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50 people with names and addresses, you say?
Sounds VERY solvable.
I thought I was autistic but turns out I have a different set of things that manifest similarly on the screeners but have totally different origins and approaches.
I don’t think that’s what these folks are talking about though.
The Behind the Bastards episode on autism was fascinating.
I’m not going to do it justice but the tl;dr is that parents felt like it couldn’t have been their fault or their genes that made their kid this way. That it must have been vaccines or trans frogs or whatever the fuck they can blame. Because blaming something else made them feel better. And it gave them an excuse to not deal with their kid that has real difficulty.
And, to a certain extent…I get it. I don’t agree with them but having a child with a disability was not what they expected.
But you raise the child you have and not the one you wish you had.
Autism (neuro divergence in general really) under capitalism, is the engineering equivilent to being a sacrificial gear in a gear box. You have your purpose, you do it well when placed in the proper gear set. But you wear out faster than all the other gears, not because you are a bad gear, but because the system itself was designed to crush you rather than crush the bigger more expensive gears. It was built for their longevity and success, not yours. This is them giving the squeeky wheel or “gear” “the grease” in a fucked up way.
They are trying to gaslight different groups into thinking they are just a regular normal gear, and they need to just work harder, even if it means the gear breaks quicker as a result. We are cheaper to replace than we are to repair, and that is the logic that makes capitalism unworthy of human participation, it is inherently anti human in all spectrums.
Jesus fucking christ. “I don’t meet the broadest strokes possible on interpersonal relationships it couldn’t possibly be meee”
I’m fucking asd and i am spectacular at client relationships. You ask anyone who has met me and they will also say “oh yeah there’s a spicy meatball”. These two are not exclusive, humans spin in different directions.
I managed to get past the paywall on the article somehow, so here’s the actually important stuff:
But for a community organized around social impairment, they maintained an astonishing number of social rules. Certain language and beliefs were treated as harmful, and activists policed them aggressively. Terms like high-functioning, low-functioning, severe, and profound were condemned as “ableist.” Again and again, I watched popular accounts direct their thousands of followers to comment sections so they could scold people for using the wrong language or expressing the wrong views about autism.
AKA “muh free speech”
Activists reserved particular contempt for anyone who upheld the medical understanding of autism spectrum disorder, targeting organizations, researchers, and universities that treated autism as a disorder and supported work on its causes, treatment, or cure. They compared that work to eugenics and tried to shut it down through petitions, harassment, and public pressure. Too often, they succeeded.
“We should ‘fix’ autistic people, why doesn’t everyone agree with me??? 😢”
when I began referring to myself with the term Asperger,
The response was fierce. Activists rejected the idea that there was any sort of hierarchy in the autism spectrum.
“Why don’t people like it when I use an outdated term, removed from the DSM-5, that is often used to imply low intelligence of autistic people and want me to use the more broadly accepted inclusive term instead???”
Then, my life changed. In 2022, after working for several years as an artist, I became a journalist. The career shift was spurred by my discovering the stories of detransitioners: mainly young women who had once identified as transgender and now no longer did, and whose experiences were largely ignored by mainstream media. I could relate to them; many of them, like me, had struggled deeply as teenagers and searched for a label that seemed to explain their suffering. As I learned more about their experiences, I was forced to think more critically about how activism and media shape cultural narratives around identity and diagnosis, and how perverse social incentives can lock those narratives into place.
“I saw people detransition and that means that means autism can be a social contagion and because I see it as debilitating I want a reason to believe I’m faking it”
I soon began taking on stories that required heavy reporting. As I spoke with sources, built rapport, asked sensitive questions, and earned their trust, I realized something that should have been obvious much earlier: I do not have a social communication deficit. Not only was I competent at socializing, I was good at it, and I improved the more I did it.
“I’m good at socializing therefore I don’t have autism”
Which forced me to ask: What else could have explained my social discomfort? In retrospect, the answer was more ordinary than I wanted it to be. I was a sensitive, introverted child who felt social mistakes intensely. Instead of responding to them by becoming more resilient, I chose to retreat into my interests, because they felt safer than people. Over time, that withdrawal hardened into a pattern.
“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” but applied to emotions. If she’d just responded better to mistakes, she’d never have been diagnosted as autistic, guys!
My diagnosis unraveled further once I started questioning the other traits I had come to see as autistic. Introversion, high sensory sensitivity, intense interests, and social camouflaging are not exclusively the features of an autist; they are widely distributed across the general population. But using the female autism framework, I came to see them as a meaningful pattern.
