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So I guess vaccines and Tylenol don’t cause autism anymore either right?
….
Right?
Something something stock market?
Im following here, I am getting that there islikely overlap in anti-lgbt and antivaxxers but what has one to do with the other in terms or people living their lives?
One is a diagnosis, the other is definitively not
Because trans people’s brains are literally wired to be the gender they transition into, not the body they’re born in.
Every transgender person I know, including the one I’m married to, knew from a very young age their brain didn’t match their body.
Finding out and accepting you’re trans is the diagnosis.
Cool. I dont get what this post is saying as it relates to autism or trans people.
I dont get how what you are saying ties to the post.
The comparison they are making is that there was a stage where all of a sudden a bunch of people were claiming to de-transition and people believe it was a kind of co-ordinated thing to “prove” that transgender was just some kind of fad. OL is saying now that they are doing a similar thing with autistic people going back on their diagnosis and that the strings are being pulled by those who want to “prove” that autism is being over-diagnosed.
Essentially, it’s the “strategy” being used that’s comparable. It’s designed with an agenda.
Ok cool thanks I can see that. Diagnosis can change though, thats refinement and research a work. The autism scare mongering is ridiculous
Diagnosis can and does get retracted, or added to, altered etc. But only some get the spotlight. The rhetoric around autism being particularly misdiagnosed or “over-diagnosed” at the moment is really dangerous.
Agreed. I think undereducated people are far too involved in spaces they are not qualified to hold an informed opinion.
Honestly, wouldn’t be that surprised. There’s like 30-50 people who are pushing the anti-trans narrative. Seems like you don’t need a whole lot of people to build a conspiracy like this.
As with most writing it tells you more about the author than anything else.
In this case if you’ve got rainbow hair you’re obviously an evil liberal who is on the take.
I say we sick these cunts on the antivaxxer idiots and let them claw each other’s eyes out over which logical fallacy is the true one lol
Let them gaslight each other to death as society slowly moves forward without them.
Context?
It’s literally all right there
This article: https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-autistic-i-was-wrong Since it’s behind the paywall, a PDF copy should be available here.
It’s fucking funny that even propaganda is behind paywalls these days.
Oh, good. We’re doing this now… These people always have to be on the lookout for new groups they can punch down on just so they can feel big. They sneer at others for needing help, but they are the ones who well and truly need it themselves. Why do they feel this need to belittle others? Is it because they feel small in their own lives? Do they have some hatred that stems from past trauma that needs resolved? Who knows? But instead of working on themselves, whatever form that may take, they instead spend all their time and energy trying to tear down and destroy others. It’s a sad thing in the end, but the damage they do to others can not be forgiven or tolerated.
They sneer at others for needing help, but they are the ones who well and truly need it themselves
but that help seems unreachable to them; that’s the problem, they see others getting the help they need , don’t think can get, or feel ashamed of needing.
When sociopathy is normalized and idolized, that’s exactly how it seems to be.
I disagree. You imply they admit to needing help. I think they’re all in denial. They have problems and want to blame everyone but themselves, and are unwilling to take any responsibility.
This is it. It’s a bunch of angry people who think “Life is supposed to be hard! Deal with it.”
They think their life experiences are comparable to everyone else, which creates a logical fallacy:
-
Successful people don’t need help, but must obviously struggle just as much as I do.
-
I don’t have it easy, yet don’t need help, so people who ask for it are just being lazy.
They internalize the “life is hard” mantra and assume it’s normal to be playing life on hard mode, not realizing some people have the difficulty slider set to very easy while others are on nightmare.
You have just described my father perfectly. He is precisely like this.
“I suffer from depression. Or, as my father puts it, no I don’t.”
-Tig Notaro
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Unpopular opinion in these circles I’m sure, but:
The US (and the west in general, but especially the US) has a genuine problem with overmedicalization, driven in no small part by for-profit pharmaceutical companies having a financial incentive to sell medication and treatments to people. Part of fixing this problem involves admitting that it also affects autism, ADHD, OCD, etc. diagnoses, and that saying this is not erasure of people affected by those conditions.
Another unpopular opinion: making a medical condition part of your identity is generally not healthy, and if you’re upset about an “anti-autism diagnosis campaign”, there is a chance you have made a medical condition part of your identity.
