[sci, neuro/psych] Like "Flowers for Algernon", but with Autism, and Real

[siderea]

I maintain the best science fiction these days isn't fiction.

What happens when a treatment for autism abruptly works.

Turns out, being neurotypical isn't quite the unqualified good the neurotypical represent it to autistic people to be.

Oh, ah, PS: there's apparently an apparently effective treatment for autism in trials now.

Comments

Ah, heck...

[thetimesink]

Emotions...

Not quite the same as "light" and "sound".

Good to know though; perhaps an analog to genetic counseling before treatment?

[heron61]

Indeed. One of my partners has Asperger's and that's their biggest issue.

[batwrangler]

I wonder how much the abruptness of the transition contributed to his difficulties? He missed the early learning period where many people learn to read and react to other people's emotional states and then had to acquire a whole new skill set....

[siderea]

Yeah, I expect rather a lot.

[siderea]

Ayup. I'm sort of surprised this was not all over my friends list already, what with the import of it all.

[topum]

Fascinating article

[heron61]

One facet that struck me about this article was that it sounds like a single treatment or perhaps (it isn't clear) a short series of TMS treatments had long term effects, which I didn't think was possible. I'd been considering playing around with TMS, but if this article is remotely accurate, my interest in having anything to do with TMS outside of a carefully controlled therapeutic setting just vanished. Temporary cognitive changes interest me a great dead, potentially permanent cognitive changes do not.

[siderea]

...the whole reason TMS is being studied as a treatment for psychiatric conditions is with the hope they'll work, i.e. the change will be at least somewhat durable.

[nuclearpolymer]

I had the impression that the TMS direct impact was fairly short term, but that someone with a chronic psychiatric condition might be willing to do weekly treatments (or even daily treatments during an acute episode).

Although possibly some side effects, such as learning, could be permanent. (I mean, if you realize that people are making fun of you, and start noticing it, I could believe that once the TMS effect wore off, you'd still notice the mocking because you don't just unlearn all the tells that you became able to notice.) I thought for autism, people thought that there was a cascade of effects leading from a small number of root effects to a wide range of commonly observed symptoms. So the idea is that if a fix is applied anywhere along the process, even if the fix doesn't get at the original root effect, many of the downstream autism effects could be mediated. I think that because some of the cascade steps are "does not learn X because of Y", if Y is temporarily fixed, and X is learned, it can stay learned even when Y is un-

[adelenedawner]

Yes-but. Learning itself can be weird and unreliable with autism; while abrupt or unusual skill loss is most common in early childhood and adolescence, there are plenty of reports of it happening at other times, including well into adulthood. (Abrupt or unusual skill gain, too, though that's not as often noticed by anyone but the individual gaining the skills.)

This does seem like the kind of thing that would be unusually durable for most auties (among those it works for in the first place, and if all it's doing is providing awareness of others' emotions that's definitely not going to be all of us; plenty of us are fine or even better than the average NT at that, or have complicated enough things going on that just changing that one thing isn't going to do much), but that's a 60-80% 'most' in my estimation, not a 95+% 'most' - it's upstream of a lot of other things that can turn out not to be able to sustain the changes in question.