Sorry, I think my first reply was a bit too tangential. To try to bring it back to the topic of the thread...
Of course I wouldn't want a 'cure' for myself. But I feel that is far easier for me to say as a "high-functioning" autistic. That said, I
don't think that all the difficulties I experience are just a result of how society handles it. For instance, I have had high anxiety for as long as I can remember, and as long as my mother was aware of my emotions. I see it as a bit similar to sensory hypersensitivity, except with anxiety: it is easier for me to become anxious and about more things than an NT; my baseline level of anxiety is higher like I'm always 'on alert'.
I don't think this negates the social model of disability, but it is like being almost a different species. Humans are social animals. They have evolved to live in close quarters and rely on each other and shared language and culture. Any human who can't take part in that shared language and culture is at a disadvantage in terms of survival. But it can also be an advantage because they are separate from the 'group think'. It should be no surprise that some of the strengths of autistic people in invention, focus and creativity have a corresponding disadvantage in survival. To have belonging and acceptance, you have to be a lot less independent in thought and manner. If you're going to be independent, you have to separate from the group. But of course those inventions often benefit everyone else in the end, so perhaps having people who are genetically predisposed to be less social/conformist/whatever is essential to the species.
So maybe we can blame nature for not being exact, for just expressing a tendency towards autism so that some of those people will turn out to further the development of the species.
Because there are a lot of people who got the short end of the stick, for whom coping with daily life is only constant struggle, who cannot speak to communicate whatever might be going on in their heads and help others understand. And I think then you just have to look at different ways of coping and what is really in their best interests versus what is just to make their family feel like a "normal family".
For a few people, might it be better to have a 'cure'? I don't think we know what that looks like yet. I know
the people who studied lack of synaptic pruning as a cause of autism have looked at drugs that create normal synaptic pruning in mice and can reverse "austistic-like behaviors". They're still looking for a drug that would have the same effect in humans, but to me...that is scary. ASD isn't like other disabilities--whether mental or physical, they're usually tied to your ability to do a specific thing like see (blindness) or read and write (dyslexia). But ASD is a part of how you think and feel in many ways and as such is more like personality.
What it looks like they're talking about to me is...well, you may know how Temple Grandin had her brain scanned and saw how her visual cortex was more connected than normal? Ah,
here she explains it:
"In 2006, Nancy Minshew and her colleagues performed a method called diffusion tensor imaging on me. They found a huge white fiber tract that runs from deep in my visual cortex up to my frontal cortex. It is located in the brain slice made at the level of my eyes. It is almost twice as large as my sex- and age-matched controls. I used to joke about having a big high-speed Internet line deep in my visual cortex. It has turned out that I really do have one. This may explain my ability to read massive amounts of detailed literature and sort out the details. In my case, abstract thought based on language has been replaced with high-speed handling of hundreds of 'graphics' files."
I think if they restore normal synaptic pruning in autistic people, yes, we would regain those executive functioning and social abilities that are impaired by weak connections between the frontal cortex and the rest of the brain, but we would lose the details. The autistic way of thinking. I don't think you can have it both ways.
Earlier in the same article, she explains the general differences between autistic brains and those of neurotypicals (emphasis added; she also says more about it
here, under "2006 Update to Chapter 1"):
10. DIFFERENT KINDS OF BRAINS
Recent research on the white matter in the brain may provide an explanation for the uneven profile of abilities that is found in many individuals with autism. There are defects in the white matter interconnections between different localized brain regions. Courchesne et al. (2004) called these connections the 'computer cables' that wire different parts of the brain together. The frontal cortex gets less connections than other parts of the brain, but some local areas in the brain may get extra connections (Minshew & Williams 2007). Casanova and colleagues (2006, 2007; Casanova & Trippe 2009) found that the brain of both famous neuroscientists and people on the autism spectrum have more circuits (mini-columns) per square centimeter of brain. They suggest that this may explain savant-like skills. The disadvantage of this type of brain construction is that these small circuits have fewer long-distance connections between distant brain regions that facilitate complex social behaviors.
There is a wide range of brains that should be considered part of normal variation. A brain can be built with larger fast circuits that facilitate social communication or smaller, slower circuits that improve cognition in a specialized area.
In any information processing system, there are always trade-offs. Brains with high-speed connections to many distant areas will be fast and details will be missed. Research shows that normal brains fail to process details that the autistic person perceives (see Happe & Frith 2009; Happe & Vital 2009). My model for visualizing the different types of brains is a large corporate office building. The president (frontal cortex) is located at the top and he has telephone and computer connections (white matter) to offices throughout the building. I hypothesize that in a highly social brain, the frontal cortex has high-speed connections that go mainly to the department heads in the building. The network is fast and details are omitted. In the autistic/Asperger brain, the frontal cortex is poorly connected, but the visual and auditory parts of the brain (technical nerd departments) have lots of extra local connections providing better processing of detailed information.
11. AUTISTIC INTELLIGENCE
Michelle Dawson, a woman with autism, has teamed up with Laurent Mottron, a researcher in Canada, to show that autistic intelligence goes beyond just rote memorization. Instead of using just the Wechsler IQ tests, they tested both normal and autistic children with Raven's Progressive Matrices (Dawson et al. 2007). In this test, the person is shown complicated patterns and he/she has to choose the pattern that will complete a series of patterns. Dawson and colleagues found that the IQ scores for the autistic children were 30-70 percentile points higher on the Raven's compared with the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), while normal children have similar IQ scores when given the Raven's and the WISC. Scheuffgen et al. (2000) found that children with autism can show fast information processing despite poor measured IQ. These results show that autistic intelligence is truly different.
I see this isn't the first time Michelle Dawson has showed up in this thread. Must be a cool lady.
So I think the question is, is it 'worth it' for some autistic people to lose their way of thinking so that they can cope with the world better, or do we need to try harder to develop ways for them to get along in society as they are and acceptance and understanding for those around them? I think in most cases the latter is preferable, even if that involves medication for anxiety, (ethical) therapy, etc. Especially at a young age, it's impossible to know what a child might be capable of, and we know that being nonverbal as a kid doesn't mean someone will remain so or that there is nothing going on upstairs. Even for the severe cases in the show I referenced upthread (Extreme Love), it seemed clear that with a supportive environment, less stressed parents (we know autistic people tend to be sensitive to tension or the overall atmosphere), and better ways of coping (e.g. leaving the kid alone during meltdown rather than restraining him), life significantly improved for both the kids and their families.
I feel like just picking out the most severe cases ends up being more like intellectual discrimination than anything, and why don't we have the same discussion then about Down's Syndrome, etc.? This is reminding me of
Flowers for Algernon, ha--a favorite book of mine in middle school. I think it was an eye-opener for me that intelligence was not the unquestionably good thing I had thought it was. In general, I'm a bit cold and pragmatic, and to me, having an attachment to preserving a life that is clearly suffering is just irrational. But it's not clear to me that that is the case here, or that the benefits of alleviating the frustration and suffering outweighs the cost of changing the autistic person's way of being (even assuming we could set aside issues of consent, development, and where to draw the line). But it does seem that our current systems don't accommodate autistic people or their families anywhere near well enough to say. I do think it's tough on families, and they deserve help. We should be able to care for those at the lower-functioning end of whatever spectrum as a community, not leave families to struggle alone.
I guess that's where I stand right now.
and I could 'come back down' out of NT land into 'my own land' to see what I could learn from it. 