I say this as someone with a childhood Asperger’s diagnosis who would no longer qualify for any kind of diagnosis.
Paradoxically, I think we have both overmedicalization and a lot of people going untreated who need it. We are still pretty bad at identifying issues early and our for-profit healthcare system blocks a lot of people from being treated who need it. Often having mental health challenges itself limits people’s ability to access treatment.
This cuts both ways. As a person with extremely real AuDHD I actively hide that information from most people because so I don’t have to have this exact fucking conversation with every person I meet. “ADHD huh, you know that’s over diagnosed right?”
Thanks doctor, I’ll make sure I write that information down so I can use it later.
Sometimes it’s even worse, and people get actively hostile about it. “Yeah, I might have a PhD as well if I had an Adderall prescription.”
It’s just not helpful. Let the doctors do their thing. If we catch some false positives then so be it. You worry about you, and let other people worry about themselves.
If we catch some false positives then so be it.
I was one of those false positives as a kid. It led to me being not just unnecessarily medicated, but near criminally overmedicated. From age 7, I was put on ritalin because I couldn’t focus in class (due to a combination of the fact that I had already learned most of what they were teaching me and some serious undiagnosed PTSD). At the worst, I was put on:
- 150 mg of Adderall XR
- 75 mg of Zoloft
- 600 mg of Welbutrin
- some equally ridiculous amount of Stratera
- A revolving door of antipsychotics, because my unstable mood had to be caused by bipolar disorder and not, you know, the incredible amount of unnecessary medication I was being force-fed every day
In the end, it turned out that I didn’t have ADD, but actually had PTSD that presented as inattentiveness due to the constant flashbacks I was experiencing. A couple months’ worth of EMDR treatments (which were very much a known technique when I was being medicated) got me to a place where I was able to function enough to hold down a job and take care of myself, but it took me a decade after getting off of those medications for me to be able to recognize that.
My point in all of this is that false positives aren’t harmless, especially when it comes to minors. Yes, that doctor was giving me doses of medication that, today, would be considered criminal, but even being on a quarter of those doses caused significant damage to my long-term ability to function. Not to mention, I was treated as a lab rat the entire time. I was entered into trial runs of various medications against my will, and while some of them (such as clonidine) ended up being valid treatments, a significant part of me feels like the overmedication trend is just another excuse to treat children as science experiments.
I had somewhat similar but my autism and ADHD were overlooked until I was an adult. I was diagnosed with bipolar, schizo affective disorder and a scattering of others. I was put on;
Efexor 400mg - still can’t get off this though I am down to 225mg
Seroquel 1300mg - which is an insane dose. I was 40kg (teenager) when I started this medication, a year later I was 70kg. I am still struggling with my weight and down to 100mg. For context, they say 600-700mg is the standard for a severe schizophrenic adult. I was an underdeveloped teenager (as in underweight, “failure to thrive”, lack of nutrition etc) and I was not experiencing psychosis. I had years where I could barely get from the bedroom to the lounge room because I was that sedated.
Lithium - 1000mg.
And I would be here all night to list every medication. Seroquel was the worst - it has significantly reduced my quality of life and my life expectancy and contributed to developing other health conditions.
So the issue is ANY misdiagnosis. That’s the conversation to have. Mental illness and neurodivergent conditions are all extremely difficult to get right and that’s an important discussion to have. But when we start targeting one or two conditions; autism and ADHD, that’s not a discussion in good faith - it’s a discussion with an agenda.
I have cPTSD - which I have been told is from drumroll the medical system (as well as childhood trauma). Medical trauma is a true cruelty because sadly, you can’t avoid being re-traumatised because you can’t avoid the medical system… especially when you have chronic conditions and disabilities. You literally have to continue engaging with the system that has traumatized you. Repeatedly. Medical trauma is another important discussion.
Let me guess: early 2000s? I had a friend back then who was on a similarly asinine dose of Seroquel, and it also gave her significant weight problems. It’s only been recently that she’s been able to get to a healthy weight and find some peace. I’m also genuinely surprised that that much lithium didn’t flat out kill you.
I absolutely agree on targeting one or two specific conditions. Adderall was shoved down the throats of probably 10% of my middle school class, whether or not they needed it, because ADD went from a newly-discovered mental illness to a polite way for parents to say “my kid won’t shut the fuck up and sit still.” I don’t know if they were being given doses like mine, but my parents went to a very, uh, experimental psychiatrist because they were so out of ideas.
