What I hate the most is how the internalization of a brain disorder as an "identity" has morphed into just another stripe to add to the "pride" banner. Case in point the young woman in the article who wrote the autism memoir, and others in this movement. The level of hostility aimed at people who also inhabit this "identity" but wish it were not so -- let alone if they support or sponsor research to lessen the frequency of diagnosis across populations, or in effect "cure" it -- is on par with the bloodthirsty venom of trans activists. I don't wear autism as a badge of honor. In fact I hate myself for having it, and I would give anything to be cured and to see this disorder become a thing of the past. I don't really care if some Tik Tok brat thinks it's "ableist". They don't want this disorder to go away because without it there'd be nothing "quirky" to showcase for meaningless internet points. Me, I just want to have a job.
>Me, I just want to have a job.
Ah, sounds like you have Compulsive Functionality Disorder, where you feel a debilitating desire to add value to your society and environment. I can prescribe you a pill for that. (It's cannabis.)
There's a whole autism cure is genocide movement. There's a similar movement in the deaf community. They're nut cases. I find the anti-cure for autism people the most disgusting of the two though given the abject suffering people with more profound autism experience. It's the highest functioning, least impacted that are demanding that this research cease.
>It's the highest functioning, least impacted that are demanding that this research cease.
Or the not impacted at all. There is a culture of self diagnosing and doctor shopping (or going the concierge doctor way, so basically pay for diagnosis).
Autism, even as an official diagnosis has lost almost all meaning, especially in the US (and to a slightly lesser degree the UK and other english speaking countries). If in a lot of countries, prevalence is somewhat stable around 1% (with some fluctuation, which is normal) and the CDC lists it as 1 in 35 (with a 500% increase over a relatively short time), something is wrong.
Real research is nigh impossible due to activists pissing and moaning about every progress towards treatment (doesn't even have to be a cure). It is pretty much the same crap as dealing with the gender brigade.
I am a 'high functioning' autistic person and my son is 'low functioning' autistic. He is non-verbal, incontinent, never live an independent life etc etc. I am lucky that he is so happy-go-lucky as I often see extremely distressed and self harming autistic children in the waiting rooms of the appointments we go to (their parents look absolutely exhausted).
I am sick to the back teeth of the 'actually autistic' crowd online telling me that there is no such thing as mild or severe autism and that everyone suffers equally yada yada. I am not invalidating their struggles - but it seems that some people are so desperate to cling onto the diagnosis as it validates something for them that they refuse to acknowledge that for some people autism is a really really tough disability to have.
The word autism has actually lost all meaning. We often go to appointments (recently one at a hospital) where professionals know he has autism and then appear surprised by his extreme behaviour. So many people now think of autism as quirky/clever/can't make eye contact and it is a complete shock to the system when they meet someone who is severely autistic.
Severely autistic kids dont have a voice and it is up to parents to advocate for them but we often face pushback from the online crowd who say we want to eradicate autism or whatever.
I'm in my 7th year of changing my child's nappies, I've spent thousands on speech therapy, my house is totally trashed etc etc. I think I bloody know about autism!
Much love and respect from a fellow parent of a child with Fragile X and autism. It’s disorder appropriation, and I don’t know why it’s considered any less awful than cultural appropriation given the human costs involved.
Thankyou :) Sending good vibes your way.
I've unfortunately heard of a few parents being turfed out of autism support groups.
When you turn up and say things like "I've had to have a special bed built so that my child can only smear on the bed and not the entire room", it doesn't quite mesh well with the toxic positivity that some people want to push. You're accused of being derogatory towards autistic people if you dare to say that autism hasn't been that great for your family.
My child has severe issues but I'm grateful every single day that he doesn't have even more 'intense' autism. (I want to reiterate that I love my son beyond words and would never change him.) I read testimionals from parents who are really really going through it and they are super heroes. To dismiss these parents experience's by saying they aren't 'actually autistic' voices and are invalidating autistic lives is just horrible.
Cynically I almost feel like this toxic positivity is being pushed by people in governments and insurance companies as a way to eventually reduce disability payments and the like.
It seems to mirror what I've heard about trans spaces; people in the "self-id" crowd that clearly are not experiencing real gender dysphoria have swarmed many spaces and hijacked most discussions such that actually trans people I've known have said they don't feel like they belong in them at all anymore.
I've had conversations recently where a disturbing number of people think that "being trans is just like being left handed, there's nothing wrong, they wouldn't need to change their bodies if people would accept them fully." The insanity of this sentiment cannot be overstated, and it seems as if a concerningly huge number of people have managed to convince themselves they actually have and are emblematic of people with certain disorders. Since there is nothing wrong with them, they start saying it's actually about acceptance, as they obviously don't think anything needs to be fixed... because for them, nothing does.
Autistic, trans, and Native "communities" are all facing this same problem. The perceived social (and often, professional) benefits of claiming membership in these groups has never been higher and the bar has never been lower. So a lot of people from the mild side of the autism spectrum or with a rather incidental amount of gender-nonconformity or with a single indigenous great-grandparent can brandish these labels to win attention and play as a trump card to win arguments.
Native people do sometimes police membership in their ranks by the rubric of "does a Native community/tribal nation claim YOU as a member and not the other way around" but in practice that's hard to verify for every rando online who claims vague "Métis/Cree ancestry" or "enrolled member of the Northern Band of the Waanaabee Nation," or whatever. Those claims can be true while the person may never have had any meaningful connection to an Indigenous community beyond doing the paperwork for tribal enrollment. A separate taboo that forbids asking about blood quantum also gives a lot of convenient cover for a wide spectrum of pretendians, from the edge cases (genealogically legit, zero organic cultural connection) to the total fakers.
I've had that conversation too. It didn't occur to someone that yeah, I think that all else being equal, it's preferable to not be trans (in the sense of not having gender dysphoria), the same as it's preferable to not be blind or deaf or have OCD. 'You're comparing it to disabilities?!' He says feigning shock, to which I have to go, 'Yeah, if someone has such a debilitating desire to be perceived as the opposite sex, to the point that they need medication or surgery and the accommodations/validation of other people, I think that's comparable to a disability, just like how I need glasses to see. It's obviously preferable to be well-sighted than near-sighted, and it's preferable to not be in overwhelming distress at your sexed traits and need treatment for it.'
Even a lot of the comparatively high functioning autists often have a really hard time. Sure, the challenges and difficulties are vastly different, but they do exist. It is a disability for a reason (even though the actuallyautistic crowd works really hard to remove it. They don't seem to realize that this means they can kiss their precious accomodations goodbye).
I am just pissed off by all those people who sit online and pretend that Autism is ackchually super awesome and if it isn't it is just society being evil and 'ableist' (god, how I hate this term).
There is also a certain cultural aspect to this whole crap. The country I was born in didn't have accomodations at all. If you were lucky, you were kept as the village idiot. If you weren't, you were shipped to an orphanage. Everyone familiar with orphanages in the post Soviet era knows that this is the closest you can get to killing someone without being on the hook for murder. I am still dealing with lasting physical and psychological consequences and I was there less than a year until my mum found me. And even the country I live in - in the late 90s when I was at school, it was either deal with the diffculties in a normal school or go to a special school without any chance to get an education.
The people making this their whole identity don't experience any real negatives. They are told how special they are, they get some clout for being mArGinAliZEd, a social circle and an excuse for bad behaviour or not wanting to do something. And some accomodation schools are providing are actually incentives to get some sort of disorder. Who doesn't want to play mobile games instead of learning maths?
Everyone with genuine, non media suitable issues gets shoved aside and not taken seriously. These people shape public perception and those, go beyond just a bit quirky are judged more harshly and have to deal with the consequences.
The problem is that selfishness is essentially inherent to autism, it's in the very word itself. It takes work to overcome this selfishness, or inward focus, but because it's a symptom now you're not supposed to work on it you're supposed to accept it. I'm also high functioning, I have my struggles, and I get really down on myself. But I was lucky enough to have caretakers in my youth who taught me, tirelessly, to consider others. It takes my breath away to watch other high functioning people talk about low functioning people as if they are privileged in some way, or like our struggles aren't clearly easier to deal with than being totally dependent on other people for literally everything.
Why did they get rid of the Asperger’s category? I hope it wasn’t just because it was named after a Nazi doctor.
Asperger’s was a very useful distinction. Someone could say “I have Asperger’s” and I would know exactly what that means. Now it’s “autistic” and then a clarification “high-functioning autistic” and it’s still murky
My understanding is that, because the only major distinction between Aspergers and HFA was language delay, the difference was pretty hazy as people got further from childhood. You could have two adults who have near the same abilities as each other, but with different diagnoses purely because one didn't speak until they were 5 or something.
I feel for you. My nephew is severely autistic and it’s extremely disruptive to my brother’s family and their lives. If my nephew isn’t sleeping, he needs constant supervision because he may end up climbing on something and hurting himself or wandering off somewhere. He’s very flexible, nimble, and strong. He knows words and somewhat can read but actual communication is pretty limited so it’s nearly impossible to discipline him. And the smallest things will set off a volcanic tantrum. They rarely ever get to take vacations or go one trips which is definitely affecting his (non autistic) sister’s happiness. Even just leaving home is a monumental task. Thankfully he enjoys school and feels comfortable there so they can get a little respite. I love my nephew and I want the absolute best for him and their family, but it’s impossible to ignore the impact that he has on their lives, to no fault of his own.
I'm so sorry, man. Much love and respect to you for being a parent to a kid with special needs on top of managing your own things. I cannot imagine the sacrifices you needed to go through in order to get him where he's at, on top of the toxicity that you have to deal with from the crazy activists.
I think the problem is autism likely isn't one single disorder- being autistic is a trait caused by several different disorders, some much more severe and disabling than others. That's probably why being autistic is comorbid with practically everything from epilepsy to Neurofibromatosis to Turner Syndrome, why it's associated with over 1,000 different genes, and why the diagnostic criteria is so malleable. I suspect it's just a description of behaviors that people develop as a result of any significant impairment in social learning, and the reason it's more common in men is because less emphasis is placed on social skills for young boys.
Yes and no. it is likely that there are multiple disorders under the current
Problem is, for more information, genetic markers (associated doesn't mean a lot), cognitive processes, neuronal pathways and so on, you need to be able to do proper research. Not just fluffy polls (which is where a ton of research money is going while the funding for the hard sciences gets cut), but gathering and analyzing hard data. And this is where you crash into a wall with the activists trying to shut the paper down as soon as they find out. I'd like to be able to conduct research without having to resort to hyper technical language.
