Aspies For Freedom

Woah - less of the personal remarks or you'll be banned after your first post!

If you read a little more you will realise that there is no cure for Autism, any more than there is a cure for Down Syndrome, Albinism, fair skin, blue eyes or any other fundemental genetic difference.

The people touting 'cures' are making money out of exploiting people's fears.

The ones touting the 'cures' do not want to cure autistic people of their autism (as that is as impossible as curing somone of their natural skin colour); they want to cure THE HUMAN RACE of Autism - by developing a pre-natal test so that potentially autistic people can be aborted. Just as has happened with Down Syndrome.

I'm sorry, no. I do not think that the fact that the Ku Klux Klan raises awareness of racial problems is in their favour either!

We don't need to be 'cured'.

Exactly who do you think you are addressing on this forum?

The vast majority of us are autistic adults. We had no cure, many of us had no treatment and no recognition until well into adulthood, yet are perfectly happy the way we are.

Instead of hoping for an impossible cure, try seeing the real child you actually have as a worthwhile and precious person in her own right, as we all do.

jpcmich: there is a difference between awareness and hate speech. "autism is a horrible disease that must be cured or prevented" is hate speech, not awareness.

Troll aside, i'm curious about a curebie who also believes in the indigo children crap: isn't the myth that indigo children are going to be mankind's saviours or something equally silly?
Strange

I've re-approved the post by jpcmich on this thread, so that people can see directly the idiocy for themselves. After a day or 2 they'll be banned.

To be honest, I do believe the original post was unnecessarily provocative and inflammatory.

Even the thread title:  Jenny McCarthy's son is not autistic

My curiosity was piqued and -- since this post was in the news/media forum -- I expected to find a link to an article or other piece of evidence to back up this assertion, maybe news of some misdiagnosis.  

But no, instead, there's an opinion piece rant by another AFF member.

Jenny McCarthy may genuinely believe her son to be autistic, he may have been officially DXd and may even be autistic.  

Where we differ is in the cause of autism, because if I understand previous coverage correctly, she believes it to be caused by vaccine damage.

And also in the need for a cure.

Tbh it even strikes me as faintly misogynistic.

Are Christopher Reeve (former Superman actor) campaigning for advances in spinal surgery and other biotechnologies, and Michael J Fox, campaigning about Parkinsons Disease talked about so disparagingly about using their celebrity for what they perceive to be a worthwhile medical cause/issue that personally affects them? Were they called has-been publicity whores?

Does Jenny McCarthy come in for such vitriol because she's an attractive blonde woman?

She may be misguided but she's a mother who's concerned about her child.

Regardless of whether her son is autistic or not, that's hardly relevant to us. What is relevant is how she promotes quack cures, giving false hope to parents, especially parents who have newly diagnosed children and are especially vulnerable to this "autism is a horrible fate that needs a cure ASAP" mentality.

I also don't think it should be in News & Media, though perhaps the rationale for this was because she's in the media and the subject has to do with autism. But maybe General would be a more appropriate place for this type of discussion.

It was rather tricky to determine if this woman was a troll or not but she certainly acted like one...

I think she just laid an egg....

There is some misogyny about this issue.  I did however have a peek at her book in a store one day.  I wouldn't buy it.  

If she just wrote about her son's autism, it would be different but did she really have to include parts about her sleeping fully clothed because she didn't want any part of her husband's penis touching her because she wanted to divorce him?  What does that have to do with autism?  She also claims in her book that she knows more about autism than her doctors do and that she should be given a Phd.  Really?  

"Jenny McCarthy was born on November 1, 1972 in Chicago, Illinois into a middle-class Irish/Catholic family. Her mother was a beautician and her father a steel-mill worker who dedicated their lives to raising their four daughters as well as possible. Jenny was accepted into Southern Illinois University where she studied nursing, but after two years and no more money, Jenny left college to pursue a career in modeling. After begin told she was too voluptuous to be a run-way model, Jenny sent her pictures to Playboy Magazine and was promptly offered to become “Playmate of the Month” for October 1993. The very next year, Jenny was crowned “Playmate of the Year” and set out for Los Angeles, CA. to seek out more fame and fortune as an actress."  

Really so she studied nursing for two years and thinks she knows more than the doctors.  

