I was on low-dose gabapentin for a week or so. I wasn’t able to read due to the blurry vision, and quit.
I seem to get nasty overdose effects after two or three days of the minimum dose of most meds.
My hyperacusis and strobe-induced vertigo may be another example, getting nasty aspirin-overdose effects from years of typical dietary salicylates.
Quoted for truth.
I think it would be more a question of informed consent. Autism is a “problem” mostly because NT culture is dominant and unwilling to accommodate. Not to say there aren’t extreme cases but if a cure had been available when I was 12 or 13 or even 20, I might have “consented” to taking it not because my autism hurt me but because I wanted to stop making others uncomfortable.
It’s taken a long time for me to realize that everyone in a relationship needs to contribute. I can’t contribute effectively if I’m assuming what their needs are based on my past experiences with other folks who aren’t autistic. The other person can’t contribute effectively if they don’t know what my needs are.
In the same way, we don’t know how much we’re suffering from autism and how much we’re suffering because people are treating our differences like a disease we have to do all the accommodating for.
I absolutely, positively know I’m suffering from autism. Yes, suffering. From autism. It’s a condition that makes me friendless. No two ways about it.
Not so much of a “like” like, more of an “empathy” one. I feels ya, ya know. 
I’ve never been on Risperdal, but when my brother was a teen, he had what the psychs called an emotional psychosis or something like that. He was on Risperdal for a week before they took him off it.
He has ADHD comorbid with ODD. Any kind of offense or sleight gets him wound up. And you literally can’t ask him to do anything without making it a business transaction in some way.
“Danny please feed the cat when you get home from work today”
“How much are you going to pay me”
“We’re not. Because you don’t want the cat to starve.”
“Fuck you. I don’t normally feed the cat. Tell LDøBë to do it.”
“You know he works till 9.”
“I guess the cat can go hungry until then, if you’re not paying.”
Long story short, Risperdal is terrible. Very blunt tool.
Who says Aspies are incapable of empathy 
Thanks, M_M.
Seriously though, I’ve talked with people who sincerely didn’t know the difference between psychopathy and any other mental health issue or simply difference.
It’s really easy to pathologize stuff that’s just quirky or different for a lot of people. I know I’ve been guilty of it. And I try not to do it now.
Sometimes I think I listened to too much LoveLine as a teen. Dr. Drew Pinski is very good at being authoritative and Adam Carolla is a funny guy. But they had the problem ot constant repetition. To the point that Drew didn’t keep up with the literature and completely trusted his own experience as universally applicable.
I thought the synapse pruning deal was common knowledge.
I’m just saying it’s the only well-supported anatomical difference I know of between the ND and the NTs. So I thought everyone knew that.
Pretty much. The only thing that gets pruned with me are my toes in the bath.
It could well be - I didn’t know a lot of this until this year though. My point was more that rather than removing all signs of autism, there are particularly disabling symptoms that theoretically could be alleviated in the future in isolation of other traits. At the moment there doesn’t seem to be anything that doesn’t have bad side effects.
Psychopathy is interesting, as long as it doesn’t become synonymous with “bad people who want to hurt you”. There are psychopaths who are in long term relationships that are fulfilling to the other person, or who are good to people in general. There aren’t the feelings that might go along with this, but many people are cruel with these feelings and it can be a little like the claim that atheists can’t do good without the prospect of heaven and hell. On the other hand, it would strongly correlate with a more Machiavellian approach to life and lower functioning psychopaths who can’t control themselves as well would be very difficult to be around (with higher functioning people, it would depend on what they wanted - there’s no particular interest in harming you).
I have no idea what the physiological implications of psychopathy are, other than mirror nerouns. And those who use a lack of mirror neurons to their own advantage are probably not suitable for society.
Risperdal for someone exhibiting executive dysfunction without psychotic features? What journals are these psychs reading?
The time he was put on Risperdal, he was psychotic. That little exchange was from last week, it was just to give you a little bit of context for what ODD is like.
If it helps any, I don’t think taking a cure would be betraying anyone. *hugs offered* 
ETA: Edited for clarity.
@popobawa4u - I’ve noticed that you’ve criticised people’s preoccupation with the front of the head over other parts of the body, but would you say that this is a lack of interest in faces compared to other people, or rather a difficulty accessing this information? (I hope you don’t mind me singling you out in this comment; feel free not to answer). I say this because apparently 2/3 of people with ASD have some trouble with processing facial information such as someone’s identity or facial expressions, but not necessarily other identifying information such as someone’s voice or gait.
I actually don’t have this problem - while I can have trouble understanding people at times, it’s not that I can’t recognise them or their expressions. I think for me it’s almost like a problem with processing speed - keeping up a conversation and being aware of all of the information coming from different sources at the same time is too much to manage. I don’t seem to have trouble in facial recognition tests though, as I can focus on that aspect and isolate everything else. Movies are the same - almost everything has a meaning, so especially if the camera zooms in on someone’s expression you can tell that it’s a reaction to whatever was done or said just before. I have no trouble recognising an actor in different movies either, even if their face has been changed. I guess someone with prosopagnosia would have trouble seeing that this was the same person:
It is probably a bit of both. I am not especially interested in “facial expression” because I dispute its value as information. There is lacking a semantic layer, and usually intentionality as well. If feelings were really important to people, it would seem reasonable to me that they would develop a vocabulary about them and communicate them verbally. Also I am skeptical of the significance and persistence of personal identity. An organism can easily embody numerous persons over time, or exist as part of a larger person with multiple organisms. A person is not an organism, a person is a biological network.