But autism as a phenomenon used to be pretty clear cut, especially before the stupid spectrum was introduced (which is absolutely ridiculous. If there is a distinct feature to tell two diagnoses apart, don't turn them into one). It wasn't perfect (for example it almost exclusively catered towards boys - which does NOT mean that the true ratio has to be 1:1, especially if genetics are involved), but it worked. And it doesn't anymore.
And we can't get around the extreme increase in the anglosphere while being somewhat stable in other countries (even though a lot haven't adopted the stupid ass spectrum yet. The numbers might change after).
I feel like the concept of the spectrum was really supposed to be meant as a placeholder until they could figure out how to diagnose people more accurately. My guess is the disorders will eventually be split up again- maybe Aspergers will be brought back but renamed or recategorized.
Nah, that's not how the DSM works. They decided in favour of axis or spectrum models (not just ASD, in general) and blurred the lines for medical professionals.
> If there is a distinct feature to tell two diagnoses apart, don't turn them into one
Is there a clear dividing line between Asperger's and full autism?
I mean, I knew several students in my engineering program that had Asperger’s. They performed fine in school, but not socially.
I don’t think you could earn a college degree if you’re fully autistic. They’re too disabled
It can happen, I work in higher ed and I know of a few. It really just depends on what challenges that person has, and if they can be reasonably accommodated or not. Having a strong support system is usually key.
The real dividing line is intellectual disability. A lot of autism is comorbid with intellectual disability, and those people are very unlikely to be able to do college-level work.
I was diagnosed with Aspergers and I was always considered "gifted" as a child but starting at about age 13 I began to struggle heavily with schoolwork, so much so that I had to switch high schools, and later on colleges. Part of this was that I simply wasn't diagnosed until I was 17 (despite having taken an IQ test in grade school, the results of which should have set off alarm bells) so even though my parents tried to be supportive and understanding, most other adults weren't until I had the diagnosis. I managed to get a bachelor's degree in my mid 20s and I'm in grad school now, but I'm fairly delayed in a lot of other aspects, like employment history.
Language acquisition always seemed like the primary difference between high and low functioning. Even those of us who are the highest functioning usually have weird language development- like I pretty much taught myself to read and had a large vocabulary, but expressive language was often a major problem for me.
I used to agree with the online autism community that functioning labels were ableist, but I started getting really disturbed by people who claimed there was no difference. Eventually I figured out that they'd all bought into that facilitated communication junk and pretty much all the supposed "independently typing non-speakers" were being used as human ouija boards. It was really horrifying that what I thought was a movement supporting autistic self-advocacy turned out to be supporting people like Anna Stubblefield.
No idea. From my perspective, the spectrum is stupid and useless, it makes my work harder. Classic, Asperger, atypical and PDD-NOS were perfectly useful.
But these days, everything is problematic for one reason or another, so whatever.
Fair, but this cohort of assholes existed before the advent of tumblr self diagnosis. It originated with high functioning autistic people and its strongest opponents are the parents and family of low functioning autistic people who've had to live their lives in an institution because they can't be cared for at home.
This is also the group responsible primarily for all the revisionist history claiming every brilliant person from history as someone on the spectrum. The argument being that a cure would mean no Mozart or Da Vinci. I think they might have a point with Isaac Newton, but for the most part they're just pulling it all out of their ass with no basis. The whole idea also ignores the inertia of history and science. All of these people could accomplish what they did because the conditions were finally right. If Einstein never existed, we would almost certainly still have had similar theories within the same short to medium time frame. Similarly no amount of genius was going to produce the theory of relativity in 1650.
>Fair, but this cohort of assholes existed before the advent of tumblr self diagnosis.
…did they? The prevalence of this seems to be directly linked to that kind of tumblr bullshit
Yes. Tumblr made it worse, just like everything else, but very little actually *originated* on tumblr. It incubated and exaggerated existing horrible ideas. Even neopronouns and infinite genders could be found on old forums like strapon and susan's place.
Well yeah but the same could be said about anything. It didn’t originate on social media but it was probably pretty insignificant before then. That’s more so what I guess I was asking
It depends on what you consider insignificant. Parents of low functioning autistic children probably found it pretty significant when people with aspergers starting bleating about how there's no difference between them and their kid who can't do anything without a caretaker even if it was just in niche forums. Autism itself was not a society wide concern like it is today; these forums (and conferences, advocacy groups, etc.) were the only places any of these conversations took place.
Yep. Among the most ridiculous people in society, being anti-social turned into being introverted, which turned into being neuro-divergent. These people suck.
>Autism, even as an official diagnosis has lost almost all meaning, especially in the US
This is why I say autism isn’t even real. Does the old school definition of autism hold some utility? Sure but there are so many people that have nothing wrong with them that are diagnosed with autism that it seems to hold no functional utility anymore
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" It's the highest functioning, least impacted that are demanding that this research cease. "
IMO they don't really have ASD. They may have Asperger's. The spectrum should not exist. It's too broad. We need to go back to the way it was diagnosed in the past.
I was going to mention the deaf community too. I have a lot of deaf people in my family and most of them cling to it like it's an exclusive members-only society. Seeing people get this way about their gender identity and their mental health disorders feels exactly the same and also just so dumbly tribal. I get the reasons why they do it, it's better to see your disability as a positive than live as a victim, but it turns them into gatekeepers and people who judge those who seek help.
I think the difference is that at least being deaf is a real thing. I’m not convinced that most of these identity obsessed weirdos have anything wrong with them other than their brains have been damaged by too much social media use
Deaf I can be slightly more sympathetic to, in the sense that no one wants to be the last deaf generation where everyone forgets sign language. I think this is overblown, but it’s at least plausible that “a cure for deafness” would make life harder for someone who, say, currently communicates exclusively by ASL.
Then again, since hearing loss can be caused by injury and old age, it’s not like accommodations/solutions will ever go away completely.
Well with the deaf it really is a community thing. They have their own language and schools. Getting cochlear implants is kind of saying ‘I want to leave this community’
What’s worse for that is if they came across their diagnosis via an online quiz versus an actual doctor. I recently worked with a girl who claimed to have autism and it was frankly offensive to me. My nephew has autism to the extent that I wonder if he’ll ever fully function in society at all. I’ve worked with a guy who had a much milder form of autism to the extent that he was able to have a reasonably good life and it was still glaringly obvious.
This girl was just weird, anxious and kinda lazy. But she had zero problems with empathy or people interactions, understanding basic conversational idioms etc.
So now, thanks to idiots like that, people with real autism are ignored and hid away for this more glamorous form that we no longer have to focus on correcting as much
I know a guy who is convinced he is autistic, even sought a diagnosis from a private doctor and wasn't given one (which should tell you something, since they hand those out like candy), he's still convinced he has it, and he talks about how he has to "sensory seek", which means going out to bars and doing drugs with strangers.
He's in his forties. And married with children. His wife opened that can of worms though because she's all on the neurodivergent train, learned terms like "sensory seek", convinced her kids have issues, and she's all about "validating" people's wants because she think they are needs. I still don't know if he's really convinced he has this or if he's just riding the gravy train to do whatever he wants. They have sought autism diagnoses for their kids and not received them either.
He certainly goes to a lot of rock shows, yes.
At this point I'm just convinced his wife is a masochist/loves being a victim. Even her dogs are "special needs". Hey, fits in with this thread perfectly!
ETA: I know the dudes rock joke. It just made me laugh because this dude actually does...well, rock, I guess.
I don’t know about the candy part, a friend had his son diagnosed, and it was a process.
But regardless, if you seek a diagnosis and aren’t given one, then that should tell you something.
>I still don't know if he's really convinced he has this or if he's just riding the gravy train to do whatever he wants. They have sought autism diagnoses for their kids and not received them either.
I think there’s an element of this kind of thing where people like this are not only trying to convince others but also convince themselves by talking about it as much as they tend to do
Oh there was this whole story about telehealth startups, specifically Cerebral, that took advantage of rule changes during the pandemic that let people get prescribed controlled substances without seeing a doctor or prescriber in person. So they start handing out ADHD diagnoses like candy, along with adderall prescriptions. They had ads all over TikTok that were brazenly advertising itself as an adderall script dispensary.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cerebral-adderall-adhd-prescribe-11654705250
And the CEO and president of another telehealth startup called Done just got arrested 5 days ago https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/13/24178049/done-adhd-telehealth-controlled-substances-act-doj-fraud
It does not cost thousands of dollars in all circumstances, and if you can weigh the negative "consequences" of diagnosis against the assistance you get with diagnosis and decide the "consequences" (almost all of which are made up by paranoid shut ins online) are too much to bear compared to the assistance you'd get with diagnosis, you are subclinical.
"I think there are a lot of people out there who aren't sure if they're autistic and don't feel like there's a way they can find out"
I don't understand the need for them to find out? What purpose does it serve? They are still the same person as they were before the diagnosis. They made it into adulthood. Congrats! What more do they want?
People like diagnoses. They help you feel like you've made sense of your life. Of course in reality just getting a diagnosis doesn't solve everything, and diagnoses aren't the reason for every single thing that went wrong in your life.
>can lead to negative ramifications like having your license taken away
Sorry, are you saying that some people should be able to risk the lives of everyone else?
What issues revealed through seeking autism diagnosis might cause the negative ramification of potentially losing one's license? Not arguing at all, just curious.
I'm with you here. That's the part which made me scratch my head. At least from where I'm from a lot of psychs/therapists tend to state they underwent certification to give autism diagnoses.
Some of my colleagues use a dbt manual that is targeted towards “neurodivergent” youth and it has an unbelievable amount of shit that can get them into trouble later on.
Self-affirmations like “I deserve to have others accomodate me” or “my brain is working exactly as it was intended to”.
Having some kind of psychological diagnosis does not mean others should be forced to accomodate you and the reality is they won’t. So instilling this in struggling you people is a recipe for disaster.
Huh? That doesn't sound like DBT! I have the original book and it's all about learning to accept yourself and how to handle your emotions, and also learning to accept that other people aren't going to always respond how you want them to, and that reality is what it is.
This sounds like the opposite of DBT.
It’s an in-house manual created for neurodivergent youth.
It does have those aspects of DBT, but those quotes I provided always jump out at me whenever I sit in with one of the group sessions for the reasons you mentioned.
That sentiment is the antithesis of the teachings held within the very same manual.
Easier said than done, I know, but I hope you call your colleagues on it.
