I work in this field and I dislike takes like this, where individuals think they can speak for a whole group.
Also this “Having sensory processing issues doesn’t make you “a little autistic.” It makes you someone with sensory processing problems. Autistic people will understand your struggles and welcome you as a fellow neurodivergent cousin, but that’s it.
But in order for a person to be considered autistic, they must have difficulty in multiple categories spanning the spectrum.”
If someone says that they are ‘a little autistic’ they aren’t saying that they ‘are autistic’, they are just attempting to emphasize. Don’t destroy that by getting into a semantic debate.
Honestly this is a massive problem in the psychological sciences. Most of the disorders are just collections of symptoms without any solid research tying those symptom collections to concrete issues in neurological circuits or biochemical signaling pathways. Work is being done to fix this, but its currently an absolute shit show in my opinion
> Most of the disorders are just collections of symptoms without any solid research tying those symptom collections to concrete issues in neurological circuits or biochemical signaling pathways.
This isn't true for autism, ADHD, bipolar or schizophrenia since some biological mechanisms are understood (even if these labels aren't perfect), so what are you talking about and what do you base it on?
The illnesses you mentioned are misdiagnosed all the time. DSM-V is a joke and so are most mental health professionals. They’re just fitting a list of symptoms to another list of symptoms based on what amounts to Levenshtein distance.
Anyone can be diagnosed with ADHD these days. And for all intents and purposes the patient might have 9/10 symptoms. But do they really have ADHD or is it something else? We don’t even have the capacity to figure that out right now because our understanding is so limited.
If you want to, you can spend 2 or 3 days and $5000 to get properly assessed by a neuropsycholoist to figure out what your issues actually are. That is laborious, time consuming and doesn't fit the 15 minute doctor visit medical billing model, so it comes down to a 15 question screener test for many.
Living in germany i got good healthcare and did allready some deeper analyses as a adult and its apartantly adhd. In the first message I meant as a child the test was not enough. But thank you for this hint :)
Often this deeper analysis is done on children and the 15 minute thing a quick initial screener :)
I had a bunch of assessment in early childhood but I didn't figure out what exactly my set of issues were until I got assessed by a very good neuropsych later in life. I really wish I knew about this stuff in late childhood, would've explained a lot more! It's also sad that there are not many good neuropsychs out there and it's hard to evaluate who is good for most people.
One thing for the other intelligent people out there, your intelligence can often mask that you are not performing to your full potential, because it compensates and makes you perform 'good enough'. Unfortunately our medical system is more orientated towards fixing the people who's lives are in a mess vs people who are just OK, so those who hobble along often don't get the help they need. Sometimes wish there was an equivalent of doctor that focuses on making people perform their best vs. good enough sometimes, kind of like a coach.
Saying most mental health professionals are a joke is perhaps a little harsh in my opinion, after all they are trying to understand and treat the most mysterious and complex things known to man.
We don't diagnose diabetes with a list of symptoms because we have a lab test (where we have picked an arbitrary value, but that's another story). We have no lab test for add. That is frustrating, and I think that adhd is probably overdisgnosed, but I think most are doing the best they can.
Our knowledge of schizophrenia is primarily based on what medications alleviate the symptoms, this is something I learned from pharmacology and biopsychology textbooks. Same with ADHD. Autism, I'm not aware of any solid research pointing to overarching mechanisms so please do cite some if you are. I would love to read it.
Just because some symptoms are alleviated by a medication does not mean that must be related to the underlying mechanism. Many times medications are altering symptoms far removed from the initial cause.
A steelmanned accurate take is that they are not biologically objectively confirmable. Which is more of an actual problem in psychiatry than other areas of medicine. Looking at say past x-rays and noting a tumor that went uncommented upon at the time on malpractice lawsuits for instance.
But notably also not done the majority of time in practice. It is seldom done to the level of say verifying your flu strain, let alone other more expensive and/or invasive tests which do not serve the patient's medical needs.
I don't think it's the answer you're looking for, but it's basically how I think about the scientific process: we ask all the wrong questions when we have the wrong mental models and the wrong vocabulary. But as our understanding improves, and as our vocabulary begins to map to the real world better, we start asking better questions and this unblocks science from progressing.
This is why its important for us to consider a broad variety of perspectives on a problem and to change our own perspectives. It's a complicated problem and its easy to get stuck on something that seems "almost kinda right enough that it sorta works"
Laying the tracks while the train travels down them. Absolutely agree with this. Some of us are better at connecting the dots than others. More literal/concrete people get stuck in the published or established wisdom and have a tough time thinking “outside the box”
Personally, I like the idea of reclassifying things based on biochemical mechanism. Not that this is any small undertaking, as we need to understand the mechanism that leads to the symptom(s) and develop some sort of reliable test for them. This goes for all psychological issues though, beyond just ASD
That's a good idea but nobody knows the mechanism for most brain diseases. When they know they say something like "you have a lesion in your right parietal lobe."
Yes but that is why researchers are actively working to change this. We are aware of the problems, but the system we're dealing with is large and complex.
It takes time and effort to learn about the mechanisms, just because we don't know right now doesn't mean we never will.
It's sort of a self reinforcing problem though - a lot of studies trying to understand biochemical mechanisms are taking our existing subpar labels at face value. They generally don't have the sample size to get remotely close to detection of the probably double digit distinct disorders that are making up the "Autism" group. And that is further complicated by natural heterogeneity found even in control groups.
Personally I think coming up with better behavioral characterizations will be an important intermediate step to identifying bio mechanisms, because it leads to much more tractable lines of questioning. For example, we could be quantifying symptoms like rigidity and repetitiveness of movement, sleep quality, sensitivity in different sensory domains, etc. - which should be increasingly feasible to do at scale these days.
How would you go about treatment for illnesses that have no known cause?
There are illnesses where we have a known set of symptoms, a known progression, and known treatment options, but have yet to discover the underlying set of causes. You may be able to reliably diagnose, and treat, without understanding the mechanisms at play.
You're not going to be able to work with the bureaucratic side of the healthcare system without being able to say what they're being treated for. Those treatment options can be approved for one illness and not another, even when they share symptoms, because of known efficacies.
Having a name to call something helps, even when you have no idea about the mechanism at play.
In DSM-V they did the contrary. In DSM-IV, things like Asperger's, PDD-NOS, etc existed. Now, with V, it is all under the same umbrella: ASD ('Autism Spectrum Disorder' in short 'autism' or ASD).
I'm not sure why, but I know there was discrimination going on. People looking to e.g. headhunt idiot savants or high functioning autistics with Asperger's.
The DSM is ... well, it's a many-purpose compendium, but one of them is diagnosing people to get them a starting point. For insurance claims, for looking for specialists, etc. But it's certainly not in itself an expert manual. (While yes it is, but it's really not. Because it necessarily has to exclude the outlier cases, so it intentionally limits its own scope, focusing on the most common symptoms, and general descriptions of them. Which is very hard for psychological phenomena.)
And it was because it seems those are all caused by the same underlying biology, so they are the same disorder with differing levels of severity in their symptom categories. (Social/language and restricted repetitive behaviors.)
To add to the above, my understanding is that classifying autism spectrum disorders into subcategories (eg aspergers) didn't seem to provide much benefit and it made things more difficult to understand. At this point all of our limited interventions are similar and are focused on strengthening social skills, which applies whether you have aspergers or pervasive developmental disorder.
This may change again if we find benefit in subclassification (e.g. a treatment that benefits aspergers patients only).
As an autistic person, I usually find people saying that they're "a little autistic" without really being autistic a little demeaning. They're trying to tell me that they understand, I get that, and I genuinely appreciate the attempt at connection. However, I literally have this label because I am different and they cannot really understand what it's like, so it just comes off like they're trying to tell me the way I feel about something doesn't matter or like my troubles aren't real because they claim to experience something similar (even though they literally don't because they're not autistic).
I recommend reading up on what the psychologist John Gottman calls a "bid for connection," specifically about not taking it at face value but recognizing it as a genuine attempt at building rapport.
Nevertheless, you aren't alone in interpreting such bids in a negative way. I sometimes ask people, especially defense clients, straight up: "Are you a person who finds comfort in discussing times when others have faced similar problems, even if there are still a lot of differences? Or would that make you feel that you weren't being heard as an individual?"
What matters is the context or even what isn't being said.
For example, it can imply the person is saying they recognize a (typical) trait in themselves. It can also imply the person does not have a diagnosis, but does recognize themselves in the description. Or it can imply the person is interested in figuring out if they have a diagnosis. It can imply an affirmation of sympoms ('oh, now that you say it, I do recognize X or Y in your behavior). It can also be used to create common ground or sympathy. I wouldn't assume harm though (theory of mind!).
I have an ASD diagnosis and it was not a matter of a 15 minute questionnaire as suggested elsewhere in this thread with regards to ADHD. Yes, I did need to fill in a questionnaire. After that I had to wait almost a year til the diagnosis process was started. It included detailed historical analysis of a parent ('hetero anamnese'). I would like to assume all ASD diagnosis are proper, though mine was after DSM-V was introduced so I have autism but no specific label.
From what I understood, its being discussed in the scientific community AD(H)D is merely a variant of autism.
When I see a movie like Girl, Interrupted or Ik Ook Van Jou it is supposedly about a young woman with borderline (BPD) but all I see is a young woman with autism instead. That's just my personal take though.
> Also this “Having sensory processing issues doesn’t make you “a little autistic.” It makes you someone with sensory processing problems.
This filing-people-into-groups thinking is something that i see so often here on HN and I'm so bothered by it.
For me, i do what i feel i want to do, and make up names and concept for it afterwards if it seems necessary. Sometimes i don't have words for what i am doing. Its a lot of improvisation.
For some people, this process seems to be reversed... Like as if they need to be "validated" by external concepts, otherwise they don't do some things. And they feel relieved when they have a diagnosis like "autism". Not having a name/explanation for it seems like a barrier to them.
I don't know what i am observing here, but I'd like to know. Maybe this is like the inner-monologue thing, where humans vastly differ in some regard but are unaware of it.
Similar. I think because I've always been "kind of weird", and eternally baffled at so-called "normal" people expecting everybody to be like them. Like, we're allowed to be different, right? In practice you'll be ostracized. Unless you get an official diagnosis. Then you're allowed to be weird. Thanks for "accommodating" me, society. But how about we just don't structure it in such a stupid way in the first place? "No, you weirdo, stop being unreasonable. Go back to watching football."
That said, labels can be useful. If other people that are similarly weird have found some tactic (or substance) useful, you might also find it useful. For me, "aha, it's ADHD!" was a huge breakthrough, because it gave me a general direction to search for answers (and meds).
So, uh, to summarize: labels can be useful, but I wish society was not structured in such a neurotypical-centric way. Just let people be different. e.g. If someone says "I don't work well in an open-plan office", just believe them. They shouldn't need a doctor's note.
That problem could be attributed to the tragedy of the Commons.
Claiming you don't work well in an open plan office and being taken at face value would lead to literally everyone saying that, because surprise, most people don't work well in open plan offices (I'm very neurotupical and I hate it).
Another way to look at it is that we've evolved as a society to go out of our way to try to accomodate people with different needs when necessary. Being given an office if you have ADHD is great. Try to go back 100 years and you'd be fired from the factory instead for not being a perfect cog in the machine.
So it's actually beautiful we are able and willing to accomodate others, when for most of history that wasn't the case at all.
> If someone says that they are ‘a little autistic’ they aren’t saying that they ‘are autistic’, they are just attempting to emphasize. Don’t destroy that by getting into a semantic debate.
It's like saying "I'm actually 1/16 Cherokee!" as a form of group-identifying empathy. Note: It is not.
> I work in this field and I dislike takes like this, where individuals think they can speak for a whole group.
People like us have been trying desperately to get people who "work in the field" to understand us for decades, with little success. This is but one example.
I say to myself I'm a little bit autistic. But I'm not really sure.
I fit the profile of person one in the article.
The reason I'm wondering / even looking at autism is because the meds for my ADHD just make everything worse even at really small doses and I don't really know what to do.
Yeah, there seems to be a bit of overlap between ADHD symptoms and being anywhere other than the extreme neurotypical end of the autism spectrum.
As an ADHD person, one thing that has helped me a lot is listening to ADDitude Mag podcasts[1]. Listening to people who are experts in the subject and are ADHD themselves has been quite validating. Like, yeah, we're not stupid, but the normies sure make us feel that way sometimes, huh! I recommend the ones with Ned Hallowell, especially.
So maybe you're not ADHD, or maybe you are but that's not your main problem. There are probably similar podcasts or forums or communities for people that are 'weird' or mildly disabled in other ways. I guess I'm trying to be helpful because I relate, and I know how alienating it can be, but the best I can come up with is to quote Timothy Leary and say "find the others." Easier said than done. You can talk at me if you want. :)
I really think that is an incredibly divisive and reductive way of looking at people. In my experience, everybody has mental problems, but you usually don’t get to learn of someone’s individual struggles unless you are very close to them.
I am guessing you have a job, and maybe you dislike how you feel others judge you for your personal difficulties with your symptoms. You appear to judge others, who have their own personal struggles with their own quirky symptoms, perhaps which you don’t empathise with because they don’t happen to have ADHD?
> I really think that is an incredibly divisive and reductive way of looking at people.
This is actually one of the problems in neurodiversity discourse, too: neurotypical doesn't actually qualify as a neurotype, and probably no one is neurotypical.
Well, maybe that was a bad choice of word on my part. I don't think of the majority of humanity as being judgemental assholes. Most of the people that I actually interact with are nice and understanding, because everybody's got their own set of problems, and we can use all the mutual understanding we can get. But there are certain people, especially in positions of authority, that are able to turn their ignorance and lack of imagination into /my/ problem (teachers I had decades ago, or grandboss at previous job, for example, which is part of the reason I am currently /not/ employed). I'm really complaining about systemic problems, not individuals.
For better or worse, I would never know unless you told me, and to use your metaphor, the very fact that you can socially interact here on HN at all more or less puts you in that camp of being 1/16 Cherokee and then stating "people like us".
Of the individuals I interact with on a daily basis, some can't vocalize or interact in any meaningful way beyond grunting, but of the ones that could, most would likely end up banned or shadow banned if they tried socializing on HN.
I don't discount your experience in the least, but for the individuals I personally know, work for and with, one of the most valuable things they can receive is someone taking the time to empathize with them. Most people don't and they end up having no or very few friends and/or otherwise being social outcast.
The "1/16 Cherokee" example seems to be clumsy adaptation of social techniques for trying to connect via commonalities. The intent counts for a bit. It certainly isn't effective or pleasing to the target, but it is an attempt to bridge and group-identify. That they aren't unconnected strangers with no link.
Arguably this a symptom of other conceptual issues (like needing genetic connections for kinship as opposed to universals). But it is a step of progress and a reason to educate rather than shun or scorn.
I think there's a difference between someone saying they are "a little autistic" when talking to someone who is definitely autistic as a form of self-identification, vs them trying to figure out if they have autism themselves and put the pieces together of why they seem a bit different than everyone else.
I've recently started wondering if I'm a little autistic myself. I would never say that I am in response to someone who tells me that they are. But I fit the description of person 1 almost to a T, minus the thumb sucking and chair rocking, but plus trouble dealing with driving to where driving on an unfamiliar road will ruin my day. Am I autistic? I have no idea honestly.
I don’t work in the field and I am not autistic. I have a daughter who is, and just recently spent holiday times with a family that also has members who are.
I don’t think neurotypical people can really empathize. I am saying this as someone who have had altered states of consciousness with psychedelics. It is not the same thing, but it was a different enough experience that I know that people who have not taken psychedelics or have had visionary experiences, cannot really relate to my experiences with altered states of consciousness, and those attempts at “empathizing” are shallow.
There are two kinds of things when we talk about empathy. One is the kind of empathy that comes from shared experience, and I doubt neurotypical people can really have an inkling of what it is like without having experienced altered states of consciousness.