“I have a ton of heavily correlated traits that are all often linked to autism, but if I look at them individually instead of recognizing the actual pattern, and say that non autistic people can have them too, that means I’m ‘normal!’”
This happened very swiftly, partially because an autism diagnosis is not especially difficult to obtain. The process, which has no objective medical test and relies primarily on self-reported traits interpreted by individual clinicians, leaves enormous room for confirmation bias and error. My own evaluation did not consider alternative explanations for my experiences, only that they had been present since childhood.
“We can’t do a DNA test for autism, therefore doctors must be just guessing and patients must be making it up”
Research shows that more and more people, especially young women, are over-identifying with psychiatric diagnoses, desperate for some sort of label to explain their struggles or abnormalities.
“More people are self-diagnosing, therefore trained medical professionals using actual diagnostic methods will also be diagnosing a ton of people with autism that don’t have it”
Losing the autism label allowed me to regain something more valuable than certainty: agency. My difficulties did not disappear, but they no longer defined the limits of who I could become. There is comfort in a story that shifts responsibility away from the self. Sometimes that comfort is almost irresistible. But in the end, it is better to believe in the possibility of change than to embrace a narrative that says you never had a choice at all.
“If you think you’re autistic, you’ll assume you have innate limits and stop trying hard enough.” AKA “Autism stops you from reaching your full potential and is a crutch”
The whole thing is disingenuous. The use of “Aspergers” is partly discontinued because of fascist associations. It shouldn’t be surprising that people don’t want to use a classification termed by people who wanted to sort useful autistics from the disposable (as they saw it).
The last part is actually a thing that can happen after diagnosis. But pretending to not be autistic isn’t the fix.
I’m on the autism spectrum. I’m high-functioning, what would have been called Aspergers prior to DSM-V. What that means is that I largely function in day-to-day life, and that I don’t need significant supports. The term ‘Aspergers’ is helpful, because people have a rough idea of what you mean when you use it. Austism spectrum disorder is more nebulous. Treating differing levels of support as being ‘hierarchical’ is not useful, and will–in the long run–tend to mean that everyone gets the same levels of support, rather than people with greater needs getting more support. (Would it be nice to get therapy? Sure. Do I need it as much as other people might? Probably not.)
And fuck yes, if there was a magic pill that I could take and I’d suddenly be absolutely dead-average neurotypical? Yeah, I’d take it. I’d swallow a handful. I’m probably a lot older than a bunch of other people on the spectrum here, and lemme tell you, it does not get better. If anything, the older you get, the worse it is, because the friends you had in school drift away, and you don’t make new ones. I know that social lives tend to get worse as people age, but at this point, the ONLY social life I have is two hours of church (non-denom universalist unitarian; I gave up theism years ago) on Sundays.
I have a degree, I have a job that I’m good at, I own a house and land, I have a ton of cats that mostly like me, blah blah blah. But goddamn, I feel very alone. I tried for YEARS to do what I thought you were supposed to do to meet people and make friends, and shit always fell flat. And now I know that yes, it IS me, I’m the problem. I’m the one that’s fucking up. (And apparently it’s really really autistic to send out questionnaires to ask people where I could improve in my social skills.)
BIG yikes. I hope they find themselves a deep, dark hole to crawl into and never come back out of.
Just googled Christina Buttons 😬
So called “investigative” journalist who rails against what she calls pseudoscience while spewing pseudoscience
Autism has been trending lately. A similar trend occurred with bipolar disorder; nearly 100% of people in rehabilitation clinics have this diagnosis. The most likely reason for this trend is insurance fraud. An insurance company will pay more to treat a suicidal bipolar autist then they will to treat an addict with a transient anxiety disorder.
Another factor is patient expectations. When a parent or patient pays for a psychiatrist, they expect a diagnosis. They don’t want to be told that they are normal and fine.
The worst part about the article (see comment for source) is that in a sense, the author isn’t wrong. Developing skills helps with challenges, whether they are caused by a neurodivergency or not. Also, labels can limit people and people can hold themselves back because of seeing their condition as innate and not changeable (which it is, but everything around it can change). I don’t doubt that her autism diagnosis was not useful for her and she feels better letting it go. And there are very toxic elements in the neurodiversity community, just like in other communities.
The problem is that none of the above actually invalidates the diagnosis. It’s all context in which the life of the person with the diagnosis plays out. So she may very well still be autistic by any reasonable definition. I don’t know her. And the attitude which this kind of article permits others to take can be scary.