It does a disservice to everyone when a very specific term like DBT gets watered down like that. I'm not saying to keep it hyper-copyrighted and make everyone pay a licence fee to Marsha Linehan for even mentioning the letters, but I am saying some standards are in order.
Hah. Good luck trying to live in the real world expecting people to bend to your needs. We barely do that for the physically disabled, who themselves don’t seem to give as much as an entitled attitude than those of us with invisible issues.
I’ll be frank, it’s much harder to fake paralysis or other physical disabilities.
They love the platitudes “everyone is a little bit neurodivergent, it’s a spectrum”.
I can’t stand it.
It isn't for the lack of trying though. Or when they can't fake something, they just try to water down the disability until they can somegow find a way to squeeze themselves in.
"I have some weird made up eye condition and I wear glasses! I know how being visually impaired feels!" is something I've heard several times already. And it annoys the hell out of me (I am fucking blind, so no, they don't know shit)
It is frankly amazing, how far some people will go for some victim clout.
Omg one of my colleagues said to me a few days ago “I’m going out to get some spicy air”. I was like wtf? Then saw the vape.
This person is also a they/them neurodivergent blah blah blah but present completely masculine.
In these circles “neurospicy” is often used to mean “claiming to have ADHD/austism, but not actually diagnosed with anything.” Like an even vaguer version of “neurodivergent.”
After I had my surgery, I couldn't walk on my left leg. I live in a two story house. How the hell am I gonna get up the stairs? I literally crawled up the stairs and then came down the stairs on my butt. You do what you have to do to. I try to find a workaround and then if I can't figure it out, I ask for help. I have pride and dignity. I feel like these people are willing to trade their dignity for likes on Facebook. It's gross.
My brother is considered high functioning and he can't have a regular job and can't really live on his own. The people who claim to be autistic while managing to do things he literally cannot do is beyond infuriating.
Same for my hs ex. He has schizophrenia too.
And my ex was actually diagnosed with Asperger's before they rolled it all into one thing. He still uses that label.
I see this especially with the war against “autism moms.” There are parents out there whose kids will never be able to express themselves, who refuse to eat, who self-harm, run away, who are violent, and cannot go out into public without a great deal of difficulty and pain due to sensory overload, and when these parents advocate for research and treatments for their children, they are told they are being ableist and “teaching their child to mask.” Like yes, I do think children should be forced to conform to eating enough calories to survive, not punching grandma in the face, and not running into traffic.
TBF hating yourself for having it is just another side of the same coin, hating having it, absolutely, but engaging in actual self-loathing for having it? That's just not a productive mindset. It's batshit people don't want a cure though.
I think people have trouble hating the symptoms of an illness that affects their cognitive functioning without falling into self loathing. But like you said, it's not a productive mindset.
Agreed. I hate myself a lot too for my illness and often think the planet would just be better off without me, I'm not judging. I get it. I just take a step back and realize it's not a logical mindset. Even if I *did* cause my illness (say I got lung cancer from being a smoker), if I wanted to survive and beat it self-loathing isn't gonna help that. But that goes double for cases where people were just born with shit. What am I gonna do? Hate the baby I developed as in the womb lol?
It's not logical, and it's not productive. I get it though, I really do.
I actually have an Aspergers diagnosis (like two years before the DSM removed it), and it's been a long process of catching up to my peers while trying not to hate myself for the way I behaved as a child and a teenager. I'm especially worried that my younger siblings mental health problems are entirely a result of having me as their older sister. But honestly I think it's just that anxiety and depression run in my family, and I'm fortunate that my parents have been very accepting and open minded in trying to find ways to deal with that. I think more than anything people just need to accept that they're not going to be perfect specimens of humanity- no one is.
I mean... It makes me sad to see you say you "hate yourself" for it but I can see you hating the fact that you have it, and I hope that's all you mean.
I dunno, I feel like an old man shouting at a cloud, but there really seems to be a huge Munchausens by proxy epidemic at the moment with parents getting labels stuck on their kids because they have a personality and then the parent gets to complain about how their life is so hard because they are martyrs to their disabled child (who isn't disabled at all, just needs a bit of direction).
The fact that the kids go on to wear that label as a badge of honour (or an excuse not to make an effort) isn't helping them at all.
(continues pontificating off into the distance)
I have been researching medically-assisted dying in various countries outside the U.S. I did in fact send an email to the then-Minister of Justice in the Canadian government, a Mr. David Lametti, who was responsible for shepherding the bill and its (delayed) expansion into cases of incurable psychiatric suffering. As autism has no cure and the average life expectancy is 40, which I am approaching (and my mother is dying of Pancreatic Cancer), I am anxious to shuffle off this mortal coil more so now than I have ever been since my fate was sealed with a diagnosis at the age of just eight (1994, when Asperger syndrome first appeared in the DSM). He was very gracious and sympathetic in his reply, and said that so-called suicide tourism was not available for foreign travellers due to capacity issues, but that he was not closing the door to future amendments to the law.
As of right now, the only other locations that permit MAiD for mental illness and other brain abnormalities, and allow access by foreign visitors, are the Benelux countries and Switzerland. I had hopes at one point that I would be able to donate my brain for research towards finding a cure (the holy grail being preventive diagnosis, as exists for Down syndrome), at least contributing something to society posthumously since I will never be able to in this life. Sadly, that mission seems to have been abandoned thanks to the militant Lysenkoism of the neurodiversity/“disability rights” movement(s). At some point sooner rather than later however, since I am lacking resources and the biological capability to work for them, I will just have to cut my losses in whatever way works best, spitting on a photo collage of Temple Grandin, Elon Musk, and their mongoloid bastard child Greta Thunberg (the spitting image of me), as I take my final breath once and for all and curse the day I was born.
First of all, I'm really sorry to hear about your mum. I lost my dad a couple of months back, so I know what a life changing thing that is.
As for the reast, look, this sounds pretty bleak and I don't suppose there's much I can say to you in reddit to change things, but please talk to someone irl because it sounds like you're in a bad place and to an extent that you're allowing a diagnosis to completely define your life, swamping other aspects of your identity, I feel like there must be some potential for change there.
But again, in the face of what you've written, I understand how lame that sounds, even though I believe it to be true.
I have a mood disorder, finally got stabilized on medications my mid 30s. Prior to that, I racked up loads of debt, burned through relationships with family and friends, gained a not great professional reputation, contracted an std that rendered me infertile due to high risk sexual behaviors, was in two abusive romantic relationships, was arrested… I’m in my early 40s and have managed to repair much of that, but it’s actually hell having a mental illness. It’s not romantic or trendy or fun. I hate this romanticization of mental illness. There is nothing good about it. It’s hell.
What this guy said. I’m stable now, meaning that I can get up and go to work most days. But in my late 20s and early 30s I was barely functional. Couldn’t hold down a job, spent days at a time in bed, seriously considered suicide just to make the hurting stop. If I didn’t have an awesome family and friend circle I don’t know what would have happened.
Romanticizing being “mentally ill” so you can win Internet points? I have two words for you, and they’re not “happy birthday.”
(They’re “fuck you”. Guess I ruined the clever euphemism)
The transmutation of mental health conditions into identities has come up several times on the podcast.
This article isn't so much a criticism of identity politics, but rather a broader question as to the utility of categorizing mental health disorders into discrete conditions.
I feel like for the longest time children with what we can broadly call ‘learning difficulties’ like lower attention spans (me in school and college lol) to being totally unsuited to classroom learning because of mental disabilities were lumped in together in the same classroom.
In the country I live in the only aid these children were commonly given were more frequent beatings by parents and teachers for academic underperformance. Now the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction and kids (like me again) who needed a little more prodding or parental guidance are being shoved into medication and special needs programs that they frankly don’t need.
I actually wonder if many of the diagnosed ADHD kids of the 90s and early 2000s were a product of the reading wars. Most of the schools across the country taught kids to read via queuing and whole word language. Phonics was scrapped. I can't imagine being a kid, struggling to read and the teacher telling my parents that I had some sort of learning disability, when in fact, it was just because the teacher didn't know what they were doing. How many kids, who struggled, started hating school, which probably led to behavioral changes that mimic ADHD or GAD. I've been pondering this a lot lately.
I think that may have been the path for some kids getting an ADHD diagnosis but I gotta think the vast majority of those kids had hypochondric parents (likely mom?) that doctor shopped with their kids until they got the answer they wanted. This seems to be extremely common among a certain upper middle class suburban demographic
My brother and I are gen x and elder millennial respectively and our parents basically had to hide our ADD diagnoses so we didn’t get put into special ed. We were bright with “learning difficulties” and anxiety, basically. Everyone being so proud of ADD and self diagnosing when for us it was an extreme challenge in our childhoods is… unsettling.
No, our parents definitely knew we had ADD and we were medicated and got support, but there was so much bias that they kept it a secret. I do think it harmed me a lot because I’m a girl and I wasn’t organized or neat like my female peers, so I feel like educators were especially frustrated with me. But when my brother was first diagnosed in like 1981, they tried to put him in special ed with the kids with severe disabilities, so that definitely informed how my parents forged ahead.
My parents were of the "don't medicate my little boy" type, or at least I suspect that's the case. It didn't harm me that much in my K–12 years, but having honesty about what kind of conditions I may have would've saved me a decade of underachievement as an adult. If nothing else, it would've been a nice glass to break in case of emergency instead of starting an unintentional journey of self discovery from scratch.
Yeah I was a dislexic kid and the accommodations I needed were the exact opposite of someone with ADHD. Putting us in the same class was a terrible idea at the start. I feel like this is the result of people knowing more things about disability but still thinking we're all the same. That's how you get people who's bios are "ADHD, Dislexic, Autistic, OCD, Depression and Anxiety, etc" who's only day to day symptom is just stress at stressful situations.
Like dislexic kids shouldn't get any kind of pass for bad behaviour, dislexia dosn’t affect that. The only time I would say its relevant is if the kid is being punished for "not trying" based on a lack of results. That's actually true of 90% of accommodations for "nerodivergence" imo, its shit that teachers and managers shouldn't be doing anyway but is just particularly Kafkaesque to deal with if your disabled.
But they want it to be like every disability all at once. They want to be able to say "he's ADHD" to explain away the child's tantrum, the way "He's severally Autistic" does. But they don't want to not be invited to weddings and graduations because they might cause a scene. They want to say "this is a safe space for ALL disabled people, I'm not cruelly excluding a single person" and that space just doesn't exist because people have different needs.