The other kind of empathy is where one recognizes that the other person is suffering. The reasons and circumstances by which someone suffers is unique to the individual person, but what is shared universally is that each person has suffered.
Rather than empathizing with someone by saying they are a “little” or “a lot” autistic, it’s more precise to look at the person before you, in the present moment, and share the experience of suffering.
If we are talking about therapy, the author makes a great case for clinical outcomes being biased towards mitigating the impact an autist has on other people, and not the impact to the autist herself. The whole point of explaining the spectrum like a spectral signature rather than a gradient is to have a better framework for helping people.
I think your perspective is valuable. You so try to empathize but you also realize the limitations of your own perspective which, in my opinion and observations, is light years ahead of most people who think they do have the ability to empathize and consider radically different perspectives than their own. In reality most people have an incredibly difficult time considering different thought processes.
Very good point. I wish people would still use the word sympathy for expressing shared suffering, so that the word empathy could keep its original meaning.
I don’t agree with this take. I have social anxiety and difficulty empathizing with people in certain respects. One of my children who is diagnosed has these two issues and some sensory and dexterity issues, issues with adapting to changing circumstances, and a very limited ability to regulate their responses to frustrating situations to the point where they’ll go on rants with crying and anger that is white hot (a “meltdown”). This child is what is commonly called “high functioning,” though: anybody who has not observed them long enough could easily only ever see one of these behaviors/traits, and the child is in a regular classroom and has been identified as quite gifted in some subjects.
I’m not on the spectrum, and would never claim “I’m a little autistic.” I might have before I had the kid, but definitely not now. My kid’s autism symptoms are really minor compared to many, but it’s so far beyond the kinds of quirks you’re referring to as to be obviously and starkly different.
My oldest is a daughter of two parents with ASD diagnosid and certain things have to go in her way, she needs to know in advance what happens, and she has difficulty adapting to a situation. In my country, you can only get an autism diagnosis at age 4, and she's well into 3 years old. These temper tantrums or meltdowns are common for age 3 though.
PS: We were both misdiagnosed as having anxiety disorders (GAD and avoidant, GAD and agoraphobia respectively). I also got Ritalin prescribed against fatigue (because I could not officially get ADHD diagnosis as adult according to my psychiatrist this was back during DSM-IV). It would not surprise me if other people with social anxiety diagnosis (also) have ASD, but as usual if you can function in society with your current diagnosis (or lack of it), who cares, it isn't worth the hassle (time, money, effort).
Maybe it's different for people with AD(H)D than Asperger's, but I don't get it. There is nothing good with having a brain disability. Aspie pride is about as dumb as people in wheelchairs being "proud" of being born without functioning legs. And to Homo Sapiens the brain functions I lack is almost as important as walking ability. Asperger to me hasn't meant "a little quirky" like Sheldon Cooper. It has meant total inability to "get" other people and their intentions. Asperger may have made me an awesome developer but if there was a pill or treatment to cure it, I'd take it in a heartbeat. People calling Asperger their "superpower" is laughable.
> Maybe it's different for people with AD(H)D than Asperger's, but I don't get it. There is nothing good with having a brain disability.
So what you want people who aren't average to consider themselves inferior? I don't know why people wouldn't be able to find good things or positives from a disability.
> People calling Asperger their "superpower" is laughable.
Asperger's looks pretty over-represented in the richest people in the world. Dyslexia is also over-represented. Bill-Clinton, Obama, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison were all not raised by their biological fathers. Plenty of other examples. Adversity can be a super-power.
Larry Ellison has an ASD diagnosis? TIL. The guy runs and breathes Oracle like a true psychopath. Then again, psychopaths and autistics can get along very well.
As for your other point. You need to overcome or work around your weaknesses. Everyone has to do such, but for some it requires more (out of the box thinking) effort. For example, I have ASD and get disgusted by certain foods (smelling or seeing them). I explained this to my employer and colleagues when I got hired (they were aware I am autistic). What they do is they ask if it's OK if they buy/eat X (I don't wanna get into the specifics) and I ACK it (usually). They know if I look weird or go away what's going on.
Not to my knowledge, just was offering a counterpoint to the GP who seemed to think there are only negatives to adversity, like ASD. In that example "No benefits of [adversity]" Where the adversity of not being raised by your biological father might make you significantly more likely to be a billionaire or POTUS.
Thanks, I guess I missed some context. A billionaire, he is. A happy human being? A useful addition to society? I mean, all your examples have controversies but this one seems to stand out. Speaking of outliers: it lacks statistical analysis. I don't think anyone would argue a man not raised by their biological father cannot be successful (if we describe billionaire or POTUS as successful). Rather, what is the % of highly successful compared to men being raised by their biological father highly successful. We can at least apply statistical analysis on that, combined with a definition of successful (cause mine is guaranteed different because mine includes ethics and values it much higher than power or networth); we can't on autism because of undiagnosed people, while diagnosis also denotes some kind of impact or severity (incentive to become true positive). Ie. there are likely loads of people on the spectrum yet functioning (false negative). Then there's those who can't afford a diagnosis (false negative), and then there's the misdiagnosed (false positive/negative).
> A billionaire, he is. A happy human being? A useful addition to society?
haha. personally never really met any of them so can't really touch that : )
> I don't think anyone would argue a man not raised by their biological father cannot be successful
Not only successful, but significantly more likely to be meteoriticy successful from the adversity.
For other claims, sure the waters get muddy but the lack of ground truth is less relevant for the extreme success case. Aspies are wayyyy over represented in the top 10 richest people.
Your comment comes across as condescending, full of assumptioms, and plain ignorant but I want to address them.
Let me start with an analogy. Imagine the brain as a circle. That's the brain of a normal person (sometimes called normie in quich vocabulary). The brain of someome on the spectrum is oval instead. Society assumes all brains are circles, and is build around that. Does that make ovales useless? Only if you look at it from the myopic point of view of society assuming and requiring circles.
You furthermore say 'Asperger to me means X'. Asperger was (DSM-V ditched it) a description of traits and the person with an Asperger's diagnosis checks some of these boxes, but everyone's different [1]. You zoomed in on one specific trait, but ignore the rest. I'll leave it to you to judge on what that says on your capability to assess Asperger traits.
My father had MS. He ended up in a wheelchair, but he didn't start in one. MS is a disease, autism is a personality trait. You cannot cure the latter (they can't cure MS either, only stop the progression but that's specific to some diseases and perhaps one day the scientific community overcomes that hurdle). The brain size/shape is what it is which is why some people who are autistic insist in them being called autistic instead of them having autism. I try to be relaxed when it comes to language, but my wife (also diagnosed with) has a different take on matters. Since autism and Asperger's has its pros and cons, calling it solely a disability is myopic and, if extrapolated, outright condescending and flat out ignorant.
Back about my wheelchair father, growing up with a father who is chronically ill and who tries to find peace around it gave me compassion and respect for disabled people, or those who are in need. Not only that, the old man was legally blind. His hearing though! He probably had undiagnosed autism, but he could hear details and draw conclusions from such which I could not. Because I was not trained in it as a blind person.
People who call Asperger's their super power are just boasting they are able to benefit from their oval more than it harms them, or so they are trying to imply such. There's probably a context to such a situation, and perhaps an other reason it annoys you.
[1] In a support group for people with ASD (after properly diagnosed) the diversity, hurdles, and benefits become clear. There's common grounds, but also so many differences! I have this with my wife who is diagnosed as well (^2)
Let's be honest, all of this is really motivated by empathy, the goal is to avoid thinking of people with ASD as "worse" than other people.
The reality is that nobody would want their child be autistic. People with autism have an extremely high unemployment rate. So clearly, it's not a neutral personality trait. You don't get diagnosed with a personality trait.
I say this despite suspecting that I could be on the spectrum. But I'm annoyed by the trend of bending reality just because it makes people feel better.
> Let's be honest, all of this is really motivated by empathy, the goal is to avoid thinking of people with ASD as "worse" than other people.
In general, in discussions, there's a lack of empathy, and I believe its valuable to build develop such.
Creating empathy was indeed part of my motivation. It also puts emphasis on a supply and demand issue.
> The reality is that nobody would want their child be autistic
My wife and I are autistic. Its likely (but not guaranteed) our 2 children are autistic.
According to your statement, in your humble opinion, not only should I not have been born, we should not have gotten children (we did use double folic acid dose on second because scientific research suggests it helps against certain autism traits which are perceived as negative. On first we did not yet know we had ASD though we suspected it and were on waiting list for diagnosis) because of the high risk of neurodiversive children. Some of my wife's friends said the same. Thanks for the advice.
That being said, yes I would have been deeply unhappy with a child born with a severe disability, for example syndrome of down. My wife would have been happy. We likely would have split up because if that, its a risk we took. But I recognize it is my view on syndrome of down, and my issue with dealing with it (not sure why... I grew up with neighbor kid having it). Its kind if like I am biased against it, generalizing. Even though I saw a beautiful film about it: Yo, Tambien. The issue lies with me, not people with syndrome of down. And perhaps, maybe a bonding process would have successfully happened because with my 2 children it is difficult to fathom I would not love them for how they are. Annoyed at times? Sure, but that is a given.
> People with autism have an extremely high unemployment rate. So clearly, it's not a neutral personality trait. You don't get diagnosed with a personality trait.
(Unemployment is at an all time low in my country.)
Employment isn't what defines you in life, in my opinion. Unemployment is a supply and demand issue with only losing parties (unemployed, society, government). Not only one losing party. It doesn't have to be this way. I am convinced every human wants to be functional in society, with respect to their being (things they cannot change). In my country, companies need to hire a percentage of their employees as disabled people, and they need to work around the negative connotations of their disabilities. That doesn't imply they're bad employees though. Just that they have a different manual.
Thing is, I went to an education where everyone had an autism diagnosis. I have seen diversity in neurodiversity. I have met people on the spectrum who have high potential, or who have achieved such. After I finished education I got hired because I am on the spectrum, and I function. My colleagues are happy with me as their co-employee, and I love being part of this team.
In short, supply and demand was met.
> I say this despite suspecting that I could be on the spectrum.
So, your post is some kind of possible self ridiculing? What you said is akin to saying people of colour [a trait you are born with] are subhumans, then saying you might have some lineage if some foreign culture, or that you are a POC yourself, or got friends who are POC. Chapeau.
Well, the way I see it, the difference between autism and anxiety disorder, OCD or insomnia is that autism is seen as an inherent, unchangeable part of ones identity. It's who you are, not something you have.
So autism being considered negative is much more harmful and damaging to the person's psyche than anxiety disorder for example.
Which is why there's been a push for normalizing and destigmatizing autism. Similar is true for LGBT+. It's why racism is considered so harmful - it's very hard and unsettling to think of yourself as inferior to others.
My problem is that I think this push has gone too far, to the point where reality is being bended.
A personality disorder is also something which usually lasts your entire lifetime. We need to work around our disabilities, whether its being in a wheelchair, deaf or bad hearing, insomnia, anxiety, or something else. There's various ways to do that, for example learning more about your disorder from credible sources, cognitive therapy, drugs/medicine, or an aid/device such as a hearing aid, or good ol' helping each other out.
Example of the latter: a friend of my wife is autistic (proper diagnosis, in fact they met during post-diagnosis support group), too, and he can work (he has own company), but he is unable to clean his house. Its too much chaos for him. So my wife does it for the time being, as his housemaid couldn't deal with him, and recently quit. And soon, my wife is getting paid for that work. Because of that, we'll both officially work, and we get free morning daycare for our toddler instead of having to shell out 200 EUR/month. Its a win-win-win.
> The brain size/shape is what it is which is why some people who are autistic insist in them being called autistic instead of them having autism.
> Since autism and Asperger's has its pros and cons, calling it solely a disability is myopic and, if extrapolated, outright condescending and flat out ignorant.
I think I'd be more comfortable with people calling it a disability than people calling it a personality trait... That feeds into the point that the article is addressing.
Right, I missed a mark there. Rather it would be a list of personality traits being linked to autism. Neurodevelopmental disability or neurodevelopmental disorder fits better (implies incurable), but it has a negative connotation; precisely what I wanted to address.
The article could have used a 3D cube to describe the spectrum. Then you get the colors and tints of it. Some people describe all the traits with spectrum, some severity of specific trait. 3D cube covers both, kind of like a 3D spectrogram, just multiple charts. The text then becomes context, and you immediately notice visually the differences. Context is still very much relevant though.
I thought the article was good but missed the mark on the comparson of suffering. In general, high functioning autistics are (seemingly) more intelligent, and intelligent people seem to suffer more from things like depression, weight of the world being on their shoulders. My 3 y.o. (who appears to be intelligent and likely on spectrum) doesn't realize such yet. Innocence is a blessing in disguise.
> Maybe it's different for people with AD(H)D than Asperger's, but I don't get it. There is nothing good with having a brain disability.
I don't really like the whole 'ADHD is my superpower' line either.
There are issues with the medicalization of neurodivergence, too, but nobody is obligated to feel like being neurodivergent is 'really a blessing' in their own case.
She is missing the point of "a gradient". I.e. to know how much help or space someone needs without going into 7 dimensions of traits. Everyone can't be psychiatrists ...
I see nothing here to suggest that the author is missing the point of “a gradient”; on the contrary, she knows what it is, that it is not what is meant by “spectrum” here, and argues persuasively that mistaking the latter for the former causes misunderstanding.
Here, she is giving an example of how this can happen:
“My doctor recently referred to my autism is “mild.” I gently pointed to my psychologist’s report which stated that my executive dysfunction as being greater than 99th percentile.
“”That means I am less functional than 99% of people. Does that seem mild to you?” I asked her.
“But, you see, I can speak, and I can look people in the eyes, so they see my autism as “mild.” My autism affects those around me mildly but my autism does affect me severely.“
A typical spectrum is the exact same thing as gradients of frequencies. The difference is just in interpretation and actionable mitigations. You can operate on both levels of such a model, for different purposes and effects.
This is not a typical spectrum in the sense you describe. As far as I know, There is no plausible model in which the various categories of the spectrum are explicable as different values of a single continuous variable. Attempting to apply this model seems to be part of the problem.
You can say everyone is unique (unique categories), but you can also say everybody is human (one category). Being gradients/spectrum _is_ the model. All models about life will be flawed, unprecise and pretty shallow. It's important to be aware of and avoid misuse and misapplications of such models. This doesn't mean you can never use any model. They are tools, and we must have awareness of their outcomes and shortcomings. Even simple models can have very complex outcomes in a complex world, or when dealing with individuals (singletons) vs populations (accumulations).
By writing “gradients/spectrum” you are begging the question here, assuming that the spectrum is a categorical variable with an underlying gradient, analogously to the color spectrum’s basis in frequency. What you have not said, so far, is what psychological variable you regard as analogous to frequency.
Sure. By going into the perception part of frequency, or even psychology, we go more into the subjective. We can start to see colors, or types/groups of people's minds. This can help with understanding differences, in groups, types or categories. It's all tools, and such categorization might help with differences that people struggle with. For example, more specific struggles than autism/non-autism alone.
But then again, you can also find commonalities even on the individual level, that might help universally. So it's all multiple models and some of them operating in multiple dimensions. Inventing new models doesn't automatically discard other models.
My point is simply, instead of looking at it as either this OR that, the models are that model AND that model too, while trying to recognize strength and weaknesses of our biases. When confronted with new information, we tend to discard old information, as if it's all unapplicable or not politically correct. That's perhaps psychology too :) Perhaps, linked to the competitive nature of humans.
These are all generalities. We still have not seen any explanation of what psychological gradient you think underlies the autism spectrum specifically :)
I won't claim to be an expert how it differentiates across "groups" of people. I do care a bit about keeping an open mind and try to see multiple perspectives at the same time though. But yes, that often makes it more general and less powerful (one-sided).