From one misdiagnosed kid to another, my heart weeps for you, and I hope that psychiatrist has lost his license to practice.
Yep my first diagnosis was 2004 and from that point I was on the conveyor belt, the lab rat, the guinea pig - exactly as you say. It’s really quite awful to think about teenagers who labelled themselves as guinea pigs. I’m a writer and it’s quite confronting to go over my teenage poetry and stories and realize how young I was and already describing myself as a science experiment, lab rat etc.
Seroquel is horrible. I am obviously biased, I am glad if it has helped anyone reading. Everyone I knew on it put on at minimum 20kgs. Imo, it’s one that deserves a huge expose and discussion like adderal (or equivalent, we actually don’t have adderal here!) has.
I think, in my experience, young males were labeled as ADHD and/ or just “bad” kids whereas young females were depressed/anxious/bipolar and a little later borderline personality disorder and/or just “bad” kids. (Can I ask if your experience fit this?)
So the misdiagnoses go wide sadly and whilst medication absolutely has its place I do think it’s often too quickly prescribed. I think it should be the last resort, not the first! The shitty thing is that it’s also seen as part of the process so, as far as I know, there’s very little recourse to take around misdiagnosis for these kinds of conditions. Did you get any “justice” yourself?
My heart aches for us all honestly, who were diagnosed so young with any medical condition wrongly that has had long term effects. We deserved better and it’s one of the reasons I advocate for the next generation to receive the support (not just diagnosis or medication) that will give them the best chance at a fulfilling life. I work in disability, sorry this is long, I’m passionate about these discussions! Take care of yourself!
That’s honestly horrifying, and I’m so sorry you were subject to that. I’m glad you’re doing better today though!
Well no, what’s happening to you is also because of the general culture of overmedication. If there were less false positives, people wouldn’t distrust your diagnosis. If anything, I’d argue the current culture hurts the people who have serious issues more than the people who have been given a shoddy diagnosis in order to peddle drugs, but both sides are pretty rough.
If there were less false positives, people wouldn’t distrust your diagnosis
Did you come to this conclusion by talking to diagnosed people? Because even in the decades where it was massively under diagnosed, I don’t think there’s any time period I could point to and say ‘oh yeah, nobody questions autism diagnoses because they’re so rare!’ It just changes what they say: ‘oh, are you sure? That’s so rare, it’s probably something else!’
I have experienced both sides of this over the decades, and as far as I’m concerned I’d rather cast too wide a net than too small of one, because at least that way more people that need support get it. Being told you’re making it up sucks ass no matter which direction it’s coming from.
You hear people say the same thing about fake service dogs, but they only ever wind up harassing anyone with a service dog because they think it’s their responsibility to be a disability cop.
Also so often attempts to crack down on overdiagnosis winds up hurting those of us who definitely have it. I can’t function without stimulants, I’ve tried, there were car crashes and kitchen fires. Every wave of “it’s overdiagnosed” means now I’m stuck calling every pharmacy in town every month and struggling to find doctors willing to even consider treating adhd in my network.
I don’t really see how it affects autism. I guess maybe ABA? I don’t know of any current treatments for it. If anyone’s making real money off of autism, it’s probably fidget toy and earplug manufacturers, and maybe some influencers. If there were serious money to be made then some big companies would likely be pushing back against a lot of the BS lately, but mostly it’s governments + news media (generally right wing) vs independent or small voices.
What’s the source on significant over diagnoses?
Also, how can sacountry workout universal healthcare have such excessive diagnoses when so many aren’t even getting the healthcare at all?
What’s the source on significant over diagnoses?
I don’t believe I said the words “significant over diagnoses”. However, for example for ADHD there was a pretty good article in the New York Times last year (scroll down, the page has a bunch of whitespace at the top): https://web.archive.org/web/20250414202754/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/magazine/adhd-medication-treatment-research.html
Also, how can sacountry workout universal healthcare have such excessive diagnoses when so many aren’t even getting the healthcare at all?
These conditions are often diagnosed during childhood and youth, where most Americans are AFAIK covered by national programs as well as their parents’ insurance.