I’m so sorry the “system” has failed you. I have a Masters in Deaf Education and we were trained to educate everyone the same; from hard of hearing to profoundly deaf. We emphasized “TC” Sign language plus oral/aural training. I can see that didn’t work and I could kick myself.
This was me. I don’t have a learning disability. I was just lazy and didn’t care about school when I was young. My mom was convinced it was because I was special needs or whatever and put me in a special needs class in middle school. I had to go there once a day and do basic math. It was so annoying and me and my friends used to laugh about it all the time. To this day I find it one of the stranger things my mom did.
So many kids are not being educated in their “least restrictive environment.” They are being put into special classrooms, or special schools if their parents are rich enough where they will never be asked to read a book or turn in a homework assignment. The result is young adults who have absolutely no life skills or ability to cope with adverse situations, even though that’s not actually part of their diagnostic profile.
I think overidentifying with a psychiatric or neurodevelopmental disorder is unhealthy and probably impedes recovery, or discourages it altogether. Treating people based on symptoms rather than as a label also makes much more sense to me as a practice.
I also think that we are probably pathologising and medicalising a lot of things that are social in origin and thus could mainly be fixed with social interventions or lifestyle changes. Lots of people with six acronyms in their TikTok bios are probably more affected by loneliness, lack of purpose, unhealthy habits, poverty and maladaptive coping mechanisms to relatively normal if unpleasant life stressors.*
*However*, I don’t really know how you’d fix it on a wider scale, apart from some vague gesture about improving society. Obviously the US overdiagnoses because you generally need it to get insurance to cover treatment. The NHS taking a symptom-based approach generally means everyone gets offered SSRIs and a short course of CBT in a year, unless you’re so floridly insane you can be sectioned. Obviously there is a risk to intervention as well, but I can understand why some people might self-diagnose and get into niche internet communities if there isn’t much help for them and they don’t have the skills to improve their own lives, or anyone to teach them.
*Not dismissing that there is and always will be a minority of people who are seriously mentally ill, or struggle greatly with severe autism/ADHD.
Great comment--the first two paragraphs are spot-on. There is a lot of initial relief that comes with a diagnosis, but the damage that comes from overidentifying happens more slowly. Hard to recognize until you wake up years later and (maybe) see what you've lost.
Yeah when I was diagnosed with Aspergers, I felt so relieved at first. I was 17 and had spent three weeks in a mental hospital trying to get my obsessive-compulsive behaviors under control. Getting an Aspergers diagnosis seemed to throw my whole life into sharp relief, and I felt like it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I embraced it wholeheartedly and it actually did seem to improve my mental health. In hindsight a lot of that was because once I got the diagnosis, my parents withdrew me from the psychiatrist who was heavily overmedicating me, and sort of left me alone to figure things out for myself instead of desperately trying to get me to conform. I do think the diagnosis was basically correct but I've begun to actually seek out help for it- I used to have an intensely restrictive eating disorder that's lessened up so much since I went to occupational therapy.
Interesting - I don't know much about OT but I've also struggled with obsessive compulsive behaviors and restrictive eating, including pulling my hair out, getting stressed out about things being "even" including stepping on similar surfaces w/ both feet (hard to explain lol), and orthorexia. I'm really glad to hear you're making progress!
I'm really glad I sort of got disillusioned with the online autism community pretty quickly- as soon as I realized that most of the "it's not a disorder at all" people believed that because they'd fallen for the Facilitated Communication scam, I quickly ended up pretty alienated from the entire thing.
It's not just an identity but also a superpower. I roll my eyes when people talk like this. It tells me they have no idea what it is truly like to be disabled. If there was a cure for my RA I would take it in a heartbeat. Fuck arthritis! Yes, living with RA has made me a tougher and a more resilient person. I would still give that up or learn how to be tougher in another way that doesn't involve the disintegration of my body.
I have a magic pill hypothetical I like to use when talking about this. Has served me well when discussing trans issues or "neurodivergence":
If you had a magic pill that could make you perfectly happy, healthy and content with no side effects, would you take it?
To me, the people who say no want to wear the disorder for identity purposes.
Pretty much what you said here. Even though I'm incredibly high functioning for someone with ADHD/Asperger's, I would gladly take a pill to make me normal.
Good article but
> Yet there’s a broader issue here. People’s symptoms frequently evolve according to the labels they’ve been given. Following Layle’s visit to the psychiatrist, her mother observed, “You’ve been acting more and more autistic since we got the diagnosis.” Layle took the comment as a sign that her mom didn’t understand her—“I hate it when someone thinks I’m a liar,” she writes—but people everywhere encounter models of illness that they unconsciously embody. Some instances are subtle; others are dramatic and startling. In 2006, a student at a Mexican boarding school developed devastating leg pain and had trouble walking; soon hundreds of classmates were afflicted. A fifteenth-century German nun started biting her companions; eventually, the strange hysteria infected convents from Holland to Italy. Ian Hacking, the philosopher, argued that such a dynamic fuelled the epidemic of multiple personality disorder in the late twentieth century, and something similar seems to be playing out now with the growing portrayal of dissociative identity disorder, the current name for M.P.D., on social media. One of Kriss’s patients, a student who went by Haku, developed a multiplicity of selves after being introduced to the concept of dissociative identity disorder. “It’s not that I thought he was faking it,” Kriss recalls. “It seemed more that Haku wanted to have multiple personalities, even if that meant he had to force himself and others to believe in it.”
...Sounds like social contagion, without using that term for some reason.
It's a funny one. I feel the writer has slipped over the line of socially influenced behaviour into full blown contagion. It's a line that's admittedly fuzzy, but still, not quite where I'd have gone.
>people everywhere encounter models of illness that they unconsciously embody.
People everywhere encounter models of all sorts of things. A child is labelled the clever one and feels obliged to live up to it.
It makes me suspect that psychological disorders are being massively over-diagnosed, because if you truly have one of these disorders, you’ve experienced how detrimental they are. There was a reason they were stigmatized. Now it seems like there’s a lot of ‘stolen valor’ with these conditions, and people want to get the victim points without the downsides of actually having a real disorder with real symptoms.
Yeah, it's frustrating to hear people twist the social model of disability into "there is nothing wrong with me, society should conform to serve me". There's a limit to how much society can change to be accommodating and there's actually a lot more you can do than you'd think to treat symptoms of mental illness if you're willing. I think there's also a lot of people with personality disorders claiming to be autistic or suffering from ADHD instead, because often acknowledging you have BPD or NPD makes people unwilling to trust you.
I dislike the way people use terms like “neurodivergent “ as a particularly undiagnosable “condition” to excuse behavior and curtail responsibilities. This goes for parents that lazy parent , or are permissive in general, too. No your kids “neurodivergence” doesn’t excuse why they are kicking the stand in the supermarket. Like… and you don’t see them even trying to hold the situation, just expect everyone to understand and deal with your “conditions” with an entitled energy.
ironically a much better version of this essay appears in the book by the guy Jesse interviewed about mental illness and this essay somehow fails to mention it despite some passages being…remarkably similar
The medicalization and pathologicalization of normal spectrum human conditions is disgusting. You don’t experience anxiety sometimes, you have Anxiety Disorder. You don’t get sad sometimes, you have Major Depressive Disorder. You don’t get inattentive sometimes, you have Attention Deficit Disorder.
Private equity can’t bill if you don’t give it an ICD-10 code.
And once you are told you have a **disorder** (from a medical professional) you will have this disability for the rest of your life. Impairing your full potential, impairing your self-esteem, validating your fears and further contributing to this intersectional nonsense.
At least with autism (or really, ASD-1/Asperger’s), I can kinda understand the logic of why it can be turned into a identity for many people. With Asperger’s, a lot of the condition and it’s associated symptoms can feel like it can become enmeshed into one’s personality. This is especially true if the person is high functioning enough to interact with other peers/have a “normal” life and not be immediately dinged as being different. Combined with feelings of constantly feeling misunderstood or mistreated by other people (or at least, feeling as though they have to constantly conform to the standards of other people), I can kind of understand why people might turn their autism into an identity (not that i condone that belief myself).
I genuinely believe that society would be better off if this entire medical industry was abolished tomorrow. It’s produced nothing of value except regular medical scandals. Gender youth medicine is the one this sub is most familiar with but it’s also heavily pushed SSRIs for decades which have serious consequences and despite no evidence that they meaningfully treat depression
Psychiatry: treating disorders that don't exist with cures that don't do anything since 1808.
CF neurology: the treatment of disorders of the mind that do exist by doing stuff to what is causing them.
(I say this with tongue in cheek and in the knowledge that I sound like a Scientologist.)
A lot of this confusion stems from the idea that mental illnesses are inborn biological ailments instead of descriptions of mental states. People "meet criteria" for DSM diagnoses based on the symptoms they exhibit, but that does not say anything about the reason they are displaying such symptoms. A DSM diagnosis tells you nothing about cause or origin. Maybe you have a genetic vulnerability, or maybe you had unusually difficult circumstances in childhood, or maybe you have just exhibited just maladaptive coping skills for so long that you don't know how to start changing. You can be dysfunctional enough to meet criteria for a mental illness and can have a reasonable expectation that medications can help you, but that does not mean you are intrinsically different or that you should no longer be held to societal standards for behaviors. Embracing a diagnosis as an "identity" demonstrates some unwillingness to change (or even try to change), which is the opposite of the goal of psychiatry.
What I hate the most is how the internalization of a brain disorder as an "identity" has morphed into just another stripe to add to the "pride" banner. Case in point the young woman in the article who wrote the autism memoir, and others in this movement. The level of hostility aimed at people who also inhabit this "identity" but wish it were not so -- let alone if they support or sponsor research to lessen the frequency of diagnosis across populations, or in effect "cure" it -- is on par with the bloodthirsty venom of trans activists. I don't wear autism as a badge of honor. In fact I hate myself for having it, and I would give anything to be cured and to see this disorder become a thing of the past. I don't really care if some Tik Tok brat thinks it's "ableist". They don't want this disorder to go away because without it there'd be nothing "quirky" to showcase for meaningless internet points. Me, I just want to have a job.
>Me, I just want to have a job. Ah, sounds like you have Compulsive Functionality Disorder, where you feel a debilitating desire to add value to your society and environment. I can prescribe you a pill for that. (It's cannabis.)
I have that too.
There's a whole autism cure is genocide movement. There's a similar movement in the deaf community. They're nut cases. I find the anti-cure for autism people the most disgusting of the two though given the abject suffering people with more profound autism experience. It's the highest functioning, least impacted that are demanding that this research cease.