In social contexts, people seem quick to dismiss this outlook as pathology, despite the fact that I think that there is more empirical evidence behind my perspective. Although I could simply be biased! The fronts of people’s heads do change with their emotions, but do not directly communicate emotional states from one person to another. And a cohesive feeling of personal identity really does appear to be more of an artefact of how people store and access their memories than anything else. That I think is that trap of mental/emotional/behavioral health being evaluated in purely normative terms. There are no easy answers when scientists and therapists tell me that I am quite correct - but need to adapt to something less optimal simply because others may not be conscious of these things.
I can recognize a head more readily than I used to years ago, because I have worked at it a bit. But I still don’t feel compelled to associate the same head or voice with one specific personal identity. I recognize trends and patterns, but I do not statically identify them. I can relate to needing to sometimes choose a specific sensory mode to work with in communication, and mine has usually tended to be verbal/auditory. This has always been the case, and I would rationalize that this is because compared to other areas of communication it tends to be relatively unambiguous and efficient.
Areas such as “body language” are more or less arbitrary and ambiguous, and often unintentional. I think of the constant flux of emotions as being not unlike a sort of cognitive effluvia. They are vital for knowing the health of the organism, not unlike urinalysis. But they both represent more or less automatic processes rather than anything conscious or deliberate. Which is why I find listening to a person’s speech more respectful than sniffing at their urine or intestinal gas. Those benchmarks of health are crucial, but I do not identify them as being the “person”. So focusing upon their emotions seems to be a non-sequitur like “Nice story, but I need to go because you’ve eaten asparagus and exhibit mild hyerglycemia”. Perhaps they do, but IMO that is not really them, that’s merely their background physiological environment. Of course, taken far enough, this could imply a conceptual mind/body split. But sensory communications allow us to interact as symbolizing our processes of cognition, rather than directly sharing metabolisms. It is still biological, but abstracted.
I find art less problematic because the meanings are often intended to be not strictly semantic. And the conventions are often formalized enough to be studied. And, as you noted above, they are often not all communicated in real time. But simply recognizing expressive conventions does not mean that I like and agree with them. Being something of a (semi-retired) video artist who has had a tiny bit of experience in screenwriting and film preproduction, I have often considered devising a deliberate “autistic cinematic language” which completely omits any “eye contact” or reaction shots in favor of deliberate gestures and/or directly visual symbolism. This is also a reason why I grew up listening to a lot of “radio drama” and other such audio stories, the medium forces people to articulate more in language.
I did not always recognize John Cleese in my earlier years. but have been watching them for about 35 years, so have had a long time to map their characteristics. But still, I recognize Cleese as being the same organism, without presuming that they are automatically the same person. Of course, in daily life, I might not have years to recognize who I am presented with - unless we are formally brought together as neighbors, workmates, etc.
I am classically autistic and faceblind. I can’t tell people apart by face at all, but I do a pretty good job working off size/shape, mannerisms, voice, etc.
If someone gets a haircut, I have difficulty recognizing them at first. I also can’t recognize myself in the mirror if I’ve gained or lost a lot of weight.
You dispute its value for yourself (subjective statement) or for others as well (objective statement)? It sounds like the latter but I want to make sure before I respond.
This perceived lack of value of facial expressions may be especially pronounced with autistic people because of the “double-mindblindness” effect: it can be difficult for NT and autistic people to decode each other’s emotional signals, so while an NT might see a lot of successful communication normally and problems mainly with certain individuals (such as autistic people), autistic people could be constantly misreading other people’s signals and constantly being misread themselves. If the signal quality is that bad, maybe a clearer signal should be used.
On the other hand, I see a lot of problems with miscommunication around me; it’s certainly not just something that autistic people face, but they seem to have fewer assumptions that social cues should be trusted in the first place. I’ve often wondered why I came to a similar conclusion apparently without having the communication problems that would precipitate it (since I score better than average on most ToM tests). This is one possible answer:
The idea that people with ASD lack social skills and social cognition is based on years-old studies involving younger subjects with autism who also had lower cognitive abilities. Today we are beginning to recognize that ToM correlates significantly with IQ, especially verbal IQ, meaning that today’s growing population of higher functioning people on the spectrum may not be accurately represented. Recent studies with more able adults with high functioning autism or Asperger’s Syndrome have shown that their social cognitive abilities are far better than we used to think. This research suggests that a shift in thinking may be needed. Specifically there is a difference in the social potential (social cognitive ability) of people with ASD and their social performance (mind reading in real life).
This may explain why I could comment on the appropriateness of a person’s actions if I observed them on TV or in real life, but I could make the same mistake in the moment (and then realise what I’d done later on, or when it’s obvious that I’d made a mistake).