For adult diagnoses, there’s a selection bias towards people who have self-diagnosed and seek confirmation, which will logically lead to a diagnosis rate among patients that exceeds the true incidence of the condition in the general population (due to the selection bias), as well as a slightly or somewhat increased apparent incidence of the condition in the general population (due to people who self-diagnosed without actually qualifying for a diagnosis, but read enough about the condition to effectively lie their way to a diagnosis).
I also feel that making me self-diagnose with a disorder would be very useful for keeping me small and powerless. If the specific way my mind works doesn’t please late stage capitalism, late stage capitalism and its ‘helpful’ disgnoses can fuck right off while I go take a nap as nature intended.
I also feel that making me self-diagnose with a disorder would be very useful for keeping me small and powerless
That’s a valid way to feel, but for many people on the spectrum it’s the exact opposite. A diagnosis is an answer for why in NT spaces we often feel constantly misunderstood and out of place, and reassurance that we aren’t the only people like ourselves in the world. It’s also an amazing way to connect with others for tips on how to manage symptoms or other issues; if I wasn’t connected to other autistic people I never would have discovered there are tools to reduce my sensory problems, or found the ability to advocate for myself and what I need rather than shutting up and feeling inadequate for needing help.
Yes to all those. It helped me immensely to understand that I am wired different. But lately I have come to believe it’s dangerous to find these common traits in the context of a mental illness diagnosis. Neurodiverse? Hell yeah. Suffering from ‘Can’t work an 8 hour job’ disorder? No thanks. It’s not a disorder, it’s my body and mind protesting against bad conditions. We don’t have to set up society in such a way that a significant percentage of the population cannot keep up with life tasks. I demand change not as charitable accommodation for a problem I have.
My issue here is not the grouping of people under certain traits, but calling these traits a ‘syndrome’ or ‘disorder’ because a person with these traits is less valuable as human resource within the capitalist work logic. I’m not disordered, the system is.
Yeah particularly with ADHD I feel like many diagnoses are really “incompatible with wageslaving for 40 hours a week” rather than a condition that would, in a vacuum, affect the patient’s quality of life.
Of course many ADHD patients do have real issues with their quality of life even outside of societal obligations (read: work, studies) in the form of e.g. not getting chores done, but as a former “problem child” who nearly had this forced on him back in the day, I firmly believe that there’s a lot of pressure from the school system to get kids on meds just so they’ll sit pretty in class even though the real problem lies in the system.
Individuals should not be making their own medical or psychological diagnoses. Correct.
Perfectly fine statement to make in a vacuum, but in the real world there are massive hurdles and downsides to getting diagnosed. I’ve interacted with more than one psych who has basically said that of those who have sought an adult diagnosis with him, they’re rarely wrong. Any image you have in your mind of hordes of neurotypical people making up that they’re autistic is based on prejudice, not reality.
There’s also not a single way to determine if someone is on the spectrum; a psych can run a test wrong or make wrong judgements, and a person doesn’t need a degree to know they have sensory meltdowns or can’t keep up socially to save their life. The idea that doctors are the only ones with insight into health (ESPECIALLY mental health) is something best left in the first half of the 20th century.
So weighted blanket companies are conspiring to get doctors to diagnose autism?
I don’t know about autism, but there is definitely some of that going on with ADHD for which medical treatment is much more common than for autism.
Autism patients do get prescription meds too, not for autism per se but for the various associated comorbidities (depression, anxiety, sleep meds, etc.). That’s all fine and good when there’s a genuine need for them; the problem is that big pharma has a business interest in making the barrier of prescription as low as possible.
Did you know water drinkers also get prescription meds too? Not for drinking water per se but for the various associated comorbidities with living…
I’m still confused how this is some indictment of autism diagnosis when it seems your issue has nothing to do with autism? Yet the campaign is specifically about autism. Not over-diagnosis of ADHD or depression or anxiety. Why does the one “mental disorder” that doesn’t actually have medical interventions seem to have some of the strongest negative reactions?
This exact same phenomenon applies to almost any mental disorder. And I use the term mental disorder loosely here, as I’m one of the people who doesn’t believe mild cases of autism are even worth diagnosing.
The reason it applies to autism too is that any diagnosis makes you a customer of the medical industry; the customer relationship doesn’t end when you receive a diagnosis, that’s when it starts. They may not be able to sell you autism medicine (yet), but they can sell you all sorts of other medicine and therapy.