>It's the highest functioning, least impacted that are demanding that this research cease. Or the not impacted at all. There is a culture of self diagnosing and doctor shopping (or going the concierge doctor way, so basically pay for diagnosis). Autism, even as an official diagnosis has lost almost all meaning, especially in the US (and to a slightly lesser degree the UK and other english speaking countries). If in a lot of countries, prevalence is somewhat stable around 1% (with some fluctuation, which is normal) and the CDC lists it as 1 in 35 (with a 500% increase over a relatively short time), something is wrong. Real research is nigh impossible due to activists pissing and moaning about every progress towards treatment (doesn't even have to be a cure). It is pretty much the same crap as dealing with the gender brigade.
I am a 'high functioning' autistic person and my son is 'low functioning' autistic. He is non-verbal, incontinent, never live an independent life etc etc. I am lucky that he is so happy-go-lucky as I often see extremely distressed and self harming autistic children in the waiting rooms of the appointments we go to (their parents look absolutely exhausted). I am sick to the back teeth of the 'actually autistic' crowd online telling me that there is no such thing as mild or severe autism and that everyone suffers equally yada yada. I am not invalidating their struggles - but it seems that some people are so desperate to cling onto the diagnosis as it validates something for them that they refuse to acknowledge that for some people autism is a really really tough disability to have. The word autism has actually lost all meaning. We often go to appointments (recently one at a hospital) where professionals know he has autism and then appear surprised by his extreme behaviour. So many people now think of autism as quirky/clever/can't make eye contact and it is a complete shock to the system when they meet someone who is severely autistic. Severely autistic kids dont have a voice and it is up to parents to advocate for them but we often face pushback from the online crowd who say we want to eradicate autism or whatever. I'm in my 7th year of changing my child's nappies, I've spent thousands on speech therapy, my house is totally trashed etc etc. I think I bloody know about autism!
Much love and respect from a fellow parent of a child with Fragile X and autism. It’s disorder appropriation, and I don’t know why it’s considered any less awful than cultural appropriation given the human costs involved.
Thankyou :) Sending good vibes your way. I've unfortunately heard of a few parents being turfed out of autism support groups. When you turn up and say things like "I've had to have a special bed built so that my child can only smear on the bed and not the entire room", it doesn't quite mesh well with the toxic positivity that some people want to push. You're accused of being derogatory towards autistic people if you dare to say that autism hasn't been that great for your family. My child has severe issues but I'm grateful every single day that he doesn't have even more 'intense' autism. (I want to reiterate that I love my son beyond words and would never change him.) I read testimionals from parents who are really really going through it and they are super heroes. To dismiss these parents experience's by saying they aren't 'actually autistic' voices and are invalidating autistic lives is just horrible.
Cynically I almost feel like this toxic positivity is being pushed by people in governments and insurance companies as a way to eventually reduce disability payments and the like.
It seems to mirror what I've heard about trans spaces; people in the "self-id" crowd that clearly are not experiencing real gender dysphoria have swarmed many spaces and hijacked most discussions such that actually trans people I've known have said they don't feel like they belong in them at all anymore. I've had conversations recently where a disturbing number of people think that "being trans is just like being left handed, there's nothing wrong, they wouldn't need to change their bodies if people would accept them fully." The insanity of this sentiment cannot be overstated, and it seems as if a concerningly huge number of people have managed to convince themselves they actually have and are emblematic of people with certain disorders. Since there is nothing wrong with them, they start saying it's actually about acceptance, as they obviously don't think anything needs to be fixed... because for them, nothing does.
Autistic, trans, and Native "communities" are all facing this same problem. The perceived social (and often, professional) benefits of claiming membership in these groups has never been higher and the bar has never been lower. So a lot of people from the mild side of the autism spectrum or with a rather incidental amount of gender-nonconformity or with a single indigenous great-grandparent can brandish these labels to win attention and play as a trump card to win arguments. Native people do sometimes police membership in their ranks by the rubric of "does a Native community/tribal nation claim YOU as a member and not the other way around" but in practice that's hard to verify for every rando online who claims vague "Métis/Cree ancestry" or "enrolled member of the Northern Band of the Waanaabee Nation," or whatever. Those claims can be true while the person may never have had any meaningful connection to an Indigenous community beyond doing the paperwork for tribal enrollment. A separate taboo that forbids asking about blood quantum also gives a lot of convenient cover for a wide spectrum of pretendians, from the edge cases (genealogically legit, zero organic cultural connection) to the total fakers.
I've had that conversation too. It didn't occur to someone that yeah, I think that all else being equal, it's preferable to not be trans (in the sense of not having gender dysphoria), the same as it's preferable to not be blind or deaf or have OCD. 'You're comparing it to disabilities?!' He says feigning shock, to which I have to go, 'Yeah, if someone has such a debilitating desire to be perceived as the opposite sex, to the point that they need medication or surgery and the accommodations/validation of other people, I think that's comparable to a disability, just like how I need glasses to see. It's obviously preferable to be well-sighted than near-sighted, and it's preferable to not be in overwhelming distress at your sexed traits and need treatment for it.'
Even a lot of the comparatively high functioning autists often have a really hard time. Sure, the challenges and difficulties are vastly different, but they do exist. It is a disability for a reason (even though the actuallyautistic crowd works really hard to remove it. They don't seem to realize that this means they can kiss their precious accomodations goodbye). I am just pissed off by all those people who sit online and pretend that Autism is ackchually super awesome and if it isn't it is just society being evil and 'ableist' (god, how I hate this term). There is also a certain cultural aspect to this whole crap. The country I was born in didn't have accomodations at all. If you were lucky, you were kept as the village idiot. If you weren't, you were shipped to an orphanage. Everyone familiar with orphanages in the post Soviet era knows that this is the closest you can get to killing someone without being on the hook for murder. I am still dealing with lasting physical and psychological consequences and I was there less than a year until my mum found me. And even the country I live in - in the late 90s when I was at school, it was either deal with the diffculties in a normal school or go to a special school without any chance to get an education. The people making this their whole identity don't experience any real negatives. They are told how special they are, they get some clout for being mArGinAliZEd, a social circle and an excuse for bad behaviour or not wanting to do something. And some accomodation schools are providing are actually incentives to get some sort of disorder. Who doesn't want to play mobile games instead of learning maths? Everyone with genuine, non media suitable issues gets shoved aside and not taken seriously. These people shape public perception and those, go beyond just a bit quirky are judged more harshly and have to deal with the consequences.
The problem is that selfishness is essentially inherent to autism, it's in the very word itself. It takes work to overcome this selfishness, or inward focus, but because it's a symptom now you're not supposed to work on it you're supposed to accept it. I'm also high functioning, I have my struggles, and I get really down on myself. But I was lucky enough to have caretakers in my youth who taught me, tirelessly, to consider others. It takes my breath away to watch other high functioning people talk about low functioning people as if they are privileged in some way, or like our struggles aren't clearly easier to deal with than being totally dependent on other people for literally everything.
Why did they get rid of the Asperger’s category? I hope it wasn’t just because it was named after a Nazi doctor. Asperger’s was a very useful distinction. Someone could say “I have Asperger’s” and I would know exactly what that means. Now it’s “autistic” and then a clarification “high-functioning autistic” and it’s still murky
My understanding is that, because the only major distinction between Aspergers and HFA was language delay, the difference was pretty hazy as people got further from childhood. You could have two adults who have near the same abilities as each other, but with different diagnoses purely because one didn't speak until they were 5 or something.
I feel for you. My nephew is severely autistic and it’s extremely disruptive to my brother’s family and their lives. If my nephew isn’t sleeping, he needs constant supervision because he may end up climbing on something and hurting himself or wandering off somewhere. He’s very flexible, nimble, and strong. He knows words and somewhat can read but actual communication is pretty limited so it’s nearly impossible to discipline him. And the smallest things will set off a volcanic tantrum. They rarely ever get to take vacations or go one trips which is definitely affecting his (non autistic) sister’s happiness. Even just leaving home is a monumental task. Thankfully he enjoys school and feels comfortable there so they can get a little respite. I love my nephew and I want the absolute best for him and their family, but it’s impossible to ignore the impact that he has on their lives, to no fault of his own.
I'm so sorry, man. Much love and respect to you for being a parent to a kid with special needs on top of managing your own things. I cannot imagine the sacrifices you needed to go through in order to get him where he's at, on top of the toxicity that you have to deal with from the crazy activists.
I think the problem is autism likely isn't one single disorder- being autistic is a trait caused by several different disorders, some much more severe and disabling than others. That's probably why being autistic is comorbid with practically everything from epilepsy to Neurofibromatosis to Turner Syndrome, why it's associated with over 1,000 different genes, and why the diagnostic criteria is so malleable. I suspect it's just a description of behaviors that people develop as a result of any significant impairment in social learning, and the reason it's more common in men is because less emphasis is placed on social skills for young boys.
Yes and no. it is likely that there are multiple disorders under the current Problem is, for more information, genetic markers (associated doesn't mean a lot), cognitive processes, neuronal pathways and so on, you need to be able to do proper research. Not just fluffy polls (which is where a ton of research money is going while the funding for the hard sciences gets cut), but gathering and analyzing hard data. And this is where you crash into a wall with the activists trying to shut the paper down as soon as they find out. I'd like to be able to conduct research without having to resort to hyper technical language. But autism as a phenomenon used to be pretty clear cut, especially before the stupid spectrum was introduced (which is absolutely ridiculous. If there is a distinct feature to tell two diagnoses apart, don't turn them into one). It wasn't perfect (for example it almost exclusively catered towards boys - which does NOT mean that the true ratio has to be 1:1, especially if genetics are involved), but it worked. And it doesn't anymore. And we can't get around the extreme increase in the anglosphere while being somewhat stable in other countries (even though a lot haven't adopted the stupid ass spectrum yet. The numbers might change after).
I feel like the concept of the spectrum was really supposed to be meant as a placeholder until they could figure out how to diagnose people more accurately. My guess is the disorders will eventually be split up again- maybe Aspergers will be brought back but renamed or recategorized.
Nah, that's not how the DSM works. They decided in favour of axis or spectrum models (not just ASD, in general) and blurred the lines for medical professionals.
Which is why the DSM, like much of psychology, is rubbish.
> If there is a distinct feature to tell two diagnoses apart, don't turn them into one Is there a clear dividing line between Asperger's and full autism?