"At first, Ms. McCarthy ran into some stumbling blocks because she had posed for Playboy, but finally convinced MTV to hire her as the host of a game show called “Singled Out”. Jenny was the only bright spot of the show; her charisma and wit matched with her undeniable beauty propelled the show to instant success. MTV was so impressed they offered Jenny a $500,000 contract to become one of their VJ’s and let her develop her won show. Even NBC gave her a show called “The Jenny McCarthy Show”, but neither lasted very long. Ms. McCarthy has starred in a little less than ten movies (none with any real success) as well as guest shots on several popular TV series over the past few years.  Jenny McCarthy recently divorced her husband of six years, John Mallory Asher,"

I guess she needs the money or why would she be going on all these tv talk shows?   If she really wanted to study autism, she could go back to college unless she is still broke.

I don't think there is much misogyny about this issue.  The bigger annoyance for most of us is that she is obviously airhead material when it comes to medical stuff but since she's pretty and on TV suddenly hosts of relatives and friends become convinced she's a genius and are more than not likely to think we are devilish retards because we don't worship her ideas etc...

That is perhaps overstating it.  In any case, the number of airheads out there who view big time celebrities airheads as part of the intelligentsia make airheads like her much more annoying.  But our culture has treated celebrities like that for a long time.  Reminds me of a person I randomly spoke with who mentioned with some enthusiasm that a whole bunch of pop stars were getting together at a global meeting to discuss what they could do about poverty.  Its as if he thought U2, Elton John, and company were some sort of super heros that could accomplish something other than donating their personal fortunes.  To be fair they can do something, if they direct their energies responsibly.  They can convince a whole bunch of politicians that people care about a subject and try to show a voting record to appeal to the celebrities audience.  So there is nothing wrong intrinsically with celebrities out to save the world but when they start going in any random direction you please it causes damage.  A whole bunch of politicians find themselves itching to support non science because its popular, reputable scientists find themselves wasting resources running PR campaigns to make sure other people's crazy ideas don't cause more health crisis such as measles outbreaks because people stop using vaccines.

When she represents autism as something involving a lot of puke and poop fest and no humanity, people like Jenny McCarthy are likely to lend support to public perceptions that lead to violence against autistics.

As far as whether her son technically has autism or not I couldn't say, never looked up any of the relevant information on him.  I do remember supposedly she claimed a full cure and then backed off to suggest it was just mild personality traits now or something.  But for how many of us generalize the terms autism and Asperger's syndrome together I think we shouldn't get overly technical with how she describes her son.

It's just terribly dangerous when someone proclaims (very loudly, and with applause on such shows as Oprah) that they not only know better than doctors or autistics (who she claims to know nothing about the existence thereof, despite the abundance of autistic bloggers and her self-appointed "Google Phd"), but she also describes autism in extremely negative light, and says vaccines cause it.

Those two together (autism = awful and vaccines = autism) would pose serious threat to public health if people continue to accept these more widely as being valid, despite the absence of evidence. For her to so fervently go to these lengths, and also some of the absurd statements she's made, make her seem very illogical, in the most dangerous ways.

Perhaps that's where you're going wrong?

If you've learnt most of what you know about the autistic spectrum from someone who is very misguided, then you are going to hold a lot of misguided views also.

I do hope that you won't go away.  But instead read more (from this site, places like WrongPlanet and the many, many autistic/aspie blogs out there, and also read the writings of Tony Attwood, Lianne Holliday Willey, Donna Williams and so on, and think a little bit before contributing.

What you've said about a cure, for example, a lot of people will find offensive.   Yes, offered the red pill/blue pill, at some point in the future, some might want to be 'cured', but the vast majority of people on the spectrum on AFF and WrongPlanet don't want to be cured.

Yes, we have some deficits and developmental delays, but we're different, many of us also have gifts and advantages.  For example, my IQ was measured to be 150, if I took a pill to be 'cured', to make me 'normal', like you, I wouldn't be anywhere near so intellectually able.  In some ways, I'm actually better off being Aspie than I would if I were NT.  So it can be quite offensive for someone to come along and have the audacity to start to 'pray' for people like me.  (As well as being against a cure, I'm not a huge fan of other people trying to impose their religion on me either.)

But you're new to all this, and so I'm cutting you some slack, and trying to be welcoming and trying to point you in the direction of more information with alternative, more positive viewpoints, than the negative doom and gloom stuff you've come across to date.  

You have many years of raising your autistic child ahead of you, so it might be good to try to look for some of the positives, to keep you going when the going gets tough, because you will have some tough times, but there is light at the end of the tunnel, as you will find out if you hang around here, the outlook is not necessary as bleak as you feel at the moment.

Or when he grows up and has problems due to autism/comorbids, his mother will tell him that it is all his fault because he was "cured".