They may not be able to sell you autism medicine (yet)
Medical marijuana is prescribed to people with autism in my state, so I don’t give it much longer before they can.
So autism diagnosis are bad because they’re trying to hook you on the drug of getting diagnoses and eventually given people medications maybe decades after their diagnosis?
They can already hook you on xanax, sleeping pills, medical marijuana…
Exactly. It’s targeted. All medical conditions have some level of misdiagnosis. Mental illness and developmental disabilities. But people love to just zero in one diagnosis for this discussion which means it’s targeted and there’s an agenda behind it.
Nobody is getting an autism diagnosis to back up their comorbidities of depression and anxiety to get medication. If anything, people having a diagnosis of depression and anxiety is going to be a reason autism gets overlooked. If you want medication, you aren’t going to go through an autism assessment (cost, time, stress, etc) and then be like “oh yeah you know how I’m autistic, don’t you think that means I am depressed too? Pills please!” If that’s your thing you’d just go for the depression.
Autism has zero benefit trying to obtain medication and actually is LESS likely to go straight for medication because if you’re autistic then the first thing to do is make sure you’re not overloading yourself and managing your sensory issues and such before even determining IF there’s a reason to try drugs. Autisms first line of defense is environmental factors, self care, learning how to manage your energy and capacity, accommodations. The last resort is medication. Ffs I wish people would have a clue what they’re talking about sometimes.
Lol it’s not healthy to have an anti autism diagnosis campaign to begin with. The issue is that EVERY diagnosis will have people who find out later they were misdiagnosed. So it is targeted to just be discussing one or two diagnoses.
Nobody’s diagnosing/seeking a diagnosis of autism to get meds. There are no meds specifically for autism. That doesn’t make sense
On one hand i clearly agree with you about the overmedicalization issue, on the other hand there also was an undermedicalization going on for centuries, especially in the autism/ADHD/etc fields. It’s a tough balance to get, cuz the rise of diagnoses may not indicate an overmedicalization, but rather a correction of the undermedicalization (though the risk of overmed. is real, clearly).
And on the medical condition being part of an identity, i also get your point, but it’s also important to consider that making your differences part of your identity makes perfect sense, and for a lot of people their differences come from medical conditions. Conflating the two may be slightly unhealthy, but far less than repressing it as non-subject.
There’s a pendulum swinging towards the middle. Under diagnosis, and then ultra trendy diagnosis, huge self-diagnosis, general personality trend to align with. Now it’s going to swing back, likely towards biomarkers, as the DSM VI is trying to focus on. Can we see this on a scan? If so it exists. And then the DSM XII will be like “fuck that.” Mental health has always wobbled between extremes and somehow found the truth in the middle.
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.
At least they think they would, and then it’s !leopardsatemyface@lemmy.world
Everything is political.
Someone: stop “making” everything political!!
Name and shame them
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 thing that got me to finally go for my ADHD diagnosis was yes, I can get by, if I absolutely exhaust myself doing things that most people find trivial.
I can develop skills and workarounds to even things out, and that’s valuable. But it’s going to take me three times the effort and leave me empty.
The difference between thriving and surviving and all that.
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 were almost certainly some 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.
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
I’ll consider this discussion when people start discussing how often people are misdiagnosed and mis-medicated for mental illnesses and other illnesses. But whilst it’s just a narrow attack on one or two diagnoses (autism and ADHD) it’s not a discussion that’s being had in good faith. It’s one with an agenda.
It’s the kind of thing that haunts you and gives you impostor syndrome for the rest of your life
God, I hate looking at non-xkitted Tumblr.Anyway, what terrible thing happened to the person who wrote the article? Were they systematically discriminated against for being autistic when that’s something that should only happen to Those Other People or something?
They’re just monumentally xenophobic and entitled.
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.
If you have a highly desired skill in developed countries, like medecine, engineering, highly skilled technician etc. it’s a good way to get a long term visa supported by the hiring organization. Usually those countries will advertise the professions they want next to professional visa procedures. Otherwise you can try to marry someone from there.
I’m not, and I have no international potential wives.
I have been saying, on lemmy, hey anybody wanna do a sham marriage, since Trump got elected again… no takers so far.
Maybe you can give it a try in real life.
Hard to do when you’re crippled and can’t walk too far or operate a vehicle.