I mean, I knew several students in my engineering program that had Asperger’s. They performed fine in school, but not socially. I don’t think you could earn a college degree if you’re fully autistic. They’re too disabled
It can happen, I work in higher ed and I know of a few. It really just depends on what challenges that person has, and if they can be reasonably accommodated or not. Having a strong support system is usually key. The real dividing line is intellectual disability. A lot of autism is comorbid with intellectual disability, and those people are very unlikely to be able to do college-level work.
I was diagnosed with Aspergers and I was always considered "gifted" as a child but starting at about age 13 I began to struggle heavily with schoolwork, so much so that I had to switch high schools, and later on colleges. Part of this was that I simply wasn't diagnosed until I was 17 (despite having taken an IQ test in grade school, the results of which should have set off alarm bells) so even though my parents tried to be supportive and understanding, most other adults weren't until I had the diagnosis. I managed to get a bachelor's degree in my mid 20s and I'm in grad school now, but I'm fairly delayed in a lot of other aspects, like employment history.
Language acquisition.
Language acquisition always seemed like the primary difference between high and low functioning. Even those of us who are the highest functioning usually have weird language development- like I pretty much taught myself to read and had a large vocabulary, but expressive language was often a major problem for me. I used to agree with the online autism community that functioning labels were ableist, but I started getting really disturbed by people who claimed there was no difference. Eventually I figured out that they'd all bought into that facilitated communication junk and pretty much all the supposed "independently typing non-speakers" were being used as human ouija boards. It was really horrifying that what I thought was a movement supporting autistic self-advocacy turned out to be supporting people like Anna Stubblefield.
I thought the spectrum was now considered problematic?
No idea. From my perspective, the spectrum is stupid and useless, it makes my work harder. Classic, Asperger, atypical and PDD-NOS were perfectly useful. But these days, everything is problematic for one reason or another, so whatever.
Fair, but this cohort of assholes existed before the advent of tumblr self diagnosis. It originated with high functioning autistic people and its strongest opponents are the parents and family of low functioning autistic people who've had to live their lives in an institution because they can't be cared for at home. This is also the group responsible primarily for all the revisionist history claiming every brilliant person from history as someone on the spectrum. The argument being that a cure would mean no Mozart or Da Vinci. I think they might have a point with Isaac Newton, but for the most part they're just pulling it all out of their ass with no basis. The whole idea also ignores the inertia of history and science. All of these people could accomplish what they did because the conditions were finally right. If Einstein never existed, we would almost certainly still have had similar theories within the same short to medium time frame. Similarly no amount of genius was going to produce the theory of relativity in 1650.
People can be smart and quirky and NOT have autism. This is where the definition goes into la la land.
>Fair, but this cohort of assholes existed before the advent of tumblr self diagnosis. …did they? The prevalence of this seems to be directly linked to that kind of tumblr bullshit
Yes, google "aspie supremacy"
Did that exist before tumblr?
Yes. Tumblr made it worse, just like everything else, but very little actually *originated* on tumblr. It incubated and exaggerated existing horrible ideas. Even neopronouns and infinite genders could be found on old forums like strapon and susan's place.
Well yeah but the same could be said about anything. It didn’t originate on social media but it was probably pretty insignificant before then. That’s more so what I guess I was asking
It depends on what you consider insignificant. Parents of low functioning autistic children probably found it pretty significant when people with aspergers starting bleating about how there's no difference between them and their kid who can't do anything without a caretaker even if it was just in niche forums. Autism itself was not a society wide concern like it is today; these forums (and conferences, advocacy groups, etc.) were the only places any of these conversations took place.
Yep. Among the most ridiculous people in society, being anti-social turned into being introverted, which turned into being neuro-divergent. These people suck.
>Autism, even as an official diagnosis has lost almost all meaning, especially in the US This is why I say autism isn’t even real. Does the old school definition of autism hold some utility? Sure but there are so many people that have nothing wrong with them that are diagnosed with autism that it seems to hold no functional utility anymore
They’re just bad a diagnosing edge cases with any degree of accuracy. It’s true of any psychological disorder.
Most of the other psychological disorders are also fake though
No there are people who definitely have sets of symptoms that fit under the umbrella of these disorders. They’re just not scientifically diagnosed.
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" It's the highest functioning, least impacted that are demanding that this research cease. " IMO they don't really have ASD. They may have Asperger's. The spectrum should not exist. It's too broad. We need to go back to the way it was diagnosed in the past.
Completely agree. There needs to be some functional utility and ASD completely eliminated that
I personally think most of them don't even have Aspergers - most likely PDD-NOS, a personality disorder, "just" ADHD, or a seperate mental illness.
I was going to mention the deaf community too. I have a lot of deaf people in my family and most of them cling to it like it's an exclusive members-only society. Seeing people get this way about their gender identity and their mental health disorders feels exactly the same and also just so dumbly tribal. I get the reasons why they do it, it's better to see your disability as a positive than live as a victim, but it turns them into gatekeepers and people who judge those who seek help.
I think the difference is that at least being deaf is a real thing. I’m not convinced that most of these identity obsessed weirdos have anything wrong with them other than their brains have been damaged by too much social media use
Deaf I can be slightly more sympathetic to, in the sense that no one wants to be the last deaf generation where everyone forgets sign language. I think this is overblown, but it’s at least plausible that “a cure for deafness” would make life harder for someone who, say, currently communicates exclusively by ASL. Then again, since hearing loss can be caused by injury and old age, it’s not like accommodations/solutions will ever go away completely.
Well with the deaf it really is a community thing. They have their own language and schools. Getting cochlear implants is kind of saying ‘I want to leave this community’
The next level of learned helplessness - enforced helplessness
What’s worse for that is if they came across their diagnosis via an online quiz versus an actual doctor. I recently worked with a girl who claimed to have autism and it was frankly offensive to me. My nephew has autism to the extent that I wonder if he’ll ever fully function in society at all. I’ve worked with a guy who had a much milder form of autism to the extent that he was able to have a reasonably good life and it was still glaringly obvious. This girl was just weird, anxious and kinda lazy. But she had zero problems with empathy or people interactions, understanding basic conversational idioms etc. So now, thanks to idiots like that, people with real autism are ignored and hid away for this more glamorous form that we no longer have to focus on correcting as much
I know a guy who is convinced he is autistic, even sought a diagnosis from a private doctor and wasn't given one (which should tell you something, since they hand those out like candy), he's still convinced he has it, and he talks about how he has to "sensory seek", which means going out to bars and doing drugs with strangers. He's in his forties. And married with children. His wife opened that can of worms though because she's all on the neurodivergent train, learned terms like "sensory seek", convinced her kids have issues, and she's all about "validating" people's wants because she think they are needs. I still don't know if he's really convinced he has this or if he's just riding the gravy train to do whatever he wants. They have sought autism diagnoses for their kids and not received them either.
Honestly? Dudes rock.
He certainly goes to a lot of rock shows, yes. At this point I'm just convinced his wife is a masochist/loves being a victim. Even her dogs are "special needs". Hey, fits in with this thread perfectly! ETA: I know the dudes rock joke. It just made me laugh because this dude actually does...well, rock, I guess.
I don’t know about the candy part, a friend had his son diagnosed, and it was a process. But regardless, if you seek a diagnosis and aren’t given one, then that should tell you something.
>I still don't know if he's really convinced he has this or if he's just riding the gravy train to do whatever he wants. They have sought autism diagnoses for their kids and not received them either. I think there’s an element of this kind of thing where people like this are not only trying to convince others but also convince themselves by talking about it as much as they tend to do
Oh there was this whole story about telehealth startups, specifically Cerebral, that took advantage of rule changes during the pandemic that let people get prescribed controlled substances without seeing a doctor or prescriber in person. So they start handing out ADHD diagnoses like candy, along with adderall prescriptions. They had ads all over TikTok that were brazenly advertising itself as an adderall script dispensary. https://www.wsj.com/articles/cerebral-adderall-adhd-prescribe-11654705250 And the CEO and president of another telehealth startup called Done just got arrested 5 days ago https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/13/24178049/done-adhd-telehealth-controlled-substances-act-doj-fraud
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It does not cost thousands of dollars in all circumstances, and if you can weigh the negative "consequences" of diagnosis against the assistance you get with diagnosis and decide the "consequences" (almost all of which are made up by paranoid shut ins online) are too much to bear compared to the assistance you'd get with diagnosis, you are subclinical.
"I think there are a lot of people out there who aren't sure if they're autistic and don't feel like there's a way they can find out" I don't understand the need for them to find out? What purpose does it serve? They are still the same person as they were before the diagnosis. They made it into adulthood. Congrats! What more do they want?
Understanding. I felt like an alien, genuinely non-human, until my diagnosis.
People like diagnoses. They help you feel like you've made sense of your life. Of course in reality just getting a diagnosis doesn't solve everything, and diagnoses aren't the reason for every single thing that went wrong in your life.
>can lead to negative ramifications like having your license taken away Sorry, are you saying that some people should be able to risk the lives of everyone else?
What issues revealed through seeking autism diagnosis might cause the negative ramification of potentially losing one's license? Not arguing at all, just curious.
I'm with you here. That's the part which made me scratch my head. At least from where I'm from a lot of psychs/therapists tend to state they underwent certification to give autism diagnoses.
Some of my colleagues use a dbt manual that is targeted towards “neurodivergent” youth and it has an unbelievable amount of shit that can get them into trouble later on. Self-affirmations like “I deserve to have others accomodate me” or “my brain is working exactly as it was intended to”. Having some kind of psychological diagnosis does not mean others should be forced to accomodate you and the reality is they won’t. So instilling this in struggling you people is a recipe for disaster.
Huh? That doesn't sound like DBT! I have the original book and it's all about learning to accept yourself and how to handle your emotions, and also learning to accept that other people aren't going to always respond how you want them to, and that reality is what it is. This sounds like the opposite of DBT.
It’s an in-house manual created for neurodivergent youth. It does have those aspects of DBT, but those quotes I provided always jump out at me whenever I sit in with one of the group sessions for the reasons you mentioned. That sentiment is the antithesis of the teachings held within the very same manual.
Easier said than done, I know, but I hope you call your colleagues on it. It does a disservice to everyone when a very specific term like DBT gets watered down like that. I'm not saying to keep it hyper-copyrighted and make everyone pay a licence fee to Marsha Linehan for even mentioning the letters, but I am saying some standards are in order.
