From Facebook:

[willworker]

"put this on your status if you know someone (or are related to someone) who has AUTISM, My wish for 2010 is that people will understand that autism is not a disease: people with autism are not looking for a cure but for ACCEPTANCE..."
I would argue that

Comments

[spiffystuff]

You forget, autism and aspergers are ACTUALLY an excuse to do whatever you want and have no one criticize you for it, no matter how dumb / rude / gross it is.

*end furry rant*

(yeah I know, it sucks for people who actually have these disorders)

[quartzpebble]

One might want other people to not exercise power over one's life against one's wishes, or force one into painful therapies (electroshock for instance) in hopes of a "cure", however. Both of these are more likely under a disease model imo.

[willworker]

I would argue that that's sort of baby-with-the-bathwater. The obvious example of deaf people and cochlear implants comes to mind, although I admit that there is a difference in that patients with autism are less able to communicate as to whether they want a treatment or not, but to me that's more of a "educate the caregiver" problem than a "say it's not a disease" problem.

Also, electroshock isn't a painful therapy. You get anesthetized, briefly paralyzed, and are given a brief seizure. You don't even wake with any muscle aches (mostly, occasionally the dosing they use isn't quite right) or anything. The only real downside to electroshock is some significant confusion and memory loss right around the therapy session, and some general cognitive dysfunction which, while major and a good reason to choose not to do electroshock, isn't painful per-se.

Steve

[mermit]

Well, at least it's not "autism is caused by vaccines, I would rather my child died (or killed other people children) of a preventable disease than be autistic" or "I'm going to chelate my child to death because I feel guilty about a disorder I did nothing to cause".

Yeah, let's not go there,'cause I can get super worked up in a non-helpful way.

Let me know if you see a bunch of measles or mumps soon, if you can?

[sithjawa]

2) By the definition of the disease, autistic people (classical autism, not merely autism-spectrum) don't look for acceptance, because really they don't care. While sure, broader acceptance of autistic behaviors would be a positive change, if one is truly autistic, one truly doesn't care what other people think, by definition.

I understand that autism is non-integer, much like deafness. That argument seems a little like saying that deaf people by definition don't notice if people verbally insult them.

Although I suspect that what gets called autism is less like a real number and more like a sack full of colored rocks. They all look like colored rocks and people who aren't in charge of the sack don't care if some of them are volcanic, some are colored glass, and some are actually plastic things made to look like rocks.