Asking because my gf has ADHD and she told me that, the first time she took ritalin (methylphenidate), she thought to herself “So this is what it feels like to not have ADHD?”
That got me thinking, is there a drug that has a similar effect on autists, that allows them to experience what is it like to “not have autism”?
@ICastFist Not really, with ADHD it’s primarily a chemical imbalance which means like 90% of the issues can be cleared chemically (ie. medication). It’s not exactly a “normal” experience, but it’s way closer than it was.
Autism on the other hand is broad and neurological, so much of it has to do with the actual physical structures of our brains (like density of nerve clusters), and there’s nothing that can be done about that.
Don’t forget that adhd can result in underdeveloped areas and overdeveloped areas when left untreated.
Edit: what about a GABA drug like GHB?
@SCmSTR that’s why I said primarily, but I recognize that was a subtle distinction and not very clear.
I don’t think any medication is going to really make us have an allistic experience, we can sometimes use medication for some comorbidities, but the things that make us autistic are too fundamental.
I realized in reply to someone else that I could have pointed out that we do have one occasion where we have something resembling an allistic experience, and that’s when we’re associating with other autistics.
They’ve done studies and our “social difficulties” disappear when we’re only interacting with other autistics.
It’s because our social issues are outside expectations and not a problem with us, we operating in an autistic manner. But because the world treats allistic norms as the only right way, we’re forced to accommodate them and they refuse to accommodate us… so we get difficulties. When we’re interacting with other autistics we’re basically using the same protocol, so everything is fine.
It’s still not entirely an identical experience, but it’s the closest we’ve got. We still have fundamental differences in our entire sense of selves (the recent Identity Theory of Autism highlights how we structure our identities in a completely different way from allistics, it’s why we typically don’t understand “school spirit” or “peer pressure”)