The article here is all about arguing against what you have been saying: its author argues that the autism spectrum is not "a typical spectrum [that] is the exact same thing as gradients of frequencies" - or a gradient of anything else, for that matter. This is, in fact, the main point of the article! Carrie Beckwith-Fellows' TED talk does not address this issue at all: she makes an analogy to the color spectrum, but there is no indication that this analogy extends to there being an underlying gradient analogous to frequency. Both author and speaker argue that even the conflation of the somewhat pop-sci gradient of high/low functioning with the spectrum is a misunderstanding!
I think the important message from both people here is not that there is no gradient - of "functioning", stress, or something else - but that it is / they are largely orthogonal to the dimension plotted out by the spectrum's categorical values.
At this point, I think we're just talking beside each other's points. My first post, as a reply to other posts, is just about spectrum and gradients, really being the same, but there's a duality between the continuous frequencies/gradients and the perceptions of colors. I'm being general, whereas you are pointing out problems with too general models (or aggregates for that matter). I don't disagree with that.
To attempt to reply though: There doesn't need to be a psychological variable, there just need to be made one or more tests that scores aggregates. However, as the article and TEDx talk says, a number or two would not paint the whole picture of a complex socio-psychological issue.
My very first reply to you was to point out that your generality - “a typical spectrum is the exact same thing as gradients of frequencies” - does not appear to apply in this case, and I am glad to see that we now seem to be in agreement on this.
Your second paragraph appears to be broadly in agreement with my point (which is merely a paraphrase of the author, believe) that, in this case, the gradients of quantitative test scores are largely orthogonal to the spectrum’s categorical variables. Even if one could combine them to get a meaningful aggregate score (which I suspect you can do, though only to some extent), you cannot tell from that score what aspects of the spectrum describe the subject.
For sure. Note, I never disagreed with the author, and even provided links of my own. Not every post is a disagreement, at least not from me ;)
From the TEDx-talk, it does seem like the typical spectrum/gradient understanding is lacking in terms of being meaningful for individuals. Maybe because it's a sort of score as seen from the outside, and not even very precise one at that.
Also, society also needs to accommodate and improve understanding of diversity, rather than expecting everyone to be clones of each other. The latter doesn't work that well, since we're then not encouraging people's natural strengths and creativity.
Well, it was certainly hard to see it any other way:
Author:
The spectrum is not a gradient.
From your first reply:
A typical spectrum is the exact same thing as gradients of frequencies.
As your reply did not explicitly make this claim about the autism spectrum, it nominally did not directly contradict the author, but if it was not about the autism spectrum, then it was utterly pointless to raise it here - and, furthermore, it took several promptings on my part before you addressed this issue.
With regard to your second paragraph, I completely agree.
Sure, but I found this phrase a bit bombastic: "The spectrum is not a gradient."
Good find though, that was probably what sparked the sub-thread.
I replied to you in further posts that I see both perspectives. So can now conclude I don't see it as just one way because it depends on your frame of reference / POV / state of mind.
Maybe it was pointless when I didn't really relate it directly to autism at first, and I didn't mean to go into a discussion of it being either that or the other in the first place.
The argument is clear but not entirely persuasive. There are a lot of people on the spectrum who have no hope of expressing their thoughts in an essay like this or ever living independently. Whether we call it “mild” or “high-functioning” or some other choice along the euphemism treadmill, it does not change the fact that these people have very different prospects.
I may have misunderstood your point here, but I do not think the author intended to suggest that her situation was in any way a worst case, or to minimize the difficulties faced by others. On the other hand, I do think she was pointing out that terms like high or low functioning are not categories of the spectrum, and nor are they the sort of issue it is intended to differentiate between.
I took the point of the piece to be that thinking about it in terms of "best" or "worst" cases was itself wrongheaded, and that there's no meaningful distinction you could make between "high" or "low" function. Assuming that's what she meant, I don't agree.
I feel that it is implicit in the passage I quoted that the author sees such a distinction, but that her doctor was mistaken in assuming that it is determined by the spectrum diagnosis.
I suspect that autism is a special shape of attention (and by attention I mean what you direct when you pay attention, that which gets jerked around when you are distracted and what you concentrate when you concentrate).
Call it "habitually concentrated".
We study that kind of stuff in the meditation scene.
Another shitty development is how "mild" autism has become a trendy status symbol. Psychiatrists are now inundated with so many diagnosis requests from neurotypicals that actually autistic people such as my wife and I cannot get the official diagnoses we need for government programs, NGO memberships, school and workplace accommodations, etc. There are now literally years-long waits to even get an appointment! Autistic people now have to add the preface "actually autistic" to hopefully get some understanding.
This happened with gluten intolerance although seems to have had the positive effect of raising the profile of actual gluten intolerance (like coeliac disease) and vastly increased the availability of gluten free products. I wonder if there could be a similar upside for people with "actual autism".
I think we are seeing that effect with regards to mental health and autism. It seems to me that there is at least a greater understanding. Growing up, I was likely right on the bubble of being diagnosed. Unfortunately, instead I was just labeled a bad kid.
Now I have a child with an official diagnosis, and I see a lot of the traits from my childhood, and things that I struggled with and her, just magnified.
I think if I were to go through the school system now, someone probably would have at least suggested that I get tested. Rather than berating me day after day and labeling me a bad kid
Yeah, I used to laugh at the gluten intolerance epidemic. Then as an experiment I cut it from my diet. I was not at all intolerant, I just wanted to try it.
I could not believe the difference. For example, I never realized that some foods made me tired. Now when I eat breads or pastas, I notice i am tired afterwards (not immediately but after a time).
Why do you think this has anything to do with gluten? Is there perhaps another substance in bread and pasta that is known to contribute to sleepiness after eating?
Supposedly carbohydrates are a precursor to serotonin, so getting sleepy from carbs could be expected. The neuroscientist Andrew Huberman talks about this in his podcast, eating low carb during the day can maintain alertness, while eating carbs at night are useful to prepare for sleep.
A heavy portion of carbohydrates will raise and lower your blood sugar levels. The crash is the tiredness. I would nearly fall asleep at my desk after lunch if I had pasta, and it took some time to make the connection.
The gluten intolerance thing is complicated by FODMAPs (certain carbs that tend to ferment in the gut and to which some people are especially sensitive for reasons that are poorly understood). In practice, a gluten-free diet is often also a low-FODMAP diet, but companies don't label their food as "low-FODMAP", so people might make the switch, get actual relief from actual symptoms, and assume that gluten was the issue because they've never even heard of FODMAP sensitivity.
In my experience, the biggest issue with autism isn't so much raw awareness or availability, but that almost none of the "autism industry" caters to autistic people themselves. I sometimes end up excluding phrases like "your child", "the child", "the student", "my son", "my daughter" etc. from searches for information about autism because there's just so much stuff that's laser-focused on the concerns of presumed-neurotypical people around an autistic person.
Interesting, but I think it has gone the other direction. It seems to me that the autism diagnosis has been unilaterally bad for rational people, and something like a green light for exploitation by emotional people. I hear people calling others autistic all the time to diminish their rational points in an argument.
I really feel for you. My ex-boyfriend had Asperger's and was similarly had issues applying for programs and getting regular specialized medical/therapy visits because of how sensationalized "neuroatypicality" had become. My heart sinks whenever I read another article about how TikTok users decided that nervous tics are not only popular, but deserve to be imitated and even diagnosed to feel legitimacy. I know "social media bad" is a played-out theme these days, but it really makes my blood boil imagining all the personal development these people are missing out on by trying to roleplay as a less-fortunate individual and record it for online clout.
As individuals, they're probably not intentionally doing this. Autism has just expanded to being so vague that people think it may actually be the reason they're not happy, or the reason they're secretly special. Walking into an autistic identity by imitating people whom you know as autistic could subjectively feel like dropping the pretenses of being normal and expressing your true autistic self.
People crave attention. Some people and kids do what they need to do to get attention. Look at the kids of Hollywood actors and how their afflictions affect their behavior.
That’s not to dismiss people who actually suffer from actual differences, but some of it is the same old “rebellion” in different clothing.
This is sadly all too common in the disabled community in general.
I am not ignorant. I understand that many, perhaps the majority, of disabilities that exist in the United States are of the “invisible“ kind.
However, the number of individuals who want to elevate their very common, and human, difficulties in life, to a “disability“ is ridiculous. If I had to diagnose most of these people, I would call them narcissists.
Funny because narcissism can be debilitating. Narcissistic personality disorder completely ruins a persons ability to have even just one healthy human interaction or relationship.
Debilitating to themselves but infinitely more harmful for the people they interact with. Maybe a diagnosis would open them up to some mitigations on their behavior. Narcissism personality disorder cannot be cured but sufferers can learn to do less harm.
I won't say I have ADHD, but I am very lazy. For my entire life, I've found myself unable to just snap out of laziness and choose to stop being lazy. I don't believe that I'm selfishly lazy, because my laziness often causes obvious, preventable problems for me, and I still can't find the switch inside myself to turn it off.
I wish we could set aside the labels and say "I'm lazy and I want to buy therapy to help me deal with being lazy." Maybe there is also a reason people are not getting their need for attention satisfied in whatever way they're supposed to.
I satisfy my need for attention by being good at programming, and then talking to other programmers about programming. I notice most people (general population) don't have any particular skill worth showing off like I do. I don't know what the actionable to fix that is, though.
The two of you sound like you're being dismissive of mental illnesses that cause immense suffering and are accusing people of just seeking attention or performance enhancing drugs. That's pretty fucked up.
Their are tons of people who really do need medication.
Their are others who shop doctors to get the meds they want.
For example, it's common for kids struggling in college to get an ADHD diagnosis so they can study for longer hours. As far as I'm concerned as long as your adult, ingest whatever you want. But I don't think being unable to study Chem for 12 hours a day is an illness.
Why stop adults from doing what they want.
No one stops you from rock climbing, even though that's also dangerous.
ADHD medications don't really restore anyone to 'normal'. They're a compensatory measure ('performance enhancer') which is reserved only for some people mainly for bad reasons (the war on drugs, lack of public and accessible infrastructure for addiction treatment). They can be used to help people with certain deficits meet certain demands (typically productivity in work or school), but it's not like they counteract ADHD. They help with some aspects of the disorder (difficulty sustaining attention) and make other aspects of the disorder (difficulty being deliberate and judicious about when to switch tasks) worse.
Gating them heavily behind many appointments and preventing pharmacies from providing any refills makes stimulant medications harder to access for people who have ADHD, especially during bad times when it's relatively poorly managed, which forms a vicious cycle. (ADHDers sometimes refer to the total fees associated with missed and late appointments and other such mishaps as 'the ADHD tax', and it's not unusual for that sum to exceed what an ADHD patient actually pays in copays, especially when they're first trying to get things under control.)
Expanding public access both to stimulant medication and to addiction treatment could, imo, help more people live better lives (including both ADHD patients and people who don't have ADHD) and allow treatment of ADHD to focus more on people who actually have ADHD , and on all of the management aspects of living with ADHD (which are much harder and collectively at least as important as medication).
(At the same time, under the policies the GP described, I would continue to consult with a psychiatrist, because adjusting psychoactive medications without professional assistance is a stupid thing to do.)
Nicotine is a very effective ADHD med, and it's available over the counter. (No, I don't mean in tobacco.)
I have inattentive ADHD and Aspergers, and wearing part of a nicotine patch for half the day really helps with focus issues. (Any longer and I don't sleep well, though.) I also take l-tyrosine and Avmacol, and drink tea.
Since I started this regimen, my work performance went up significantly and I got a promotion to a position I'd been wanting for nearly a decade. My wife is also a bit less upset with me and I feel subjectively more able to think ahead and plan.
Do you think someone with depressive tendencies should be able to overdose?
Please look up some of the package inserts. This isn't some globuli smartie medecine you are talking about. It's only legally available because the suffering caused by social isolation is less bearable than some of the side effects.
You can be happy if you only get malnutrition from them, if you are unlucky you'll end up with chronic diseases or cancer
I'm pretty libertarian on most political charts, but offering benzos to people OTC seems like one of the last things I'd be trying to legalize.
If we had no drug enforcement whatsoever, sure. But as long as we do benzos may be one of the most dangerous forms of substances we have short of straight up opiods.
You miss two of the biggest points of formal diagnosis. Legal rights to accommodation (IEP, workplace) and getting insurance/healthcare money. If an autistic person can’t hold down a job or even live independently only really being diagnosed offically will get them the support they need. I’ve had to ask for accommodation to have noise cancelling headphones in a certain workspace where I was unable to really focus and having my demands backed by legislation and a diagnosis made it much easier to demand that.
On the point of medication though I largely agree, the current system is insanely paternalistic. Like having patients be forced to follow up with doctors about medications they’ve been on for 5 years. However society doesn’t truly want to deal with the true costs of freedom like somebody being able to easily legally acquire a lethal dose of anxiety meds.
> I wish we could set aside the labels and say "I'm lazy and I want to buy therapy to help me deal with being lazy."
You can absolutely go to a therapist and say exactly that. You won't be turned away. Generally therapists are more interested in helping people versus labeling people.
Are you sure it's not executive dysfunction, which can be a symptom of ADHD and/or autism? Your first paragraph sounds exactly how I'd describe myself before getting diagnosed with autism.
I've spent all my adulthood thinking I'm lazy and something is wrong with me and I need to work harder at it. I can't be bothered to tell all my life story right now, but look into ADHD. It's been a revelation the moment I've learned my condition has a name and there is a chance for a normal life for me. Good luck
The notion that a neurotypical person exists is kinda silly. What does that even mean? That’s like saying this snowflake here doesn’t look like all the rest.
Of course there are differences, but in terms of large traits and behaviors over the majority of the population there are a lot of similarities. Saying no one is NT hurts those who absolutely aren't.
> The notion that a neurotypical person exists is kinda silly.
It's not at all silly. Not more than what's a good car. For some, a Toyota model is a good car. For some, a Mercedes model is a good car. A Dodge is a good car too perhaps. But a boat is not a good car. A Formula 1 engine is also not a good car.
Your statements are inexplicably linked to your own biases. They are true for you, but only you.
An F1 car wouldn’t work for a family with kids but I’d love to daily one of those.
Nothing is absolute. Nothing is typical. An “NT” person in Japan is not the same as one in the US. Where do you draw the line? I posit you don’t. There isn’t a line. There isn’t a typical case. We are all so vastly different, often in ways we cannot see or understand.
> An F1 car wouldn’t work for a family with kids but I’d love to daily one of those
Even assuming you could handle it (which is a huge assumption), you can not drive an F1 around on city streets. Ground clearance means will get hung up on the first driveway or minor road work you run into.
Originally it was a way to differentiate between autistics and non-autistics, and then suffered language drift. It would probably have been better to just start off saying NA for "non-autistic".
Given that diagnoses are based on physiological divergences that make it difficult to function in society, a neurotypical person is one who does not have these traits, which is most people.
In an N-dimensional system, as N goes up, every member in a normally distributed population is increasingly likely to be at an extreme along some dimension (this is related to the fact that a hypercube's volume is disproportionately close to edges and corners as dimensionality goes up). Even if you just stick to the big 5 psychological breakdown, the probability that someone is in the middle 80% on every measure is only about 1/3, so it's not surprising that most of us are a pretty big distance from normal overall.
> actually autistic people such as my wife and I cannot get the official diagnoses
If you don't have an official diagnosis, on what basis do you claim to be any more “actually autistic” than the other undiagnosed people that see themselves that way and are seeking an official diagnosis?
That explains how you know about yourself, but it doesn’t explain how you know that the others seeking diagnosis are not autistic.
It seems like a bad idea to stigmatize people for seeking diagnosis.
There are plenty of stories of actually autistic people who don’t get diagnosed until much later because the people around them dismissed it or didn’t support them because their difficulties were not so visible.
Yeah, I'm one of them. But this is a real problem that psychiatrists themselves complain about. Many have even stopped doing autism diagnoses due to the sheer number of people who come in over some simple behavioral tick and demand their autism badge.
