Published MDMA/Ecstasy Experiences of Adults on Autism Spectrum

I'm in a master clinical psychology program and am really thinking about doing a study based off of your study! Please update us!!! I currently work with autistic CHILDREN (3-17) but am obviously interested in drug effects (especially MEDICINAL benefits)..!! :)
 
Sweet Tea said:
As someone with experience dealing with Autistic individuals I can tell you your research using Aspergers diagnosed subjects will invalidate your results. Aspergers is the most commonly misdiagnosed form of Autism. I can't tell you the number of children I see that are diagnosed as AS that are not Autistic or even close. They may be a little strange or have trouble making friends. Some were just not raised well by their parents and display anti-social behavior. Instead of the doctor telling the parents their kid is just weird, they get an IEP and steal resources from truly Autistic children. Children that can't walk into a room with an echo because the sound frightens them. Childre that have trouble processing stimuli from their environment, have limited speech function and delayed learning are for whom the Autism diagnosis was intended. If you have enough comprehension to seek out and complete this survey then you are most likely not Autistic. Aspergers is not Autism. If you gave MDMA to a truly Autistic person they would not experience the sense of community you wish to exhibit from your results. It would be a traumatic and frightening experience for them. An Autistic person does not have the capability of expressing their feelings as most of their verbal reactions are taught to them. They see no purpose in verbal communication until they are taught it important for getting what they need. An Autistic person would simply shut down, cover their ears and moan and Stim to deal with the added stimulation and hallucinations from the MDMA. What makes MDMA so great to a neurotypical person is that they understand enough about what they have ingested that the effects are desireable. But imagine if you went to Wendy's and one of the employees put 10 hits of acid in your drink and you had never done LSD before. You would be freaking out because you can't explain these profound changes in your perception, mood and reality. Now imagine if you took all that LSD and were unable to tell anyone what was going on in your head or ask for help. That is what you are doing when you give MDMA to a truly Autistic individual. I think before you begin encouraging MDMA realted studies with Autistic individuals you should determine what causes Autism and recognize that Aspergers is not Autism but a personality disorder. Furthermore, there have been no drugs that are more theraputic to persons with Autism than Speech and Occupational therapy. Good old fashioned one on one, day in and day out repetition, scheduling and education.
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^ this
But I disagree that all austistic individuals, including the low functioning ones, would reject the entirety of the MDMA experience were they to be dosed in any sort of experiment. Most would, I'm sure, but you never can know when describing phenomenon that are novel to science and are based on a large enough pool of particiapants to produce novel results. And in fact that is so much we don't understand about how a drug such as MDMA is really even working on the mind itself because we don't know or understand the mind that much at all -- we know the pharmacology and neuromodalities of drugs and neurotypes and so on, but just like we don't know what someone is thinking in a conventional setting with conventional pschological research in the neurotpical realm, we don't know at all what an autistic person is truly even thinking or feeling, so we don't know how the would respond with this. Their hypersensitivity is even hardly understood, and how many studies have been conducted on them that used non external stimuli (i.e. drugs or certain ingestible foods or chemicals such as carbonated drinks or whatever) in order to gauge overstimulation? The rich emotional response evoked from this sort of drug could have an unprecedented affect on their own personal relationships to stimuli and what we consider their oversensitivity. The bottom line is that we just don't know, and while I agree that Aspbergers syndrom hardly fits the same category as a low functioning autistic (I have known both) I would say that this is really an intruiging field to look into.
 
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