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.)
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.)