Until you experience it yourself, you can't understand just how frustrating and demeaning it is.
Life is indeed harder for some exactly for the reason that societal norms are being imposed on them. Think corporations and the norms they impose on all the industries. I personally work hard to mask my differences but it does take a lot more effort on my part. All these efforts could have been used to be more productive and efficient.
Self-satisfaction that they are complicated people who are 'working on themselves' because our medical system affords it. It's now commonplace to hear people say things like "It's my OCD acting up" when they don't have obsessive compulsive disorder. And where does that go? Think of the huge numbers of people who take ADD or ADHD meds for 'neuro enhancement' while the larger swaths of people who truly need treatment for those can't afford it.
> because the people around them dismissed it or didn’t support them because their difficulties were not so visible.
Not to downplay any difficulties you or someone else may have had, but a counter to this I am seeing some people claim on twitter that they should just be able to state their diagnosis without getting one and want accommodations for it because of poverty or family would look down on it.
This is very dangerous. People just assume they see a characterization on TV and assume they have that. Symptoms can be shared between different classes of syndromes. ADHD and High Functioning Autism both can share, on the surface, similar sensory processing issues, anxiety, and obsessive thinking in my experience; but I imagine the therapy and day to day accommodations that one with ADHD needs is much different that one with Autism (honestly I barely remember the therapy I got in school and I am hoping more people can chime on this).
Sure, but seeking diagnosis from a trained professional should mean that the differences between those cases will be detected. I acknowledge that IRL it is a messy field and there is high variance in quality of practitioner. But seeking help shouldn't be discouraged. It should be up to the professionals to determine if someone actually has "Autism" or "something else" (or nothing). And also to do some amount of triaging! Criticism of the process shouldn't generally be targeted at individuals seeking help.
Well... isn't this part of it? A lot of people are more or less satisfied with the coping mechanisms they've established and don't really need to get a diagnosis because they don't want further treatment. And I don't think this is unreasonable, especially when treatment mostly takes the form of helping you establish coping mechanisms.
> Not to downplay any difficulties you or someone else may have had, but a counter to this I am seeing some people claim on twitter that they should just be able to state their diagnosis without getting one
How is this in any way related to the comment you are replying to? It seems like you misunderstood.
So, here’s what that sounds like without the emotional content:
You are a self-diagnosed-autistic person (SDAP). You are upset that other SDAPs are consuming resources intended for ‘actual’ autistic persons. You would prefer to consume those resources yourself. You are trying to get a professional diagnosis as ‘autistic’. You have thus far been unsuccessful.
Are those the facts which you intended to convey?
People tell me I’m autistic all the time. I do not accept this label. I will not agree to the diagnosis, treatment, or aid of any sort. I don’t care if it’s in a book. I call it rationality. I see information where other people see emotions. I realize that this is a deficit in relating to many other people and the world at large. If I were to change one thing to adapt better, it would be stronger recognition and avoidance of emotional people, and closer connection to rationals. Emotional people can be very convincing to get what they want from rationals.
It is an emotional issue for us, because it's effectively a DDOS of the psychiatric services that is preventing us from getting the support we need, and preventing a number of other things that we could otherwise do.
I don’t think I have an adequate understanding of how you perceive yourself to be treated.
But, to attempt, I’d first say that I don’t ‘treat’ groups. I interact with individuals. Also, I don’t know exactly what ‘marginalized’ means, but that sounds like something having to do with the way that others have treated those individuals.
So I’d probably say, on an individual basis, I think I treat most people the same. I tend to have a penchant for reaching out to people who I observe to have been ignored or mistreated by others because I find that they are often very happy to be treated normally, and make great friends. I’m not really a big fan of interacting with anybody that demands to be treated differently, if that’s what you mean.
They didn't demand, they asked. If you seek to represent your position on internet forums then you're going to need to tell people your position.
As access to specific resources is a central part of the complaint it seems perfectly reasonable to request more details. They can be general, like "I can't book a psychiatrist" or "I need specific drugs that are in limited supply".
> I realize that this is a deficit in relating to many other people and the world at large
I’m not sure why, but I keep coming back to your comment, even an hour or more after you posted it. I feel sympathy for your lack of balance. I am reminded of these Supertramp lyrics:
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily
Oh joyfully, playfully watching me
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh responsible, practical
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable
I appreciate the frustration, but doesn’t this mean that there is a larger percentage of people trying to get help for mental illness that otherwise would not be? Sure trying to get diagnosed with something because it’s trendy is ridiculous, but it also means these people are talking to a professional and may uncover other mental health concerns
No, it means there's a deluge of status seekers deceiving themselves into thinking they're autistic and then clogging up the system with their diagnosis requests. As I mentioned in a sister comment, many psychiatrists who have autism knowledge and training have stopped doing diagnoses because of this, thus exacerbating the problem.
You get to put it in your social media bio. That's all a lot of them want. They don't want treatment, they don't want to get better, they just wanna be able to tell people they have it. It's a whole thing on Til Tok right now.
Well, maybe that’s what’s happening. Or maybe a lot more people have realized they’re likely autistic than in the past. Getting a diagnosis seems like a lot of trouble to be “trendy.”
The people trying to be trendy are not the people seeking medical diagnoses in my anecdotal experience, but the fetishization of mental disorders on the internet as social media profile badges among young people is not helping anything.
Sure. Probably not. But I think anyone who's booking an appointment with a doctor at least have some basis for believing they might meet the diagnostic criteria.
In a lot of cases on Tiktok they turn it into a quirky "twitching" and saying cute things. You barely see anyone where it doesn't come across adorably. Most of them are faking it for attention.
I don't think that "autistic" is more of a "status symbol" than, say, "gay".
And yes, it is wonderful that finally, autistic people get their voice, their agency and are (sometimes) getting treated as equals (even if different). Sadly, in some places, "autistic" is still being used as an insult, usually based on a harmful stereotype that autism is in any way related to the lack of empathy.
I love that the world changes to at least consider autism as a neurodivergence, even if not act upon that. Decades ago, it wasn't the same. Being traumatized by noise level was my problem, and even when I was in primary school, begging to let me go to some more quiet place, I was not allowed. Other kids were OK with the noise level, so why do I have a problem?
If a person needs some accommodation (say, reducing volume in their workplace), it shouldn't matter if they are "truly autistic" or "non-autistic, but highly oversensitive to noise". And converse - if someone declares themself "mildly autistic" but does not require special accommodations, they won't take precious resources from you.
I wish you success with getting the necessary accommodations!
> I don't think that "autistic" is more of a "status symbol" than, say, "gay".
Uh..aren't they both pretty big status symbols? Gay, queer, disability, "this is indigenous land". If I work as a disability officer, it's probably somewhat important my email byline has a disability (or two, of three).
"I have to prove my status" (as someone who is a disability officer) and "this person is a disability officer, they dont even have a disability or their pronouns in the signature?!".
I don't know how anyone could see mild autism as a status symbol?
I have no idea what I am, but I know I'm not "normal" - at least as normal as most in America. I definitely think different and require a strong filter to function in normal society. Things like schedules and meetings overwhelm me mentally, or at least are the most tiresome stuff I do where to others they are trivial.
I also simply cannot push through "busy work" tasks even if I see immense payout in the end. I dropped out of high school without a plan simply because it was such a mental torture to sit through useless classes every day I could trivially test out of.
But, when I get an idea or project or goal in my head I am utterly relentless to a level I don't see in many others.
When I was younger I could kind of patch through this and find professional paths that worked alright with my quirks. Now that I'm older and have a family and "real" career with 7am alarm clocks/etc. I find life to be fairly unbearable from a mental aspect.
I'd really like to know what causes this in me. I've always been this way, to my extreme detriment, when I was younger I would cry myself to sleep just wanting to be "normal". Is it mild autism? ADHD? PTSD from childhood trauma? I dunno, but it's both relationship and career impacting and having to build your life around it sucks - knowing what your dealing with sounds amazing to me.
I just can't imagine wishing putting life on "hard mode" like this is on anyone, or anyone wanting to live it...
I was hanging out with some friends. One of them, is not neurotypical; she says her family were farmers. In that way of life, it doesn’t make demanda on executive functioning like modern life does.
The other side too: there are plenty of thinkers and critics of modernity to make a case that the modern way of life is not really that healthy for neurotypical people — or more precisely, people with good, or great executive functioning, even if they are rewarded the most by modern society.
I argue that, the hard mode is not necessarily your neural wiring, but that our civilization and way of life is terribly skewed.
This is interesting to me as the author is definitely right that people use the word "spectrum" wrong. It has come to mean a gradient rather than a spectrum. But that's natural language for you. There's not much use fighting it.
I do think that when people talk about being "on the spectrum" etc, it is well understood what they mean. I'm sure everyone on HN knows at least one person who is "a bit autistic" and maybe even considers themselves to be. We all know what it means. It might be the wrong words, technically, but we do seem to be communicating the right thing.
The reason that some autistic people get upset by that usage is that is diminishes how they experience life. It's like saying, 'everyone is a little black'. There is a big differences between having the genes of a black ancestor in your family tree, and experiencing life as a black person. So, to autistic people, you are not communicating the right thing.
But, to play devil's advocate, isn't this exactly what we should want, long term?
I think the end goal is for Black and autistic people to be thought of as people first and foremost, and their differences would take a back seat. This is the only way we can be one big happy family. Wouldn't the best way to accomplish this be for the rest to realize that they actually have something in common with the marginalized groups?
Imagine a white supremacist who learns they had a Black ancestor. That would transform their whole world view.
Same with autism: neurotypical people being able to relate to quirks that cause social exclusion isn't something to shut down. We should be celebrating the normalization of these things because that is how they stop being markers of the "other".
Sometimes I wonder what the people who are up in arms about being "not properly" Black, autistic, etc. have as their end game. Perpetual exclusion of the marginalized groups for sympathy points? I think many would gladly trade those points for greater inclusion.
My understanding is that the normalization doesn’t mean subsumption but that the differences are normal and accounted for by default. For example, m/f bathrooms are largely considered normal to account for two different gender identities (this is extremely simplified; I’m aware that non-binary people exist but they are still not considered “normal” largely and are not accounted for by default). Very few people are running around saying all men are a little bit women so why do we have separate bathrooms, clearly this is perpetual exclusion.
Being able to better communicate with one another is obviously a good thing. The point is that the language being used isn't facilitating that and that is why the autistic community has pushed back on it. So it seems to me, that it is now on the neurotypical community to listen to that feedback.
Also, autism isn't just about social quirks. These are people with different neurophysiology who experience the world in a different way. It is not simply a matter of holding a different opinion or learning a particular behavior. This is not something that can be 'normalized' by talking through it.
The autistic community is largely against gate keeping, and are quite accepting of people who are self-diagnosed. This is not about not being 'properly' autistic, but about having a voice. Being a part of society for the person you are. To not having the challenges you face in a world defined by and for neurotypical people being trivialized.
> magine a white supremacist who learns they had a Black ancestor. That would transform their whole world view.
Afaik, it does not. Nazi who found out they have Jewish ancestors did not concluded being Jew is fine. They continied to hate Jews and found whole thing unfair.
Self Hate is a thing, ignoring evidence is a thing and both can make you even more dangerous.
Some people are a little black. Not everything should operate by the one-drop rules of American slavery. I don't think many people are saying "everyone" is a little autistic.
I don't know. If you are a "little" autistic, you don't have as many issues. I get that you have lots of issues, just not as many as say, someone who is non-verbal.
What would be the point of doing away with the word "mildly" because aren't you then downplaying what severe autism looks like? So aren't they just saying that the support structure for "mildly" autistic people isn't strong enough?
Seems like a really indirect way to say such a thing.
I think what's interesting is that a spectrum can be generated from the combination of a series of gradients.
Consider different regulation in specific biochemical pathways to be individual gradients. These parameters, when combined, can represent many different unique states that exist on a spectrum.
This article is not about spectra and gradients in general: it is about a specific situation where conflating the two creates misunderstanding. In this case, a categorical (spectrum) diagnosis should not be regarded as a measure of severity.
The point is that autism could be the consequence of damage to nerve cells. When given to an adult, a stroke may cause physical and mental issues. The same would be the case for a child, but (especially for young children) the symptoms would appear differently.
a) I've never heard anyone say "we're all a little autistic". I think by and large people see autism as a spectrum that you can be on or not.
b) Her idea of how autism is diagnosed is wildly optimistic. It can work for self-diagnosis, ie "no diagnosis", but every psychologist and psychiatrist has a different idea of how to diagnose it. If you don't present repetitive movements, it will likely be very difficult to get a diagnosis.
One of the problems is how the DSM works. To vulgarize, it's a tool to diagnose dysfunctional abnormality. But atypical doesn't mean dysfunctional in the same way as for neurotypical people. And "normal" changes based on culture and context, the very concepts used to describe symptoms will change over time.
I think it's easier for individuals to recognize that they are neurologically atypical, but that's simply not a diagnosis just yet, so they can be misdiagnosed a lot. And there are fads in psychiatry that follow popular culture somewhat, so if yesterday's ADHD is today's autism, the goalposts are moving.
So hey, maybe trying to put a single label on such a complicated spectrum will always be a problem, and we should provide help and resources to people who need it without trying to boil things down to one word.
Isn't this caused by a general oversimplification of autism to mean "difficulty handling social situations"? I feel that autism is being thrown around as a description of this specific, limited set of traits that do not align with its formal definition.
And as with everything, if some word is being used for some thing other than it's original definition, it will start to lose meaning (or gain meaning depending on how you look at it).
Interesting point. 100 years ago “idiot” and “mental retardation” were medical diagnoses. 100 years from now, both the evolution of language and the advancement of medicine may similarly antiquate the term “autism.”
Maybe this is a perpetual cycle when it comes to mental health terminology.
>Interesting point. 100 years ago “idiot” and “mental retardation” were medical diagnoses.
"Mental retardation" was the proper and polite lay term in my lifetime. It was only in 2010 that government agencies started removing the word "retardation" from their names. (See: Rosa's Law)
The problem really is that many or most positive autism diagnoses do not come with medically testable symptoms, much like depression or anxiety. And it really hurts the truly intractable, very clinically observable cases to allow for this definition creep IMHO, putting a threshold of points on some psych survey, no matter how well normalized, and simply medicalizing people. I am not even convinced your typical aspie programmer with the high vocabulary who's bad with girls even has the same underlying medical problem as the mute kid who rocks in the corner in fetal position and didn't learn to use the potty until he was 6. Some of these kids for example are improved dramatically when they get on immunomodulating drugs. On others it has no effect. The way some of the "advocates" speak with such cocksure certainty about what is and isn't only hurts the larger cause.
Not really true where I am. You have to go through all kinds of tests and be tested for other things (to make sure you're not those.) I suspect it's the same everywhere.
The other issue with Sheldon is that Sheldon is actually abusive guy and his friends are actually enablers. With best friend being mix of enabler and victim.
Where are you located and what, precisely, do these medical tests entail? What biochemical mechanisms do they look at for accurate diagnoses?
From my observation of psychological testing and diagnosis on the research side in the US, its a shit show. Most of it is self reporting and questionnaires which don't actually tell us anything about underlying mechanisms. Its just a bunch of symptom check boxes.
The "along" the spectrum part that most latch on to subconsciously is related to spectrums being a visual measure of energy level. That part does increase along the spectrum. That being said I think her interpretation is much more useful for the actual subject matter and important for people to keep in mind. People with actual diversity will often appear high and low functioning in various ways. It's important to understand that dynamic.
I have diagnosed adhd and I’m always struck by how much overlap there is between the way autistic and adhd symptoms are described. I definitely identify with a lot of the traits of person 1.
For me, a lot of my issues stem from my being unable to direct my attention towards anything that my brain designates as boring, and away from anything I feel to be exciting. I also naturally drop out of the real world into my own head where there’s a constant movie reel going on of memories, songs, hypothetical situations, whatever. I’ve sometimes been zoning out in my own world and suddenly realized that one of my friends was standing in front of me, waving their arms to get my attention. My eyes were open but I didn’t see them. I tend to miss pieces of conversations and lose touch with people and forget to do things because of these issues. So, I dunno, anyways there’s a lot of overlap.