ADHD Sidebar Rant
(This doesn’t get into my big issue with a large swath of the DSM, which calls a bucket of symptoms a diagnosis without any understanding of underlying causes. With other medical fields we’ve often found that there are multiple diseases underlying the population of patients with a cluster of symptoms (e.g. recent discovery of multiple variants of Parkinsons with different origins). I personally suspect that there are multiple distinct conditions that underpin what we currently bucket as “autism”, and same with many of the other conditions in that section of the DSM. The only one we understand even reasonably well is ADHD, AFAICT. We at least have brain differences and some genetic components mapped out, but we’re still learning more all the time, e.g. recent study which suggests primary mode of operation of the condition is reward, not attention, which is why stimulants work.)
Stop making everything political!
The national anthem of people who love the status quo!
The national anthem of people who love the status quo!
Of 40 years ago.
For now. They’d ideally prefer 400 years ago.
Just somebody let me know when I can claim asylum in a more civilized country, as a persecuted class, where that class is ‘I am Autistic’.
Till then, I’ll continue not publically existing.
The US admin has already publically stated multiple times that they basically wanna holocaust us, send all the people with mental ‘disorders’, who use prescribed meds… to farm labor detox work camps.
Just go look for quotes from Health Minister Brainworm.
Might want to look up your family tree. If you’re related to any Canadian, at any point (think great great great grandparents), you can get a passport.
I actually did this, milked the shit out of a free ancenstry.com membership, before they charged me.
Long story short:
Traced my lineage back to the American Revolutionary War? 🇺🇲 ✅
Found out that I am apparently technically, literally an Italian by their blood right heritage laws, and the timing of when my ancestors had children vs got naturalized? 🇮🇹 ✅
(Do I speak any Italian? ❌)
Do I have any Canadian heritage? 🇨🇦 ❌❌❌
Nope. Literally none, back to ~1700 - 1800, through anyone.
So… maybe learning Italian is my future, idfk.
EDIT:
lol, welp:
https://italyget.com/decreto-tajani-on-italian-citizenship/
tl;dr nevermind , Italy can apparently just amend its law via the judiciary, at any time, so… I am not Italian.
perfetto, angry hand gestures
the most insulting aspect has got to be the idea that plainly bonkers people are the ones making these aspersions. RFK and Trump are nutbags.
So I guess vaccines and Tylenol don’t cause autism anymore either right?
….
Right?
Something something stock market?
Sorry media campaign, I just checked and I did get vaccinated.
I’m Autistic, I swear! I have the vaccination card to prove it.
So… I am unquestionably ADHD. Like diagnosed in kindergarten, “doctor sees I’m neurodivergent the instant I start talking.”
Maybe AuADHD, still figuring that out.
…But, while I am no doctor, there are almost certainly diagnoses just to get ADD meds or extra time for tests. It was quite rampant in my school.
What I’m saying is, the grain of truth they’re stretching here shouldn’t be forgotten. Misdiagnoses and “false diagnosis” for benefits is definitely a thing for ADD, and it might be one for autism at some point. And pushing back against shameless neurodivergence discrimination shouldn’t cross the threshold of pretending that doesn’t exist.
It’s the kind of thing that haunts you and gives you impostor syndrome for the rest of your life
You can get Gold ADHD now?
I’ve already ranked up to Diamond /j
I’ve been hard stuck plat for 40 seasons…
And here I am in bronze league, thinking there was no hope.
Don’t worry, at least you’re not cardboard
Are they saying this is all part of an anti-trans campaign?
Nope. People are “leaving the autistic lifestyle” just like they “left the transs lifestyle” and earlier still "left the gay lifestyle "
They have one fucking move and it’s “you’re choosing to be a weirdo”
Can you choose to stop being a bigoted freak too?
Nah, I think the gist of it is more like there’s a philosophy out there that has low empathy and pushes low comprehension victim-blaming type of logic, and encourages harassment and starting shit that actively makes the world worse for all kinds of people, but mostly punching down in insidious ways to make people disenfranchise themselves and others in order to justify their own being pieces of shit or something.
Seems very “conversation therapy” based. Including reversing diagnoses of mental health disorders.
as a bi trans nonmonogamous audhder, fuck these people. all they really want is to kill us, and when they realize they can’t do it by turning us into someone else they will reach for the camps and gas chambers. then they will destroy themselves because the great tragedy is that so many of them are neurodivergent too. rigid black and white thinking is one of the major pitfalls of humanity, and sadly is one far too many neurodivergent people fall into.
