.) Way to experimental
2.) Too many unknowns to have to re-learn or just learn from scratch
3.) Afraid of being overwhelmed in new ways that I can't decipher
4.) Took me this long to just being to figure things out, why do I want to add layers of complexity?

With all due respect, you are mixing up "getting a treatment" with "Taking part in research."

The only way any new treatment evolves is by experimentation, test, and validation. SWITCHED ON describes my participation is basic research aimed at using TMS to target a specific component of disability for many autistic people (me included) The study was not a treatment trial.

There are other studies going on right now, looking at TMS and other aspects of autism (executive function, depression, anxiety) They too are basic studies, not treatment trials.

There may well be a treatment for a component of autistic disability in 5 years. It took 9 years for depression to be approved in the USA, even as it was approved in the rest of the world sooner. As for not taking part . . . no one is asking you to take part. It's there if you want to explore it. Many universities are studying TMS in the context of all manner of issues in the mind. Autism is one of many.

Your reasons for being concerned are all valid. It does not sound like you should be volunteering for research of this kinds. But you might want to watch from the sidelines, and see what develops over the next decade. People expressed the same doubts over many emergent therapies. Some have fizzled and others have become broadly life changing. Time will tell.

It's OK for me to have tried it and be enthusiastic, just as you are reading about it and are very dubious. As you will see in the book, most of my friends thought I was crazy to try it, yet I came out in some ways changed for the better. As the NY Times piece says, there was a high cost.

So it's by no means black and white.

And the question of parents seeking treatment for kids . . . TMS opens lots of ethical questions