But I’m a pretty good coder because I visualize the data and the relationships between the data, and figure out how it needs to be transformed. And the only reason I have a career is that I became obsessed with programming as a teenager. So, the neurodiversity giveth and it taketh away.
Amy Klin has a nice model of Autism (At least the the non harsh cases) which I interpret as the brain at early age (0-18 months) can't focus. So by this theory ADHD and Autism might be seen as two sided coin.
I would say this is because the experience of someone with “high-functioning,” or whatever euphemism we prefer now, autism is utterly different than that of someone with nonverbal autism (which is often comorbid with profound mental retardation). So different that they may as well be different conditions. It is pretty natural for laypeople to come to the understanding lamented here, that it goes from “a little” to “a lot,” if they’re told that people who present this differently are both autistic.
In fact I think many autistic community disputes are people talking past each other because of this difference. I guess they must have had a good reason, but eliminating them Asperger’s diagnosis would seem to me to just exacerbate the problem.
> I would say this is because the experience of someone with “high-functioning,” or whatever euphemism we prefer now, autism is utterly different than that of someone with nonverbal autism (which is often comorbid with profound mental retardation). So different that they may as well be different conditions.
I've definitely seen this as a challenge in describing two of my boys, who both have autism that additionally presents with being nearly non-verbal.
You say to someone that they have autism, and in their mind they're thinking 'oh, like Sheldon'. But it's as you say, it's not nearly the same. Sheldon is closer to NT than he is to my boys.
>When people discuss colours, they don’t talk about how “far along” the spectrum a colour is. They don’t say “my walls are on the high end of the spectrum” or “I look best in colours that are on the low end of the spectrum.”
Of course they don't, people all know that color is a complex mix depending on what light is projected on the wall, what material constitutes the wall (glass?), and so what it will throw back, as well as the physiological condition of who look at it (color blind), as well as psychosocial framing (are you the hidden child of Sapir&Whorf and some Inuit engendered during a fifty shades of white party who just ate some psychedelic mushroom?).
Or maybe most of them don't, obviously don't read HN, and will look at you strangely if you start to reference any of these things, or at best will ask for some explanations. Just like when you talk about autism spectrum.
If I hear someone has autism, the only thing I can assume is that their authentic personality is "not normal". And even then they could be so good at masking that nobody can tell the difference.
> Red is not “more blue” than blue is. Red is not “more spectrum” than blue is.
I get what they are saying re: autism but this is an incorrect analogy. If you measure wavelength then red is quantitatively more than blue. If you measure frequency then red is less than blue.
You take a detail from a sentence and complain about the accuracy of that detail while deliberately missing the actual point. Your place on the spectrum is:
1. IMHO, the gradient (from "a bit autistic" to "highly autistic") makes sense - as long as we treat it as the first principal component of a multidimensional process. I know many people who learned that they are autistic in their 30s, as on ALL axes, their symptoms were relatively mild (especially women, who are vastly underdiagnosed). After realizing they are autistic, they often cried, explaining decades of their life and why they always felt different.
2. While I understand where "Don't assume anything about an autistic person." comes from, I disagree. If we take it literally, the word "autistic" makes no sense (as it is not related to anything). Sure, stereotypes are both inaccurate and harmful + there is great neurodiversity among autistic people - "If you've met one individual with autism, you've met one individual with autism". The best antidote is Bayesian thinking - having reasonably wide priors and modifying the posterior with each measurement.
Now it is not considered neither a separate unit nor a subset of autism.
(As there is no meaningful distinction between Asperger Syndrome and Autism without cognitive impairment.)
Because when Asperger defined “autistic psychopathy” under the Nazi regime, there was a range between the “good” kind whose “special abilities” were sufficient in relation to their social deficiencies to be valuable to society and the “bad” kind where they weren't; the former were protected for their usefulness and the latter murdered (“euthanized”, officially), often at Asperger’s personal direction and entirely based on the social dangers he warned about from them, by the Nazis. So until quite recently, “Asperger’s Syndrome” persisted as the name for “good” autism.
We need more sub-types of such a wide-ranging disorder, not fewer. It's likely autism includes combinations of several types of distinct issues anyway.
But yet the author describes herself as an "autist," so presumably the author does believe we can make some reasonable assumptions about what being autistic means -- what would be the point of using that label otherwise?
I think the point here is that some of one's assumptions will be wrong and that you should flexibly adapt rather than stick with your initial assumptions? I would agree with that.
As someone on the spectrum myself (in a family that produced 2 others, as well) I still don't really understand what rationally makes all of it "autism". The OP has a section on what we have in common, but it didn't answer my question. Is it a scientific or medical thing? A root cause? Or is it the type of situation where 100 years from now they'll look back and laugh at our archaic psychiatry.
The 'spectrum' has always been an outrageously bad metaphor (with autism and elsewhere in psychology), and this article's approach to 'correcting' that by further extending the metaphor just perpetuates another (even more convoluted and ridiculous) iteration of the confusion.
The use of the color spectrum is especially unhelpful, since the qualitative features of the color spectrum are totally unrelated to what makes it a spectrum, and so the 'distinction' the article tries to draw between a spectrum and a gradient is totally specious. What makes the color spectrum a spectrum is precisely that it's formed by variation along a single dimension (wavelength or frequency, whatever)— the exact structure the article describes as belonging to a gradient as 'opposed' to a spectrum.
The diagrams with parts of the color spectrum blacked out are pure cringe. Why are you making this broken, disanalogous metaphor worse instead of throwing it away??
It's not hard to describe the actual structure of what are (inaptly) called 'spectrum disorders' in contemporary psychology. They are disorders characterized by clusters of related traits, behaviors, and experiences which (variously in terms of severity, frequency, intensity, or something) can each vary in degree.
Please stop trying to 'fix' the spectrum metaphor. Just kill it.
Imo, 'continuum' still fails to clearly connote the characteristic of having multiple dimensions of variation rather than just one, even though in some contexts (like in the phrase 'space-time continuum') it is used to name something more structurally analogous to 'spectrum disorders' than spectrums.
And it chooses language that undermines or at least clashes with its point, e.g.,
> Red isn’t “more spectrum” than green or blue. Apples aren’t “more fruit” than oranges. That’s not how it works.
Red 'is' in fact 'more wavelength' than green or blue. That's exactly how it works.
The confusion the author bemoans comes from people actually knowing what characterizes a spectrum in general and taking that to apply when they hear the phrase 'autism spectrum'. The phrase itself is misleading.
My opinion as an autistic person is the more people who think they’re autistic the better, it’ll normalize it and we’ll all have better lives. Look at the old chestnut: gluten. Now, because everyone thinks they have a gluten allergy, people who actually have them can eat so much more good food. That’s my hot take for today.
My hot take: a bunch of shitty gluten free food products have displaced better, cheaper, quality food. The people who think they are gluten intolerant are worse off, the people who are gluten tolerant are worse off, and the .5% of actual celiac sufferers are better off.
What actual spreadsheet are you looking at? "Constant dollar food and alcohol expenditures, with taxes and tips, for all purchasers"? Because expenditure grew.
Look at the FAO food price index, and you see it only decreased since 2010-ish, but on average since 1961 prices grew to roughly match inflation.
Nobody forces you to buy the gluten-free pasta or whatever, so I can't see how things are worse for the people who neither have nor believe themselves to have Celiac disease.
Yeah, I don’t know what this is about. You can buy stuff with gluten in it. But I can kind of see it as if you had 99 things that meet your preference and 1 thing that doesn’t, then when you move to a world with 900 things that meet your preference and 100 that don’t, you see that as 9% of things being displaced rather than you having additional 801 things.
In fact, I shall call this the Percentage Bias. The Percentage Bias is when you allege displacement by looking at alterations in ratios without looking at alterations in total amounts.
It does come off as a bit kneejerk, huh. There's this like, cultural thing where folks just get mad at people who do things they don't understand, especially when they perceive it as 'dumb'.
My question to that is; why on earth do you care what other people choose to do and why? I get that there was an argument made here to that effect, but for real, nobody is suffering from other people eating less gluten. I know I'm not and I love me a good bagel.
I mistakenly thought that I was better off not eating gluten because I felt much better after going gluten free. I am now fairly sure that the real benefit I experienced came from reducing my sugar intake. Cutting out gluten tends to cut out sugar in tandem: breakfast cereal, cookies, cake, and so on. I wonder if this explains why so many people who aren’t celiac think they see a big benefit from a gluten-free diet. Lots of Americans are flirting with diabetes if they aren’t already diabetic. (And lots of sugar isn’t great for a person even if they are completely healthy.)
It's crazy to me how all of these examples are either legumes or legume derivatives, and the one exception (quinoa) actually isn't a very good source of protein.
Autistic persons may get complications from eating gluten, because it may not break down completely and instead forms gliadorphin (gluteomorphin), which is a morphine peptide. It causes damage to intestinal villi and reduces gut motility, hiding the damage.
That is theorised to happen to anybody, not just autistic people, and might be the cause of the IBS epidemic and so many people diagnosing themselves as gluten intolerant even if they're not full blown coeliac.
Labels are what we use to categorize and assign meaning to the world, like it or not.
Think about it - without an "autism" label, how do we communicate or think clearly about research, diagnosis, treatment, and social structures to help people who suffer with this category of symptoms?
It's like talking about coding or doing math without variables, making decisions without criteria, or reasoning philosophically without definitions. Coherent thinking relies on the ability to categorize and label.
Maybe in research for disease or other things, but in my opinion labeling people doesn’t turn out well. Communist, socialist, fascist, etc. Disabled, gay, straight, white, brown, black; those labels don’t help much. Even labels like engineers vs. developers causes friction. Sure, medical doctors can use labels to separate people so that they can then investigate within a group what’s causing some disease, but a hundred years ago they used to label certain people as having a disease where today we see was incorrect, like labeling promiscuous women or labeling someone we might see today as autistic as having a problem with their brain that caused them to be inferior. You can’t always just take the rational approach that labels don’t cause real issues, since not everyone is rational. Labels cause problems when applied too liberally, and making sense of the world isn’t always necessary in that respect. We need to focus on what’s important, not always categorizing every little thing based on our idea of importance we assign to those labels. Labels have a way of sticking, and mislabeling things can’t always be corrected.
I think it's actually the opposite. Because so many people think they have a gluten allergy, restaurants offering gluten-free options don't feel the need to take it so seriously.
"So what if there's a tiny amount of gluten contamination... it's not like these people are going to die, right? They're probably just on a fad diet."
Diluting the meaning of a medical condition is not a good thing.
According to my friend with Celiac, it's a bit of both. She definitely has to do more research on any new restaurant because there are a number of places out there that do not take Gluten free seriously anymore and in particular will not be careful about cross contamination even if the issue is emphasized. But on the other hand there are also many restaurants now that do have a variety of legitimate Gluten free options. So it's probably a double edged sword.
I have celiac. This is my experience. I am grateful for how common eating gluten free is, no matter the cause. But a lot of restaurants have started saying “gluten free friendly” instead of “gluten free”. The communities online are great and finding the best places to eat.
Grocery food is way better than it was even just 10-20 year ago. It’s great.
heavily agree with this. completely orthogonal, but most people i know that have worked in a kitchen (myself included) have, at some point, mentioned their initial shock with how disturbingly gross kitchens are. after reading orwell's down and about in london and paris, i suppose things have gotten much better, but still, i don't think most customers understand this. he goes into some great rants about this, if it's of any interest to you.
> most people i know that have worked in a kitchen (myself included) have, at some point, mentioned their initial shock with how disturbingly gross kitchens are.
Unless a kitchen is specifically set up for preparing food completely gluten free without cross contamination then there is going to be cross contamination. Most kitchens simply aren't big enough. It isn't a matter of taking it seriously and any kitchen that knows what they are doing will let you know they can't make a gluten-free guarantee.
My friend who has celiatide said his life improved when it became known and popular. Food is more available and cheaper for him. He has more options too.
As a neurotypical, I hear all the time from others (especially coworkers in the field of IT) saying they're "a little autistic", at least to me these people clearly have done some research to conclude they can relate in some dimensions to clinical autism, not a confabulation made in-the-moment as a desperate and failed attempt to relate to someone who has to actually live with ASD. It really does linger in the mind of these people and they want to let others know about this important factoid about their personality as much as any other important point about them and their past. I agree, let them have it, but we should also have a social script when talking with people who live with ASD so we don't have individuals getting upset when the goal might have actually been to be vulnerable and open to sharing about themselves.
Also, it appears all experts in the field believe ASD comes from assortive mating (people with similar genes that affect social function tend to come together). There should be resources for these people who think they're "a little autistic" and have clearly researched the topic to determine if it's safe for them to have children or if adoption is more appropriate. It's an unfortunate state of affairs but the experts are pointing to ASD as preventable, if you think you're almost on the spectrum and married to someone similar to yourself, consider researching the topic of "autism and assortive mating".
The more open we are to talking about being "almost on the autism spectrum" and the more informed we are the better we all are!
Do you mean to say that autistic people, or those with autistic traits who are not outright autistic, should not reproduce (with each other), because of the risk their children may be autistic?
That's what he is saying, yes. It's a dangerous thing to think because we do not understand if there is actually some hidden purpose to the genes that modulate autistic behavior, same with depression.
It's a strange thing to bring up after assortative mating, really. If it comes up in assortative mating it implies there is a reason for the genes to be there.
One example: In various experiments related to resource exhaustion, antisocial and/or "autistic" mice were the ones to survive the collapse of mouse society as they were more likely to not be involved over resource squabbles.
Of course, there are some people who are very autistic who do not have very happy lives, and some people who are just kind of autistic.
No personally, but I think an expert could analyze a couple for pregnancy risks and other issues at least. From what I've read in the past the risk goes up a bit, but not terribly significantly, so it's best to make people at least aware of the risks. Certainly at least not to the extent to force stop people from having kids!
I think more than a third of ASD cases were estimated be linked to assortive mating in some studies, which is still a lot of cases that wouldn't happen if we changed out dating strategies! Intuitively this will only get worse with how everyone currently dates - dating until we finds the exact perfect match for our soul. The science is still very speculative but do we want time to tell?
We know for a fact that if both of your parents have African ancestry you have a higher risk of sickle-cell anemia, and if both your parents are Ashkenazi Jews you have a higher risk of Tay-Sachs. Should they also not be allowed to have children with each other? Frankly I find the notion shocking.
I'm actually quite worried about this problem as someone who had an Asperger's diagnosis as a child. I've heard that there are medical procedures to allow one to specify which egg they want fertilized and where one can choose an egg which is certain to not have genetic disorders we can test for. Is autism something we can test for in the womb? If so, than this shouldn't be a problem for those with money (and my understanding is that the procedure I am describing costs about 20K).
More broadly, I consider autism to be a strong net negative in my life, and I find folks who really embrace Asperger's as part of their identity to be alien to me. I'd love to eradicate this condition from the earth to spare future humans from the pain that inability to socialize will cause.
I'm sure that some people who like their autism will be upset about "eugenics", but frankly, we don't have to be God damn Nazis to acknowledge that acting eugenicily is good and advocating for disgenic behavior is bad long term.
> Is autism something we can test for in the womb?
No.
> I'm sure that some people who like their autism will be upset about "eugenics", but frankly, we don't have to be God damn Nazis to acknowledge that acting eugenicily is good and advocating for disgenic behavior is bad long term.
Well you can pretty much say that Nazism is a natural, logical endpoint of eugenicist beliefs. If others decide not to cooperate in your little project of eliminating "dysgenic" traits then you'll have to compel them with force.
I am not a physicist, but I am wondering if light is a good example to explain a spectrum.
My primary concern is, that light indeed has a primary order (wave length) and composition of wave lengths isn't being talked about here.