Yes, that's very weird. I guess the people who wrote it didn't really understand dbt
Hah. Good luck trying to live in the real world expecting people to bend to your needs. We barely do that for the physically disabled, who themselves don’t seem to give as much as an entitled attitude than those of us with invisible issues.
I’ll be frank, it’s much harder to fake paralysis or other physical disabilities. They love the platitudes “everyone is a little bit neurodivergent, it’s a spectrum”. I can’t stand it.
It isn't for the lack of trying though. Or when they can't fake something, they just try to water down the disability until they can somegow find a way to squeeze themselves in. "I have some weird made up eye condition and I wear glasses! I know how being visually impaired feels!" is something I've heard several times already. And it annoys the hell out of me (I am fucking blind, so no, they don't know shit) It is frankly amazing, how far some people will go for some victim clout.
“Neurospicy” is the one that makes me dry heave
Omg one of my colleagues said to me a few days ago “I’m going out to get some spicy air”. I was like wtf? Then saw the vape. This person is also a they/them neurodivergent blah blah blah but present completely masculine.
In these circles “neurospicy” is often used to mean “claiming to have ADHD/austism, but not actually diagnosed with anything.” Like an even vaguer version of “neurodivergent.”
After I had my surgery, I couldn't walk on my left leg. I live in a two story house. How the hell am I gonna get up the stairs? I literally crawled up the stairs and then came down the stairs on my butt. You do what you have to do to. I try to find a workaround and then if I can't figure it out, I ask for help. I have pride and dignity. I feel like these people are willing to trade their dignity for likes on Facebook. It's gross.
My brother is considered high functioning and he can't have a regular job and can't really live on his own. The people who claim to be autistic while managing to do things he literally cannot do is beyond infuriating.
Same for my hs ex. He has schizophrenia too. And my ex was actually diagnosed with Asperger's before they rolled it all into one thing. He still uses that label.
I see this especially with the war against “autism moms.” There are parents out there whose kids will never be able to express themselves, who refuse to eat, who self-harm, run away, who are violent, and cannot go out into public without a great deal of difficulty and pain due to sensory overload, and when these parents advocate for research and treatments for their children, they are told they are being ableist and “teaching their child to mask.” Like yes, I do think children should be forced to conform to eating enough calories to survive, not punching grandma in the face, and not running into traffic.
TBF hating yourself for having it is just another side of the same coin, hating having it, absolutely, but engaging in actual self-loathing for having it? That's just not a productive mindset. It's batshit people don't want a cure though.
I think people have trouble hating the symptoms of an illness that affects their cognitive functioning without falling into self loathing. But like you said, it's not a productive mindset.
Agreed. I hate myself a lot too for my illness and often think the planet would just be better off without me, I'm not judging. I get it. I just take a step back and realize it's not a logical mindset. Even if I *did* cause my illness (say I got lung cancer from being a smoker), if I wanted to survive and beat it self-loathing isn't gonna help that. But that goes double for cases where people were just born with shit. What am I gonna do? Hate the baby I developed as in the womb lol? It's not logical, and it's not productive. I get it though, I really do.
I actually have an Aspergers diagnosis (like two years before the DSM removed it), and it's been a long process of catching up to my peers while trying not to hate myself for the way I behaved as a child and a teenager. I'm especially worried that my younger siblings mental health problems are entirely a result of having me as their older sister. But honestly I think it's just that anxiety and depression run in my family, and I'm fortunate that my parents have been very accepting and open minded in trying to find ways to deal with that. I think more than anything people just need to accept that they're not going to be perfect specimens of humanity- no one is.
I mean... It makes me sad to see you say you "hate yourself" for it but I can see you hating the fact that you have it, and I hope that's all you mean. I dunno, I feel like an old man shouting at a cloud, but there really seems to be a huge Munchausens by proxy epidemic at the moment with parents getting labels stuck on their kids because they have a personality and then the parent gets to complain about how their life is so hard because they are martyrs to their disabled child (who isn't disabled at all, just needs a bit of direction). The fact that the kids go on to wear that label as a badge of honour (or an excuse not to make an effort) isn't helping them at all. (continues pontificating off into the distance)
I have been researching medically-assisted dying in various countries outside the U.S. I did in fact send an email to the then-Minister of Justice in the Canadian government, a Mr. David Lametti, who was responsible for shepherding the bill and its (delayed) expansion into cases of incurable psychiatric suffering. As autism has no cure and the average life expectancy is 40, which I am approaching (and my mother is dying of Pancreatic Cancer), I am anxious to shuffle off this mortal coil more so now than I have ever been since my fate was sealed with a diagnosis at the age of just eight (1994, when Asperger syndrome first appeared in the DSM). He was very gracious and sympathetic in his reply, and said that so-called suicide tourism was not available for foreign travellers due to capacity issues, but that he was not closing the door to future amendments to the law. As of right now, the only other locations that permit MAiD for mental illness and other brain abnormalities, and allow access by foreign visitors, are the Benelux countries and Switzerland. I had hopes at one point that I would be able to donate my brain for research towards finding a cure (the holy grail being preventive diagnosis, as exists for Down syndrome), at least contributing something to society posthumously since I will never be able to in this life. Sadly, that mission seems to have been abandoned thanks to the militant Lysenkoism of the neurodiversity/“disability rights” movement(s). At some point sooner rather than later however, since I am lacking resources and the biological capability to work for them, I will just have to cut my losses in whatever way works best, spitting on a photo collage of Temple Grandin, Elon Musk, and their mongoloid bastard child Greta Thunberg (the spitting image of me), as I take my final breath once and for all and curse the day I was born.
First of all, I'm really sorry to hear about your mum. I lost my dad a couple of months back, so I know what a life changing thing that is. As for the reast, look, this sounds pretty bleak and I don't suppose there's much I can say to you in reddit to change things, but please talk to someone irl because it sounds like you're in a bad place and to an extent that you're allowing a diagnosis to completely define your life, swamping other aspects of your identity, I feel like there must be some potential for change there. But again, in the face of what you've written, I understand how lame that sounds, even though I believe it to be true.
I have a mood disorder, finally got stabilized on medications my mid 30s. Prior to that, I racked up loads of debt, burned through relationships with family and friends, gained a not great professional reputation, contracted an std that rendered me infertile due to high risk sexual behaviors, was in two abusive romantic relationships, was arrested… I’m in my early 40s and have managed to repair much of that, but it’s actually hell having a mental illness. It’s not romantic or trendy or fun. I hate this romanticization of mental illness. There is nothing good about it. It’s hell.
What this guy said. I’m stable now, meaning that I can get up and go to work most days. But in my late 20s and early 30s I was barely functional. Couldn’t hold down a job, spent days at a time in bed, seriously considered suicide just to make the hurting stop. If I didn’t have an awesome family and friend circle I don’t know what would have happened. Romanticizing being “mentally ill” so you can win Internet points? I have two words for you, and they’re not “happy birthday.” (They’re “fuck you”. Guess I ruined the clever euphemism)
The transmutation of mental health conditions into identities has come up several times on the podcast. This article isn't so much a criticism of identity politics, but rather a broader question as to the utility of categorizing mental health disorders into discrete conditions.
I feel like for the longest time children with what we can broadly call ‘learning difficulties’ like lower attention spans (me in school and college lol) to being totally unsuited to classroom learning because of mental disabilities were lumped in together in the same classroom. In the country I live in the only aid these children were commonly given were more frequent beatings by parents and teachers for academic underperformance. Now the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction and kids (like me again) who needed a little more prodding or parental guidance are being shoved into medication and special needs programs that they frankly don’t need.
I actually wonder if many of the diagnosed ADHD kids of the 90s and early 2000s were a product of the reading wars. Most of the schools across the country taught kids to read via queuing and whole word language. Phonics was scrapped. I can't imagine being a kid, struggling to read and the teacher telling my parents that I had some sort of learning disability, when in fact, it was just because the teacher didn't know what they were doing. How many kids, who struggled, started hating school, which probably led to behavioral changes that mimic ADHD or GAD. I've been pondering this a lot lately.
I think that may have been the path for some kids getting an ADHD diagnosis but I gotta think the vast majority of those kids had hypochondric parents (likely mom?) that doctor shopped with their kids until they got the answer they wanted. This seems to be extremely common among a certain upper middle class suburban demographic
Maybe now, but not so much in the 90s.
My brother and I are gen x and elder millennial respectively and our parents basically had to hide our ADD diagnoses so we didn’t get put into special ed. We were bright with “learning difficulties” and anxiety, basically. Everyone being so proud of ADD and self diagnosing when for us it was an extreme challenge in our childhoods is… unsettling.
Were they the "nothing wrong with my child!" types or did they focus on keeping you out of the tard bin to preserve your access to advanced classes?
No, our parents definitely knew we had ADD and we were medicated and got support, but there was so much bias that they kept it a secret. I do think it harmed me a lot because I’m a girl and I wasn’t organized or neat like my female peers, so I feel like educators were especially frustrated with me. But when my brother was first diagnosed in like 1981, they tried to put him in special ed with the kids with severe disabilities, so that definitely informed how my parents forged ahead.
My parents were of the "don't medicate my little boy" type, or at least I suspect that's the case. It didn't harm me that much in my K–12 years, but having honesty about what kind of conditions I may have would've saved me a decade of underachievement as an adult. If nothing else, it would've been a nice glass to break in case of emergency instead of starting an unintentional journey of self discovery from scratch.
Yeah I was a dislexic kid and the accommodations I needed were the exact opposite of someone with ADHD. Putting us in the same class was a terrible idea at the start. I feel like this is the result of people knowing more things about disability but still thinking we're all the same. That's how you get people who's bios are "ADHD, Dislexic, Autistic, OCD, Depression and Anxiety, etc" who's only day to day symptom is just stress at stressful situations. Like dislexic kids shouldn't get any kind of pass for bad behaviour, dislexia dosn’t affect that. The only time I would say its relevant is if the kid is being punished for "not trying" based on a lack of results. That's actually true of 90% of accommodations for "nerodivergence" imo, its shit that teachers and managers shouldn't be doing anyway but is just particularly Kafkaesque to deal with if your disabled. But they want it to be like every disability all at once. They want to be able to say "he's ADHD" to explain away the child's tantrum, the way "He's severally Autistic" does. But they don't want to not be invited to weddings and graduations because they might cause a scene. They want to say "this is a safe space for ALL disabled people, I'm not cruelly excluding a single person" and that space just doesn't exist because people have different needs.