While thinking about an alternative example, I came across sound. Frequency also plays a role, but here the composition of different frequencies is important to create melodies. The presents of different frequencies could be the equivalent of a factor being strong or weak.
What do you think, do you have other ideas/examples/thoughts?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 412 ms ] threadWhat we are is unfairly treated most of the time.
Also this “Having sensory processing issues doesn’t make you “a little autistic.” It makes you someone with sensory processing problems. Autistic people will understand your struggles and welcome you as a fellow neurodivergent cousin, but that’s it.
But in order for a person to be considered autistic, they must have difficulty in multiple categories spanning the spectrum.”
If someone says that they are ‘a little autistic’ they aren’t saying that they ‘are autistic’, they are just attempting to emphasize. Don’t destroy that by getting into a semantic debate.
I don’t know how any reasonable scientist could gatekeep something so amorphous and loosely defined.
You can take a child to 4 different doctors and they will all diagnose “autism” differently.
It stands to reason no one knows the truth. We are all just making this up as we go along.
This isn't true for autism, ADHD, bipolar or schizophrenia since some biological mechanisms are understood (even if these labels aren't perfect), so what are you talking about and what do you base it on?
Anyone can be diagnosed with ADHD these days. And for all intents and purposes the patient might have 9/10 symptoms. But do they really have ADHD or is it something else? We don’t even have the capacity to figure that out right now because our understanding is so limited.
I got adhd since a kid and i the test was the same. Only they asked the parents and not me. But i think i rly got it…
Its like the south park episode where kids got diagnosed because the bible bored them…
I had a bunch of assessment in early childhood but I didn't figure out what exactly my set of issues were until I got assessed by a very good neuropsych later in life. I really wish I knew about this stuff in late childhood, would've explained a lot more! It's also sad that there are not many good neuropsychs out there and it's hard to evaluate who is good for most people.
One thing for the other intelligent people out there, your intelligence can often mask that you are not performing to your full potential, because it compensates and makes you perform 'good enough'. Unfortunately our medical system is more orientated towards fixing the people who's lives are in a mess vs people who are just OK, so those who hobble along often don't get the help they need. Sometimes wish there was an equivalent of doctor that focuses on making people perform their best vs. good enough sometimes, kind of like a coach.
[0] "Anatomy of An Epidemic", Robert Whittaker
We don't diagnose diabetes with a list of symptoms because we have a lab test (where we have picked an arbitrary value, but that's another story). We have no lab test for add. That is frustrating, and I think that adhd is probably overdisgnosed, but I think most are doing the best they can.
Just because some symptoms are alleviated by a medication does not mean that must be related to the underlying mechanism. Many times medications are altering symptoms far removed from the initial cause.
Under the "mechanism" section in wikipedia there are multiple theories discussed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia
But notably also not done the majority of time in practice. It is seldom done to the level of say verifying your flu strain, let alone other more expensive and/or invasive tests which do not serve the patient's medical needs.
Like we don't just say "you have heart disease".
It takes time and effort to learn about the mechanisms, just because we don't know right now doesn't mean we never will.
Personally I think coming up with better behavioral characterizations will be an important intermediate step to identifying bio mechanisms, because it leads to much more tractable lines of questioning. For example, we could be quantifying symptoms like rigidity and repetitiveness of movement, sleep quality, sensitivity in different sensory domains, etc. - which should be increasingly feasible to do at scale these days.
There are illnesses where we have a known set of symptoms, a known progression, and known treatment options, but have yet to discover the underlying set of causes. You may be able to reliably diagnose, and treat, without understanding the mechanisms at play.
You're not going to be able to work with the bureaucratic side of the healthcare system without being able to say what they're being treated for. Those treatment options can be approved for one illness and not another, even when they share symptoms, because of known efficacies.
Having a name to call something helps, even when you have no idea about the mechanism at play.
I'm not sure why, but I know there was discrimination going on. People looking to e.g. headhunt idiot savants or high functioning autistics with Asperger's.
And it was because it seems those are all caused by the same underlying biology, so they are the same disorder with differing levels of severity in their symptom categories. (Social/language and restricted repetitive behaviors.)
This may change again if we find benefit in subclassification (e.g. a treatment that benefits aspergers patients only).
Nevertheless, you aren't alone in interpreting such bids in a negative way. I sometimes ask people, especially defense clients, straight up: "Are you a person who finds comfort in discussing times when others have faced similar problems, even if there are still a lot of differences? Or would that make you feel that you weren't being heard as an individual?"
For example, it can imply the person is saying they recognize a (typical) trait in themselves. It can also imply the person does not have a diagnosis, but does recognize themselves in the description. Or it can imply the person is interested in figuring out if they have a diagnosis. It can imply an affirmation of sympoms ('oh, now that you say it, I do recognize X or Y in your behavior). It can also be used to create common ground or sympathy. I wouldn't assume harm though (theory of mind!).
I have an ASD diagnosis and it was not a matter of a 15 minute questionnaire as suggested elsewhere in this thread with regards to ADHD. Yes, I did need to fill in a questionnaire. After that I had to wait almost a year til the diagnosis process was started. It included detailed historical analysis of a parent ('hetero anamnese'). I would like to assume all ASD diagnosis are proper, though mine was after DSM-V was introduced so I have autism but no specific label.
From what I understood, its being discussed in the scientific community AD(H)D is merely a variant of autism.
When I see a movie like Girl, Interrupted or Ik Ook Van Jou it is supposedly about a young woman with borderline (BPD) but all I see is a young woman with autism instead. That's just my personal take though.
This filing-people-into-groups thinking is something that i see so often here on HN and I'm so bothered by it.
For me, i do what i feel i want to do, and make up names and concept for it afterwards if it seems necessary. Sometimes i don't have words for what i am doing. Its a lot of improvisation.
For some people, this process seems to be reversed... Like as if they need to be "validated" by external concepts, otherwise they don't do some things. And they feel relieved when they have a diagnosis like "autism". Not having a name/explanation for it seems like a barrier to them.
I don't know what i am observing here, but I'd like to know. Maybe this is like the inner-monologue thing, where humans vastly differ in some regard but are unaware of it.
That said, labels can be useful. If other people that are similarly weird have found some tactic (or substance) useful, you might also find it useful. For me, "aha, it's ADHD!" was a huge breakthrough, because it gave me a general direction to search for answers (and meds).
So, uh, to summarize: labels can be useful, but I wish society was not structured in such a neurotypical-centric way. Just let people be different. e.g. If someone says "I don't work well in an open-plan office", just believe them. They shouldn't need a doctor's note.
Claiming you don't work well in an open plan office and being taken at face value would lead to literally everyone saying that, because surprise, most people don't work well in open plan offices (I'm very neurotupical and I hate it).
Another way to look at it is that we've evolved as a society to go out of our way to try to accomodate people with different needs when necessary. Being given an office if you have ADHD is great. Try to go back 100 years and you'd be fired from the factory instead for not being a perfect cog in the machine.
So it's actually beautiful we are able and willing to accomodate others, when for most of history that wasn't the case at all.
I don't know, I could imagine struggling with their life and blaming themselves for it. A diagnosis might well provide some relief from that.
It's like saying "I'm actually 1/16 Cherokee!" as a form of group-identifying empathy. Note: It is not.
> I work in this field and I dislike takes like this, where individuals think they can speak for a whole group.
People like us have been trying desperately to get people who "work in the field" to understand us for decades, with little success. This is but one example.
I fit the profile of person one in the article.
The reason I'm wondering / even looking at autism is because the meds for my ADHD just make everything worse even at really small doses and I don't really know what to do.
As an ADHD person, one thing that has helped me a lot is listening to ADDitude Mag podcasts[1]. Listening to people who are experts in the subject and are ADHD themselves has been quite validating. Like, yeah, we're not stupid, but the normies sure make us feel that way sometimes, huh! I recommend the ones with Ned Hallowell, especially.
So maybe you're not ADHD, or maybe you are but that's not your main problem. There are probably similar podcasts or forums or communities for people that are 'weird' or mildly disabled in other ways. I guess I'm trying to be helpful because I relate, and I know how alienating it can be, but the best I can come up with is to quote Timothy Leary and say "find the others." Easier said than done. You can talk at me if you want. :)
[1] A collection of them I generated from some RSS feed: http://www.nuke24.net/projects/Playlister/?playlist-uri=urn:...
I really think that is an incredibly divisive and reductive way of looking at people. In my experience, everybody has mental problems, but you usually don’t get to learn of someone’s individual struggles unless you are very close to them.
I am guessing you have a job, and maybe you dislike how you feel others judge you for your personal difficulties with your symptoms. You appear to judge others, who have their own personal struggles with their own quirky symptoms, perhaps which you don’t empathise with because they don’t happen to have ADHD?
I really like the jokingly serious way this is said at 12:15 to 13:30 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctz6eJ3Pr94
> I really think that is an incredibly divisive and reductive way of looking at people.
This is actually one of the problems in neurodiversity discourse, too: neurotypical doesn't actually qualify as a neurotype, and probably no one is neurotypical.
The full context on the conversation is important.
In this conversation: I'd like to know more on how to define: people like us.
Of the individuals I interact with on a daily basis, some can't vocalize or interact in any meaningful way beyond grunting, but of the ones that could, most would likely end up banned or shadow banned if they tried socializing on HN.
I don't discount your experience in the least, but for the individuals I personally know, work for and with, one of the most valuable things they can receive is someone taking the time to empathize with them. Most people don't and they end up having no or very few friends and/or otherwise being social outcast.
Arguably this a symptom of other conceptual issues (like needing genetic connections for kinship as opposed to universals). But it is a step of progress and a reason to educate rather than shun or scorn.
I've recently started wondering if I'm a little autistic myself. I would never say that I am in response to someone who tells me that they are. But I fit the description of person 1 almost to a T, minus the thumb sucking and chair rocking, but plus trouble dealing with driving to where driving on an unfamiliar road will ruin my day. Am I autistic? I have no idea honestly.
I don’t think neurotypical people can really empathize. I am saying this as someone who have had altered states of consciousness with psychedelics. It is not the same thing, but it was a different enough experience that I know that people who have not taken psychedelics or have had visionary experiences, cannot really relate to my experiences with altered states of consciousness, and those attempts at “empathizing” are shallow.
There are two kinds of things when we talk about empathy. One is the kind of empathy that comes from shared experience, and I doubt neurotypical people can really have an inkling of what it is like without having experienced altered states of consciousness.
The other kind of empathy is where one recognizes that the other person is suffering. The reasons and circumstances by which someone suffers is unique to the individual person, but what is shared universally is that each person has suffered.
Rather than empathizing with someone by saying they are a “little” or “a lot” autistic, it’s more precise to look at the person before you, in the present moment, and share the experience of suffering.
If we are talking about therapy, the author makes a great case for clinical outcomes being biased towards mitigating the impact an autist has on other people, and not the impact to the autist herself. The whole point of explaining the spectrum like a spectral signature rather than a gradient is to have a better framework for helping people.
I’m not on the spectrum, and would never claim “I’m a little autistic.” I might have before I had the kid, but definitely not now. My kid’s autism symptoms are really minor compared to many, but it’s so far beyond the kinds of quirks you’re referring to as to be obviously and starkly different.
PS: We were both misdiagnosed as having anxiety disorders (GAD and avoidant, GAD and agoraphobia respectively). I also got Ritalin prescribed against fatigue (because I could not officially get ADHD diagnosis as adult according to my psychiatrist this was back during DSM-IV). It would not surprise me if other people with social anxiety diagnosis (also) have ASD, but as usual if you can function in society with your current diagnosis (or lack of it), who cares, it isn't worth the hassle (time, money, effort).
So what you want people who aren't average to consider themselves inferior? I don't know why people wouldn't be able to find good things or positives from a disability.
> People calling Asperger their "superpower" is laughable.
Asperger's looks pretty over-represented in the richest people in the world. Dyslexia is also over-represented. Bill-Clinton, Obama, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison were all not raised by their biological fathers. Plenty of other examples. Adversity can be a super-power.
As for your other point. You need to overcome or work around your weaknesses. Everyone has to do such, but for some it requires more (out of the box thinking) effort. For example, I have ASD and get disgusted by certain foods (smelling or seeing them). I explained this to my employer and colleagues when I got hired (they were aware I am autistic). What they do is they ask if it's OK if they buy/eat X (I don't wanna get into the specifics) and I ACK it (usually). They know if I look weird or go away what's going on.
Not to my knowledge, just was offering a counterpoint to the GP who seemed to think there are only negatives to adversity, like ASD. In that example "No benefits of [adversity]" Where the adversity of not being raised by your biological father might make you significantly more likely to be a billionaire or POTUS.
haha. personally never really met any of them so can't really touch that : )
> I don't think anyone would argue a man not raised by their biological father cannot be successful
Not only successful, but significantly more likely to be meteoriticy successful from the adversity.
For other claims, sure the waters get muddy but the lack of ground truth is less relevant for the extreme success case. Aspies are wayyyy over represented in the top 10 richest people.
Let me start with an analogy. Imagine the brain as a circle. That's the brain of a normal person (sometimes called normie in quich vocabulary). The brain of someome on the spectrum is oval instead. Society assumes all brains are circles, and is build around that. Does that make ovales useless? Only if you look at it from the myopic point of view of society assuming and requiring circles.
You furthermore say 'Asperger to me means X'. Asperger was (DSM-V ditched it) a description of traits and the person with an Asperger's diagnosis checks some of these boxes, but everyone's different [1]. You zoomed in on one specific trait, but ignore the rest. I'll leave it to you to judge on what that says on your capability to assess Asperger traits.
My father had MS. He ended up in a wheelchair, but he didn't start in one. MS is a disease, autism is a personality trait. You cannot cure the latter (they can't cure MS either, only stop the progression but that's specific to some diseases and perhaps one day the scientific community overcomes that hurdle). The brain size/shape is what it is which is why some people who are autistic insist in them being called autistic instead of them having autism. I try to be relaxed when it comes to language, but my wife (also diagnosed with) has a different take on matters. Since autism and Asperger's has its pros and cons, calling it solely a disability is myopic and, if extrapolated, outright condescending and flat out ignorant.
Back about my wheelchair father, growing up with a father who is chronically ill and who tries to find peace around it gave me compassion and respect for disabled people, or those who are in need. Not only that, the old man was legally blind. His hearing though! He probably had undiagnosed autism, but he could hear details and draw conclusions from such which I could not. Because I was not trained in it as a blind person.
People who call Asperger's their super power are just boasting they are able to benefit from their oval more than it harms them, or so they are trying to imply such. There's probably a context to such a situation, and perhaps an other reason it annoys you.
[1] In a support group for people with ASD (after properly diagnosed) the diversity, hurdles, and benefits become clear. There's common grounds, but also so many differences! I have this with my wife who is diagnosed as well (^2)
The reality is that nobody would want their child be autistic. People with autism have an extremely high unemployment rate. So clearly, it's not a neutral personality trait. You don't get diagnosed with a personality trait.
I say this despite suspecting that I could be on the spectrum. But I'm annoyed by the trend of bending reality just because it makes people feel better.
In general, in discussions, there's a lack of empathy, and I believe its valuable to build develop such.
Creating empathy was indeed part of my motivation. It also puts emphasis on a supply and demand issue.
> The reality is that nobody would want their child be autistic
My wife and I are autistic. Its likely (but not guaranteed) our 2 children are autistic.
According to your statement, in your humble opinion, not only should I not have been born, we should not have gotten children (we did use double folic acid dose on second because scientific research suggests it helps against certain autism traits which are perceived as negative. On first we did not yet know we had ASD though we suspected it and were on waiting list for diagnosis) because of the high risk of neurodiversive children. Some of my wife's friends said the same. Thanks for the advice.