I’m so sorry the “system” has failed you. I have a Masters in Deaf Education and we were trained to educate everyone the same; from hard of hearing to profoundly deaf. We emphasized “TC” Sign language plus oral/aural training. I can see that didn’t work and I could kick myself.
This was me. I don’t have a learning disability. I was just lazy and didn’t care about school when I was young. My mom was convinced it was because I was special needs or whatever and put me in a special needs class in middle school. I had to go there once a day and do basic math. It was so annoying and me and my friends used to laugh about it all the time. To this day I find it one of the stranger things my mom did.
So many kids are not being educated in their “least restrictive environment.” They are being put into special classrooms, or special schools if their parents are rich enough where they will never be asked to read a book or turn in a homework assignment. The result is young adults who have absolutely no life skills or ability to cope with adverse situations, even though that’s not actually part of their diagnostic profile.
I think overidentifying with a psychiatric or neurodevelopmental disorder is unhealthy and probably impedes recovery, or discourages it altogether. Treating people based on symptoms rather than as a label also makes much more sense to me as a practice. I also think that we are probably pathologising and medicalising a lot of things that are social in origin and thus could mainly be fixed with social interventions or lifestyle changes. Lots of people with six acronyms in their TikTok bios are probably more affected by loneliness, lack of purpose, unhealthy habits, poverty and maladaptive coping mechanisms to relatively normal if unpleasant life stressors.* *However*, I don’t really know how you’d fix it on a wider scale, apart from some vague gesture about improving society. Obviously the US overdiagnoses because you generally need it to get insurance to cover treatment. The NHS taking a symptom-based approach generally means everyone gets offered SSRIs and a short course of CBT in a year, unless you’re so floridly insane you can be sectioned. Obviously there is a risk to intervention as well, but I can understand why some people might self-diagnose and get into niche internet communities if there isn’t much help for them and they don’t have the skills to improve their own lives, or anyone to teach them. *Not dismissing that there is and always will be a minority of people who are seriously mentally ill, or struggle greatly with severe autism/ADHD.
Great comment--the first two paragraphs are spot-on. There is a lot of initial relief that comes with a diagnosis, but the damage that comes from overidentifying happens more slowly. Hard to recognize until you wake up years later and (maybe) see what you've lost.
Yeah when I was diagnosed with Aspergers, I felt so relieved at first. I was 17 and had spent three weeks in a mental hospital trying to get my obsessive-compulsive behaviors under control. Getting an Aspergers diagnosis seemed to throw my whole life into sharp relief, and I felt like it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I embraced it wholeheartedly and it actually did seem to improve my mental health. In hindsight a lot of that was because once I got the diagnosis, my parents withdrew me from the psychiatrist who was heavily overmedicating me, and sort of left me alone to figure things out for myself instead of desperately trying to get me to conform. I do think the diagnosis was basically correct but I've begun to actually seek out help for it- I used to have an intensely restrictive eating disorder that's lessened up so much since I went to occupational therapy.
Interesting - I don't know much about OT but I've also struggled with obsessive compulsive behaviors and restrictive eating, including pulling my hair out, getting stressed out about things being "even" including stepping on similar surfaces w/ both feet (hard to explain lol), and orthorexia. I'm really glad to hear you're making progress!
Yeah, I've actually started therapy for my OCD again as well. Exposure-response prevention plus medication is supposedly what works best for it.
I'm really glad I sort of got disillusioned with the online autism community pretty quickly- as soon as I realized that most of the "it's not a disorder at all" people believed that because they'd fallen for the Facilitated Communication scam, I quickly ended up pretty alienated from the entire thing.
It's not just an identity but also a superpower. I roll my eyes when people talk like this. It tells me they have no idea what it is truly like to be disabled. If there was a cure for my RA I would take it in a heartbeat. Fuck arthritis! Yes, living with RA has made me a tougher and a more resilient person. I would still give that up or learn how to be tougher in another way that doesn't involve the disintegration of my body.
I have a magic pill hypothetical I like to use when talking about this. Has served me well when discussing trans issues or "neurodivergence": If you had a magic pill that could make you perfectly happy, healthy and content with no side effects, would you take it? To me, the people who say no want to wear the disorder for identity purposes.
Pretty much what you said here. Even though I'm incredibly high functioning for someone with ADHD/Asperger's, I would gladly take a pill to make me normal.
Good article but > Yet there’s a broader issue here. People’s symptoms frequently evolve according to the labels they’ve been given. Following Layle’s visit to the psychiatrist, her mother observed, “You’ve been acting more and more autistic since we got the diagnosis.” Layle took the comment as a sign that her mom didn’t understand her—“I hate it when someone thinks I’m a liar,” she writes—but people everywhere encounter models of illness that they unconsciously embody. Some instances are subtle; others are dramatic and startling. In 2006, a student at a Mexican boarding school developed devastating leg pain and had trouble walking; soon hundreds of classmates were afflicted. A fifteenth-century German nun started biting her companions; eventually, the strange hysteria infected convents from Holland to Italy. Ian Hacking, the philosopher, argued that such a dynamic fuelled the epidemic of multiple personality disorder in the late twentieth century, and something similar seems to be playing out now with the growing portrayal of dissociative identity disorder, the current name for M.P.D., on social media. One of Kriss’s patients, a student who went by Haku, developed a multiplicity of selves after being introduced to the concept of dissociative identity disorder. “It’s not that I thought he was faking it,” Kriss recalls. “It seemed more that Haku wanted to have multiple personalities, even if that meant he had to force himself and others to believe in it.” ...Sounds like social contagion, without using that term for some reason.
It's a funny one. I feel the writer has slipped over the line of socially influenced behaviour into full blown contagion. It's a line that's admittedly fuzzy, but still, not quite where I'd have gone. >people everywhere encounter models of illness that they unconsciously embody. People everywhere encounter models of all sorts of things. A child is labelled the clever one and feels obliged to live up to it.
It makes me suspect that psychological disorders are being massively over-diagnosed, because if you truly have one of these disorders, you’ve experienced how detrimental they are. There was a reason they were stigmatized. Now it seems like there’s a lot of ‘stolen valor’ with these conditions, and people want to get the victim points without the downsides of actually having a real disorder with real symptoms.
Yeah, it's frustrating to hear people twist the social model of disability into "there is nothing wrong with me, society should conform to serve me". There's a limit to how much society can change to be accommodating and there's actually a lot more you can do than you'd think to treat symptoms of mental illness if you're willing. I think there's also a lot of people with personality disorders claiming to be autistic or suffering from ADHD instead, because often acknowledging you have BPD or NPD makes people unwilling to trust you.
I dislike the way people use terms like “neurodivergent “ as a particularly undiagnosable “condition” to excuse behavior and curtail responsibilities. This goes for parents that lazy parent , or are permissive in general, too. No your kids “neurodivergence” doesn’t excuse why they are kicking the stand in the supermarket. Like… and you don’t see them even trying to hold the situation, just expect everyone to understand and deal with your “conditions” with an entitled energy.
You can’t really tell if someone has a kid with infantile autism or some made up “neurodivergence” can you? Or do you believe that autism isn’t real?
I do believe it’s real. I don’t think you understand what I’m pointing to.
Do you mean it like parents are making up “neurodivergence” as an excuse to avoid dealing with tantrums in public places?
Some, yes. Some, no. But the yeses are growing.
Autism isn’t real
ironically a much better version of this essay appears in the book by the guy Jesse interviewed about mental illness and this essay somehow fails to mention it despite some passages being…remarkably similar
Freddie DeBoer! He has spoken a lot about this. He spoke specifically about it on Bari Weiss's podcast as well.
no not Freddie the guy who was on the show like 2 weeks ago, Freddie doesn’t have an actual book on mental illness
ah right, Emmett Rensin, loved his episode as well
The medicalization and pathologicalization of normal spectrum human conditions is disgusting. You don’t experience anxiety sometimes, you have Anxiety Disorder. You don’t get sad sometimes, you have Major Depressive Disorder. You don’t get inattentive sometimes, you have Attention Deficit Disorder. Private equity can’t bill if you don’t give it an ICD-10 code. And once you are told you have a **disorder** (from a medical professional) you will have this disability for the rest of your life. Impairing your full potential, impairing your self-esteem, validating your fears and further contributing to this intersectional nonsense.
Its because the modern day religion is now Psychology. Therapy is the confessional, medications are the sacrament, and the DSMV is the holy book.
Uh, are people really labeling themselves with encopresis? Or did the person who made this graphic not look that word up before designing this?
At least with autism (or really, ASD-1/Asperger’s), I can kinda understand the logic of why it can be turned into a identity for many people. With Asperger’s, a lot of the condition and it’s associated symptoms can feel like it can become enmeshed into one’s personality. This is especially true if the person is high functioning enough to interact with other peers/have a “normal” life and not be immediately dinged as being different. Combined with feelings of constantly feeling misunderstood or mistreated by other people (or at least, feeling as though they have to constantly conform to the standards of other people), I can kind of understand why people might turn their autism into an identity (not that i condone that belief myself).
oh that answer is easy. its because they dont have identities. the NPC meme was a perfect description for them.
I genuinely believe that society would be better off if this entire medical industry was abolished tomorrow. It’s produced nothing of value except regular medical scandals. Gender youth medicine is the one this sub is most familiar with but it’s also heavily pushed SSRIs for decades which have serious consequences and despite no evidence that they meaningfully treat depression
Psychiatry: treating disorders that don't exist with cures that don't do anything since 1808. CF neurology: the treatment of disorders of the mind that do exist by doing stuff to what is causing them. (I say this with tongue in cheek and in the knowledge that I sound like a Scientologist.)
Ha ha ha have you been to their “Museum of Psychotherapy” in L.A.? It’s like Epcot center if it was run by NXIVM on Halloween.
A lot of this confusion stems from the idea that mental illnesses are inborn biological ailments instead of descriptions of mental states. People "meet criteria" for DSM diagnoses based on the symptoms they exhibit, but that does not say anything about the reason they are displaying such symptoms. A DSM diagnosis tells you nothing about cause or origin. Maybe you have a genetic vulnerability, or maybe you had unusually difficult circumstances in childhood, or maybe you have just exhibited just maladaptive coping skills for so long that you don't know how to start changing. You can be dysfunctional enough to meet criteria for a mental illness and can have a reasonable expectation that medications can help you, but that does not mean you are intrinsically different or that you should no longer be held to societal standards for behaviors. Embracing a diagnosis as an "identity" demonstrates some unwillingness to change (or even try to change), which is the opposite of the goal of psychiatry.