That being said, yes I would have been deeply unhappy with a child born with a severe disability, for example syndrome of down. My wife would have been happy. We likely would have split up because if that, its a risk we took. But I recognize it is my view on syndrome of down, and my issue with dealing with it (not sure why... I grew up with neighbor kid having it). Its kind if like I am biased against it, generalizing. Even though I saw a beautiful film about it: Yo, Tambien. The issue lies with me, not people with syndrome of down. And perhaps, maybe a bonding process would have successfully happened because with my 2 children it is difficult to fathom I would not love them for how they are. Annoyed at times? Sure, but that is a given.
> People with autism have an extremely high unemployment rate. So clearly, it's not a neutral personality trait. You don't get diagnosed with a personality trait.
(Unemployment is at an all time low in my country.)
Employment isn't what defines you in life, in my opinion. Unemployment is a supply and demand issue with only losing parties (unemployed, society, government). Not only one losing party. It doesn't have to be this way. I am convinced every human wants to be functional in society, with respect to their being (things they cannot change). In my country, companies need to hire a percentage of their employees as disabled people, and they need to work around the negative connotations of their disabilities. That doesn't imply they're bad employees though. Just that they have a different manual.
Thing is, I went to an education where everyone had an autism diagnosis. I have seen diversity in neurodiversity. I have met people on the spectrum who have high potential, or who have achieved such. After I finished education I got hired because I am on the spectrum, and I function. My colleagues are happy with me as their co-employee, and I love being part of this team.
In short, supply and demand was met.
> I say this despite suspecting that I could be on the spectrum.
So, your post is some kind of possible self ridiculing? What you said is akin to saying people of colour [a trait you are born with] are subhumans, then saying you might have some lineage if some foreign culture, or that you are a POC yourself, or got friends who are POC. Chapeau.
So autism being considered negative is much more harmful and damaging to the person's psyche than anxiety disorder for example.
Which is why there's been a push for normalizing and destigmatizing autism. Similar is true for LGBT+. It's why racism is considered so harmful - it's very hard and unsettling to think of yourself as inferior to others.
My problem is that I think this push has gone too far, to the point where reality is being bended.
I think it still has a very long way to go before it can actually start bending the other way.
Example of the latter: a friend of my wife is autistic (proper diagnosis, in fact they met during post-diagnosis support group), too, and he can work (he has own company), but he is unable to clean his house. Its too much chaos for him. So my wife does it for the time being, as his housemaid couldn't deal with him, and recently quit. And soon, my wife is getting paid for that work. Because of that, we'll both officially work, and we get free morning daycare for our toddler instead of having to shell out 200 EUR/month. Its a win-win-win.
> The brain size/shape is what it is which is why some people who are autistic insist in them being called autistic instead of them having autism.
> Since autism and Asperger's has its pros and cons, calling it solely a disability is myopic and, if extrapolated, outright condescending and flat out ignorant.
I think I'd be more comfortable with people calling it a disability than people calling it a personality trait... That feeds into the point that the article is addressing.
The article could have used a 3D cube to describe the spectrum. Then you get the colors and tints of it. Some people describe all the traits with spectrum, some severity of specific trait. 3D cube covers both, kind of like a 3D spectrogram, just multiple charts. The text then becomes context, and you immediately notice visually the differences. Context is still very much relevant though.
I thought the article was good but missed the mark on the comparson of suffering. In general, high functioning autistics are (seemingly) more intelligent, and intelligent people seem to suffer more from things like depression, weight of the world being on their shoulders. My 3 y.o. (who appears to be intelligent and likely on spectrum) doesn't realize such yet. Innocence is a blessing in disguise.
I don't really like the whole 'ADHD is my superpower' line either.
There are issues with the medicalization of neurodivergence, too, but nobody is obligated to feel like being neurodivergent is 'really a blessing' in their own case.
And you've just done... what exactly?
Here, she is giving an example of how this can happen:
“My doctor recently referred to my autism is “mild.” I gently pointed to my psychologist’s report which stated that my executive dysfunction as being greater than 99th percentile.
“”That means I am less functional than 99% of people. Does that seem mild to you?” I asked her.
“But, you see, I can speak, and I can look people in the eyes, so they see my autism as “mild.” My autism affects those around me mildly but my autism does affect me severely.“
But then again, you can also find commonalities even on the individual level, that might help universally. So it's all multiple models and some of them operating in multiple dimensions. Inventing new models doesn't automatically discard other models.
My point is simply, instead of looking at it as either this OR that, the models are that model AND that model too, while trying to recognize strength and weaknesses of our biases. When confronted with new information, we tend to discard old information, as if it's all unapplicable or not politically correct. That's perhaps psychology too :) Perhaps, linked to the competitive nature of humans.
I won't claim to be an expert how it differentiates across "groups" of people. I do care a bit about keeping an open mind and try to see multiple perspectives at the same time though. But yes, that often makes it more general and less powerful (one-sided).
I think the important message from both people here is not that there is no gradient - of "functioning", stress, or something else - but that it is / they are largely orthogonal to the dimension plotted out by the spectrum's categorical values.
To attempt to reply though: There doesn't need to be a psychological variable, there just need to be made one or more tests that scores aggregates. However, as the article and TEDx talk says, a number or two would not paint the whole picture of a complex socio-psychological issue.
Your second paragraph appears to be broadly in agreement with my point (which is merely a paraphrase of the author, believe) that, in this case, the gradients of quantitative test scores are largely orthogonal to the spectrum’s categorical variables. Even if one could combine them to get a meaningful aggregate score (which I suspect you can do, though only to some extent), you cannot tell from that score what aspects of the spectrum describe the subject.
From the TEDx-talk, it does seem like the typical spectrum/gradient understanding is lacking in terms of being meaningful for individuals. Maybe because it's a sort of score as seen from the outside, and not even very precise one at that.
Also, society also needs to accommodate and improve understanding of diversity, rather than expecting everyone to be clones of each other. The latter doesn't work that well, since we're then not encouraging people's natural strengths and creativity.
Well, it was certainly hard to see it any other way:
Author:
The spectrum is not a gradient.
From your first reply:
A typical spectrum is the exact same thing as gradients of frequencies.
As your reply did not explicitly make this claim about the autism spectrum, it nominally did not directly contradict the author, but if it was not about the autism spectrum, then it was utterly pointless to raise it here - and, furthermore, it took several promptings on my part before you addressed this issue.
With regard to your second paragraph, I completely agree.
I replied to you in further posts that I see both perspectives. So can now conclude I don't see it as just one way because it depends on your frame of reference / POV / state of mind.
Maybe it was pointless when I didn't really relate it directly to autism at first, and I didn't mean to go into a discussion of it being either that or the other in the first place.
If you are less functional than 99% of people, but more functional than 99% of autistic people, one might consider that mild autism yes.
Call it "habitually concentrated".
We study that kind of stuff in the meditation scene.
Now I have a child with an official diagnosis, and I see a lot of the traits from my childhood, and things that I struggled with and her, just magnified.
I think if I were to go through the school system now, someone probably would have at least suggested that I get tested. Rather than berating me day after day and labeling me a bad kid
I could not believe the difference. For example, I never realized that some foods made me tired. Now when I eat breads or pastas, I notice i am tired afterwards (not immediately but after a time).
Very strange.
So I think, it is quite likely that it does affect other people differently. And it makes sense for them to cut that stuff out while I don't have to.
In my experience, the biggest issue with autism isn't so much raw awareness or availability, but that almost none of the "autism industry" caters to autistic people themselves. I sometimes end up excluding phrases like "your child", "the child", "the student", "my son", "my daughter" etc. from searches for information about autism because there's just so much stuff that's laser-focused on the concerns of presumed-neurotypical people around an autistic person.
I don’t claim to know what ‘autistic’ is, and I’ve never heard a clear definition.
And I really would be quite happy with that if it weren't for the fact that it's become popular and draws a ton of unwanted attention now.
That’s not to dismiss people who actually suffer from actual differences, but some of it is the same old “rebellion” in different clothing.
This may be the domain of the matchmaking industry, which basically exists to keep people feeling alienated.
I am not ignorant. I understand that many, perhaps the majority, of disabilities that exist in the United States are of the “invisible“ kind.
However, the number of individuals who want to elevate their very common, and human, difficulties in life, to a “disability“ is ridiculous. If I had to diagnose most of these people, I would call them narcissists.
I won't say I have ADHD, but I am very lazy. For my entire life, I've found myself unable to just snap out of laziness and choose to stop being lazy. I don't believe that I'm selfishly lazy, because my laziness often causes obvious, preventable problems for me, and I still can't find the switch inside myself to turn it off.
I wish we could set aside the labels and say "I'm lazy and I want to buy therapy to help me deal with being lazy." Maybe there is also a reason people are not getting their need for attention satisfied in whatever way they're supposed to.
I satisfy my need for attention by being good at programming, and then talking to other programmers about programming. I notice most people (general population) don't have any particular skill worth showing off like I do. I don't know what the actionable to fix that is, though.
Instead of forcing people to fabricate various illnesses to get performance enhancing medications, just make it over the counter.
Antidepressants, over the counter.
ADHD drugs, over the counter.
Anti-anxiety drugs, over the counter.
As long as you're at least 21, you should have the right to ingest whatever you want.
I personally wouldn't recreationally take any of the above, but I think everyone has a right to make their own choices.
In America there's a billion dollar industry in convincing everyone their broken. As far as I'm concerned I'm the best me I can be and that's it.
Their are tons of people who really do need medication.
Their are others who shop doctors to get the meds they want.
For example, it's common for kids struggling in college to get an ADHD diagnosis so they can study for longer hours. As far as I'm concerned as long as your adult, ingest whatever you want. But I don't think being unable to study Chem for 12 hours a day is an illness.
Why stop adults from doing what they want.
No one stops you from rock climbing, even though that's also dangerous.
ADHD medications don't really restore anyone to 'normal'. They're a compensatory measure ('performance enhancer') which is reserved only for some people mainly for bad reasons (the war on drugs, lack of public and accessible infrastructure for addiction treatment). They can be used to help people with certain deficits meet certain demands (typically productivity in work or school), but it's not like they counteract ADHD. They help with some aspects of the disorder (difficulty sustaining attention) and make other aspects of the disorder (difficulty being deliberate and judicious about when to switch tasks) worse.
Gating them heavily behind many appointments and preventing pharmacies from providing any refills makes stimulant medications harder to access for people who have ADHD, especially during bad times when it's relatively poorly managed, which forms a vicious cycle. (ADHDers sometimes refer to the total fees associated with missed and late appointments and other such mishaps as 'the ADHD tax', and it's not unusual for that sum to exceed what an ADHD patient actually pays in copays, especially when they're first trying to get things under control.)
Expanding public access both to stimulant medication and to addiction treatment could, imo, help more people live better lives (including both ADHD patients and people who don't have ADHD) and allow treatment of ADHD to focus more on people who actually have ADHD , and on all of the management aspects of living with ADHD (which are much harder and collectively at least as important as medication).
(At the same time, under the policies the GP described, I would continue to consult with a psychiatrist, because adjusting psychoactive medications without professional assistance is a stupid thing to do.)
I have inattentive ADHD and Aspergers, and wearing part of a nicotine patch for half the day really helps with focus issues. (Any longer and I don't sleep well, though.) I also take l-tyrosine and Avmacol, and drink tea.
Since I started this regimen, my work performance went up significantly and I got a promotion to a position I'd been wanting for nearly a decade. My wife is also a bit less upset with me and I feel subjectively more able to think ahead and plan.
Do you think someone with depressive tendencies should be able to overdose?
Please look up some of the package inserts. This isn't some globuli smartie medecine you are talking about. It's only legally available because the suffering caused by social isolation is less bearable than some of the side effects.
You can be happy if you only get malnutrition from them, if you are unlucky you'll end up with chronic diseases or cancer
If we had no drug enforcement whatsoever, sure. But as long as we do benzos may be one of the most dangerous forms of substances we have short of straight up opiods.
On the point of medication though I largely agree, the current system is insanely paternalistic. Like having patients be forced to follow up with doctors about medications they’ve been on for 5 years. However society doesn’t truly want to deal with the true costs of freedom like somebody being able to easily legally acquire a lethal dose of anxiety meds.
You can absolutely go to a therapist and say exactly that. You won't be turned away. Generally therapists are more interested in helping people versus labeling people.
NT is the large part of the bell curve. It’s called typical because they share mental ability traits with over 80% of the rest of humanity.
“I’m not neurotypical. That statement hurts me”
“It seems that we are in agreement on your first statement. Please help me understand how the second statement can be true.”
It's not at all silly. Not more than what's a good car. For some, a Toyota model is a good car. For some, a Mercedes model is a good car. A Dodge is a good car too perhaps. But a boat is not a good car. A Formula 1 engine is also not a good car.
An F1 car wouldn’t work for a family with kids but I’d love to daily one of those.
Nothing is absolute. Nothing is typical. An “NT” person in Japan is not the same as one in the US. Where do you draw the line? I posit you don’t. There isn’t a line. There isn’t a typical case. We are all so vastly different, often in ways we cannot see or understand.
Even assuming you could handle it (which is a huge assumption), you can not drive an F1 around on city streets. Ground clearance means will get hung up on the first driveway or minor road work you run into.
Supposedly they don't. Mental health professionals could probably diagnose neuroses or psychoses in most adults.
If you don't have an official diagnosis, on what basis do you claim to be any more “actually autistic” than the other undiagnosed people that see themselves that way and are seeking an official diagnosis?
It seems like a bad idea to stigmatize people for seeking diagnosis.
There are plenty of stories of actually autistic people who don’t get diagnosed until much later because the people around them dismissed it or didn’t support them because their difficulties were not so visible.
Until you experience it yourself, you can't understand just how frustrating and demeaning it is.
I’m surprised people are seeking diagnosis just to have the label. What actual benefits are they getting?
In any case someone can be wrong about having autism, but not wrong that they have a particular challenge that others do not.
Not to downplay any difficulties you or someone else may have had, but a counter to this I am seeing some people claim on twitter that they should just be able to state their diagnosis without getting one and want accommodations for it because of poverty or family would look down on it.
This is very dangerous. People just assume they see a characterization on TV and assume they have that. Symptoms can be shared between different classes of syndromes. ADHD and High Functioning Autism both can share, on the surface, similar sensory processing issues, anxiety, and obsessive thinking in my experience; but I imagine the therapy and day to day accommodations that one with ADHD needs is much different that one with Autism (honestly I barely remember the therapy I got in school and I am hoping more people can chime on this).
How is this in any way related to the comment you are replying to? It seems like you misunderstood.
ADHD and autism also have significant comorbidity, though its possible only one or the other is initially diagnosed when they coöccur.
You are a self-diagnosed-autistic person (SDAP). You are upset that other SDAPs are consuming resources intended for ‘actual’ autistic persons. You would prefer to consume those resources yourself. You are trying to get a professional diagnosis as ‘autistic’. You have thus far been unsuccessful.
Are those the facts which you intended to convey?
People tell me I’m autistic all the time. I do not accept this label. I will not agree to the diagnosis, treatment, or aid of any sort. I don’t care if it’s in a book. I call it rationality. I see information where other people see emotions. I realize that this is a deficit in relating to many other people and the world at large. If I were to change one thing to adapt better, it would be stronger recognition and avoidance of emotional people, and closer connection to rationals. Emotional people can be very convincing to get what they want from rationals.
And no, we are not self-diagnosed.
Do you treat all marginalized groups this way?
But, to attempt, I’d first say that I don’t ‘treat’ groups. I interact with individuals. Also, I don’t know exactly what ‘marginalized’ means, but that sounds like something having to do with the way that others have treated those individuals.
So I’d probably say, on an individual basis, I think I treat most people the same. I tend to have a penchant for reaching out to people who I observe to have been ignored or mistreated by others because I find that they are often very happy to be treated normally, and make great friends. I’m not really a big fan of interacting with anybody that demands to be treated differently, if that’s what you mean.
So, yes, I think I’d say that I probably do.
As access to specific resources is a central part of the complaint it seems perfectly reasonable to request more details. They can be general, like "I can't book a psychiatrist" or "I need specific drugs that are in limited supply".
I’m not sure why, but I keep coming back to your comment, even an hour or more after you posted it. I feel sympathy for your lack of balance. I am reminded of these Supertramp lyrics:
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily
Oh joyfully, playfully watching me
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh responsible, practical
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable
Oh clinical, oh intellectual, cynical
https://youtu.be/4YxTa1AUqps
https://youtu.be/low6Coqrw9Y
I don’t hear the remake using anything but the first verse of lyrics from the original.
If nothing else, makes me wonder if I missed out on a "welcome packet" or something I didn't know I was supposed to get. :P
And yes, it is wonderful that finally, autistic people get their voice, their agency and are (sometimes) getting treated as equals (even if different). Sadly, in some places, "autistic" is still being used as an insult, usually based on a harmful stereotype that autism is in any way related to the lack of empathy.
I love that the world changes to at least consider autism as a neurodivergence, even if not act upon that. Decades ago, it wasn't the same. Being traumatized by noise level was my problem, and even when I was in primary school, begging to let me go to some more quiet place, I was not allowed. Other kids were OK with the noise level, so why do I have a problem?
If a person needs some accommodation (say, reducing volume in their workplace), it shouldn't matter if they are "truly autistic" or "non-autistic, but highly oversensitive to noise". And converse - if someone declares themself "mildly autistic" but does not require special accommodations, they won't take precious resources from you.
I wish you success with getting the necessary accommodations!
> I don't think that "autistic" is more of a "status symbol" than, say, "gay".
Uh..aren't they both pretty big status symbols? Gay, queer, disability, "this is indigenous land". If I work as a disability officer, it's probably somewhat important my email byline has a disability (or two, of three).
"I have to prove my status" (as someone who is a disability officer) and "this person is a disability officer, they dont even have a disability or their pronouns in the signature?!".
> If I work as a disability officer, it's probably somewhat important my email byline has a disability
It's not.
I wonder what makes people deluded enough to believe that.
I have no idea what I am, but I know I'm not "normal" - at least as normal as most in America. I definitely think different and require a strong filter to function in normal society. Things like schedules and meetings overwhelm me mentally, or at least are the most tiresome stuff I do where to others they are trivial.
I also simply cannot push through "busy work" tasks even if I see immense payout in the end. I dropped out of high school without a plan simply because it was such a mental torture to sit through useless classes every day I could trivially test out of.
But, when I get an idea or project or goal in my head I am utterly relentless to a level I don't see in many others.
When I was younger I could kind of patch through this and find professional paths that worked alright with my quirks. Now that I'm older and have a family and "real" career with 7am alarm clocks/etc. I find life to be fairly unbearable from a mental aspect.
I'd really like to know what causes this in me. I've always been this way, to my extreme detriment, when I was younger I would cry myself to sleep just wanting to be "normal". Is it mild autism? ADHD? PTSD from childhood trauma? I dunno, but it's both relationship and career impacting and having to build your life around it sucks - knowing what your dealing with sounds amazing to me.
I just can't imagine wishing putting life on "hard mode" like this is on anyone, or anyone wanting to live it...
The other side too: there are plenty of thinkers and critics of modernity to make a case that the modern way of life is not really that healthy for neurotypical people — or more precisely, people with good, or great executive functioning, even if they are rewarded the most by modern society.
I argue that, the hard mode is not necessarily your neural wiring, but that our civilization and way of life is terribly skewed.
Hope you find some tools and understanding in the coming year.
I do think that when people talk about being "on the spectrum" etc, it is well understood what they mean. I'm sure everyone on HN knows at least one person who is "a bit autistic" and maybe even considers themselves to be. We all know what it means. It might be the wrong words, technically, but we do seem to be communicating the right thing.
I think the end goal is for Black and autistic people to be thought of as people first and foremost, and their differences would take a back seat. This is the only way we can be one big happy family. Wouldn't the best way to accomplish this be for the rest to realize that they actually have something in common with the marginalized groups?
Imagine a white supremacist who learns they had a Black ancestor. That would transform their whole world view.
Same with autism: neurotypical people being able to relate to quirks that cause social exclusion isn't something to shut down. We should be celebrating the normalization of these things because that is how they stop being markers of the "other".
Sometimes I wonder what the people who are up in arms about being "not properly" Black, autistic, etc. have as their end game. Perpetual exclusion of the marginalized groups for sympathy points? I think many would gladly trade those points for greater inclusion.
Also, autism isn't just about social quirks. These are people with different neurophysiology who experience the world in a different way. It is not simply a matter of holding a different opinion or learning a particular behavior. This is not something that can be 'normalized' by talking through it.
The autistic community is largely against gate keeping, and are quite accepting of people who are self-diagnosed. This is not about not being 'properly' autistic, but about having a voice. Being a part of society for the person you are. To not having the challenges you face in a world defined by and for neurotypical people being trivialized.
Afaik, it does not. Nazi who found out they have Jewish ancestors did not concluded being Jew is fine. They continied to hate Jews and found whole thing unfair.
Self Hate is a thing, ignoring evidence is a thing and both can make you even more dangerous.
Never underestimate the mental gymnastics of racism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischling_Test
What would be the point of doing away with the word "mildly" because aren't you then downplaying what severe autism looks like? So aren't they just saying that the support structure for "mildly" autistic people isn't strong enough?
Seems like a really indirect way to say such a thing.
Consider different regulation in specific biochemical pathways to be individual gradients. These parameters, when combined, can represent many different unique states that exist on a spectrum.
The reason why I jump (1) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eZe8_60zZtg
The point is that autism could be the consequence of damage to nerve cells. When given to an adult, a stroke may cause physical and mental issues. The same would be the case for a child, but (especially for young children) the symptoms would appear differently.
b) Her idea of how autism is diagnosed is wildly optimistic. It can work for self-diagnosis, ie "no diagnosis", but every psychologist and psychiatrist has a different idea of how to diagnose it. If you don't present repetitive movements, it will likely be very difficult to get a diagnosis.
One of the problems is how the DSM works. To vulgarize, it's a tool to diagnose dysfunctional abnormality. But atypical doesn't mean dysfunctional in the same way as for neurotypical people. And "normal" changes based on culture and context, the very concepts used to describe symptoms will change over time.
I think it's easier for individuals to recognize that they are neurologically atypical, but that's simply not a diagnosis just yet, so they can be misdiagnosed a lot. And there are fads in psychiatry that follow popular culture somewhat, so if yesterday's ADHD is today's autism, the goalposts are moving.
So hey, maybe trying to put a single label on such a complicated spectrum will always be a problem, and we should provide help and resources to people who need it without trying to boil things down to one word.
And as with everything, if some word is being used for some thing other than it's original definition, it will start to lose meaning (or gain meaning depending on how you look at it).
Maybe this is a perpetual cycle when it comes to mental health terminology.
yes, the euphemism treadmill.
https://englishcowpath.blogspot.com/2011/06/euphemism-treadm...
Warning: politically incorrect content ahead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUvdXxhLPa8
"Mental retardation" was the proper and polite lay term in my lifetime. It was only in 2010 that government agencies started removing the word "retardation" from their names. (See: Rosa's Law)
Not really true where I am. You have to go through all kinds of tests and be tested for other things (to make sure you're not those.) I suspect it's the same everywhere.
From my observation of psychological testing and diagnosis on the research side in the US, its a shit show. Most of it is self reporting and questionnaires which don't actually tell us anything about underlying mechanisms. Its just a bunch of symptom check boxes.
For me, a lot of my issues stem from my being unable to direct my attention towards anything that my brain designates as boring, and away from anything I feel to be exciting. I also naturally drop out of the real world into my own head where there’s a constant movie reel going on of memories, songs, hypothetical situations, whatever. I’ve sometimes been zoning out in my own world and suddenly realized that one of my friends was standing in front of me, waving their arms to get my attention. My eyes were open but I didn’t see them. I tend to miss pieces of conversations and lose touch with people and forget to do things because of these issues. So, I dunno, anyways there’s a lot of overlap.
But I’m a pretty good coder because I visualize the data and the relationships between the data, and figure out how it needs to be transformed. And the only reason I have a career is that I became obsessed with programming as a teenager. So, the neurodiversity giveth and it taketh away.
In fact I think many autistic community disputes are people talking past each other because of this difference. I guess they must have had a good reason, but eliminating them Asperger’s diagnosis would seem to me to just exacerbate the problem.
I've definitely seen this as a challenge in describing two of my boys, who both have autism that additionally presents with being nearly non-verbal.
You say to someone that they have autism, and in their mind they're thinking 'oh, like Sheldon'. But it's as you say, it's not nearly the same. Sheldon is closer to NT than he is to my boys.
Of course they don't, people all know that color is a complex mix depending on what light is projected on the wall, what material constitutes the wall (glass?), and so what it will throw back, as well as the physiological condition of who look at it (color blind), as well as psychosocial framing (are you the hidden child of Sapir&Whorf and some Inuit engendered during a fifty shades of white party who just ate some psychedelic mushroom?).
Or maybe most of them don't, obviously don't read HN, and will look at you strangely if you start to reference any of these things, or at best will ask for some explanations. Just like when you talk about autism spectrum.
Merry Christmas to everybody.
If I hear someone has autism, the only thing I can assume is that their authentic personality is "not normal". And even then they could be so good at masking that nobody can tell the difference.
I get what they are saying re: autism but this is an incorrect analogy. If you measure wavelength then red is quantitatively more than blue. If you measure frequency then red is less than blue.
Where does this response put me on the spectrum?
I like how this post fights with "scalar fallacy" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8132525, http://observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com/2011/01/scalar...), prevalent in popular psychology.
My small nitpicks:
1. IMHO, the gradient (from "a bit autistic" to "highly autistic") makes sense - as long as we treat it as the first principal component of a multidimensional process. I know many people who learned that they are autistic in their 30s, as on ALL axes, their symptoms were relatively mild (especially women, who are vastly underdiagnosed). After realizing they are autistic, they often cried, explaining decades of their life and why they always felt different.
2. While I understand where "Don't assume anything about an autistic person." comes from, I disagree. If we take it literally, the word "autistic" makes no sense (as it is not related to anything). Sure, stereotypes are both inaccurate and harmful + there is great neurodiversity among autistic people - "If you've met one individual with autism, you've met one individual with autism". The best antidote is Bayesian thinking - having reasonably wide priors and modifying the posterior with each measurement.
Now it is not considered neither a separate unit nor a subset of autism. (As there is no meaningful distinction between Asperger Syndrome and Autism without cognitive impairment.)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-h...
That label seriously offends some people.
But yet the author describes herself as an "autist," so presumably the author does believe we can make some reasonable assumptions about what being autistic means -- what would be the point of using that label otherwise?
I think the point here is that some of one's assumptions will be wrong and that you should flexibly adapt rather than stick with your initial assumptions? I would agree with that.
The use of the color spectrum is especially unhelpful, since the qualitative features of the color spectrum are totally unrelated to what makes it a spectrum, and so the 'distinction' the article tries to draw between a spectrum and a gradient is totally specious. What makes the color spectrum a spectrum is precisely that it's formed by variation along a single dimension (wavelength or frequency, whatever)— the exact structure the article describes as belonging to a gradient as 'opposed' to a spectrum.
The diagrams with parts of the color spectrum blacked out are pure cringe. Why are you making this broken, disanalogous metaphor worse instead of throwing it away??
It's not hard to describe the actual structure of what are (inaptly) called 'spectrum disorders' in contemporary psychology. They are disorders characterized by clusters of related traits, behaviors, and experiences which (variously in terms of severity, frequency, intensity, or something) can each vary in degree.
Please stop trying to 'fix' the spectrum metaphor. Just kill it.
[1] Through bad spelling (and not synesthesia) I typed "diapasm" first, but it seemed wrong. Turns out it's smelly and not soundy.
> Red isn’t “more spectrum” than green or blue. Apples aren’t “more fruit” than oranges. That’s not how it works.
Red 'is' in fact 'more wavelength' than green or blue. That's exactly how it works.
The confusion the author bemoans comes from people actually knowing what characterizes a spectrum in general and taking that to apply when they hear the phrase 'autism spectrum'. The phrase itself is misleading.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-expenditure-seri...
Look at the FAO food price index, and you see it only decreased since 2010-ish, but on average since 1961 prices grew to roughly match inflation.
https://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/worldfood/images/hom...
https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/
In fact, I shall call this the Percentage Bias. The Percentage Bias is when you allege displacement by looking at alterations in ratios without looking at alterations in total amounts.
My question to that is; why on earth do you care what other people choose to do and why? I get that there was an argument made here to that effect, but for real, nobody is suffering from other people eating less gluten. I know I'm not and I love me a good bagel.
Isn't protein really easy to get from veges? Like chickpeas, tofu, tempeh, quinoa, edamame, lentils, etc
Everybody these days is a programmer.
Everybody is an investor.
Everybody is a trader.
Everybody is an entrepreneur.
No thank you
Think about it - without an "autism" label, how do we communicate or think clearly about research, diagnosis, treatment, and social structures to help people who suffer with this category of symptoms?
It's like talking about coding or doing math without variables, making decisions without criteria, or reasoning philosophically without definitions. Coherent thinking relies on the ability to categorize and label.
"So what if there's a tiny amount of gluten contamination... it's not like these people are going to die, right? They're probably just on a fad diet."
Diluting the meaning of a medical condition is not a good thing.
Grocery food is way better than it was even just 10-20 year ago. It’s great.
Same here, this matches my experience exactly.
Thanks for the pointer, I'll check it out!
... which you can do here:
https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180314
... and here:
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100171.txt
... and here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121010092154/http://www.george...
Also, it appears all experts in the field believe ASD comes from assortive mating (people with similar genes that affect social function tend to come together). There should be resources for these people who think they're "a little autistic" and have clearly researched the topic to determine if it's safe for them to have children or if adoption is more appropriate. It's an unfortunate state of affairs but the experts are pointing to ASD as preventable, if you think you're almost on the spectrum and married to someone similar to yourself, consider researching the topic of "autism and assortive mating".
The more open we are to talking about being "almost on the autism spectrum" and the more informed we are the better we all are!
It's a strange thing to bring up after assortative mating, really. If it comes up in assortative mating it implies there is a reason for the genes to be there.
One example: In various experiments related to resource exhaustion, antisocial and/or "autistic" mice were the ones to survive the collapse of mouse society as they were more likely to not be involved over resource squabbles.
Of course, there are some people who are very autistic who do not have very happy lives, and some people who are just kind of autistic.
I think more than a third of ASD cases were estimated be linked to assortive mating in some studies, which is still a lot of cases that wouldn't happen if we changed out dating strategies! Intuitively this will only get worse with how everyone currently dates - dating until we finds the exact perfect match for our soul. The science is still very speculative but do we want time to tell?
More broadly, I consider autism to be a strong net negative in my life, and I find folks who really embrace Asperger's as part of their identity to be alien to me. I'd love to eradicate this condition from the earth to spare future humans from the pain that inability to socialize will cause.
I'm sure that some people who like their autism will be upset about "eugenics", but frankly, we don't have to be God damn Nazis to acknowledge that acting eugenicily is good and advocating for disgenic behavior is bad long term.
No.
> I'm sure that some people who like their autism will be upset about "eugenics", but frankly, we don't have to be God damn Nazis to acknowledge that acting eugenicily is good and advocating for disgenic behavior is bad long term.
Well you can pretty much say that Nazism is a natural, logical endpoint of eugenicist beliefs. If others decide not to cooperate in your little project of eliminating "dysgenic" traits then you'll have to compel them with force.
My primary concern is, that light indeed has a primary order (wave length) and composition of wave lengths isn't being talked about here.
While thinking about an alternative example, I came across sound. Frequency also plays a role, but here the composition of different frequencies is important to create melodies. The presents of different frequencies could be the equivalent of a factor being strong or weak.
What do you think, do you have other ideas/examples/thoughts?