(Its the US, healthcare and public transit don’t exist / are scams)
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.
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”
Wow.
Per the article (thanks for posting it all!): autism is a social construct.
Do they just throw random things to the wall to see what sticks?
I mean, I think autism could be partially a social construct, in the sense that many people who have been diagnosed with autism (though nowhere close to all) would have very few symptoms if society were geared towards them. My autism is mostly problematic because of how other people react to it or because of getting overwhelmed by things that would be greatly reduced in a world where (at least a subsection of) autism was neurotypical.
I am not trying to minimize the experience of people whose autism is a significant disability that wouldn’t be noticeably affected by societal change, to be clear.
Yeah, it’s a social construct in the sense that it’s just natural differences among humans, specifically differences that don’t as often square with societal/social norms as the average person. If society were comprised of all autistic people, you wouldn’t have the label “autism”, you’d just have “people that are the way people are.”
That said, unlike the article implies, autism is, of course, not just something everyone is choosing, making up, or using to justify not doing work.
I will note the article doesn’t technically say “everyone with autism is faking it and it’s not real”, it just implies that because a lot of people self-diagnose with it now, that must mean that the real numbers are way lower than they actually are, and that people who have autism, but don’t experience major social or productivity related issues from it, aren’t actually autistic and are just “introverted” or some other general term that could theoretically apply.
It’s absolutely a social construct in the same way Mexico is
Per the article (thanks for posting it all!):
I actually didn’t post all of it! The full article was probably about 4-6 times as long as just the snippets I showed, if not more. I cut out a lot of either repetitive points, or stories that just didn’t really make a point and were more there just to illustrate this specific person’s life in general for emotional attachment.
Oh yikes, she sounds just awful
BIG yikes. I hope they find themselves a deep, dark hole to crawl into and never come back out of.
It’s so ironic, they spend quite some time insinuating these problems are just hurdles to get over with by getting gud, then they talk proudly about how they no longer label themselves autists and that’s liberating, as if accepting yourself was a hurdle that CAN’T be jumped over so I’ll just lie myself.
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).
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.)
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.
As another on the “high-functioning” category (though not very high I guess since I’ve failed in life already), I find this always so heart-breaking. I understand exactly where it’s coming from, but it is still so sad to me. We are conditioned to see ourselves so flawed, so unworthy, there’s no understanding to be given. You look at the others and there’s the glass wall you can’t cross, and they tell you to come over as if it isn’t there. We just can’t fit in the narrow roles society has to offer without diminishing ourselves by masking, and that’s just suffering alone in a different way anyway.
I can look at myself and think I wouldn’t change a thing, since I’m selfish enough to see the problem to be how others treat and perceive me, and very scared of becoming someone else as changing myself on such deep levels would mean. But I also fully agree; it does not get better. Society will not change and people don’t even want to, and you cannot change either, because you are you. The mismatch is always there.
I do hope you end up finding people that vibe with you, even if it’s totally hopeless now. I’m deeeeep in depression so I have only kind words to offer anymore
You look at the others and there’s the glass wall you can’t cross, and they tell you to come over as if it isn’t there. We just can’t fit in the narrow roles society has to offer without diminishing ourselves by masking, and that’s just suffering alone in a different way anyway.
I don’t blame other people. I know that there’s this idea that if people just treated autistic people like allistic people, that everything would be fine. But that completely ignores that way that allistic people make and maintain relationships. You don’t really have direct control over who you like, who you don’t like; insisting that allistic people can just be besties with autistic people is a pipe dream. There’s no ‘fault’ in any of this. It just sucks, that’s all.
Anyways.
There’s no cure, so it’s just, y’know, keep muddling along. I’ve got a nice house, I’m married again to someone that’s very probably also on the spectrum–not that we always understand each other, but we’ve managed to make it work for almost a decade now–I’ve got a job, I’ve got an ungodly number of cats. I keep busy enough that I don’t think about it much any more.
insisting that allistic people can just be besties with autistic people is a pipe dream
Oh yeah definitely, things like these depend on the personalities, and at least in my experience us autistic folks tend to just clash with most allistic people. Not with everyone, but it’s a lot harder to find any circles you can fit into… Anyway things could still be better than they are now, if autistic traits weren’t seen as such weaknesses, which increases how badly we are perceived socially. The modern times are a terrible match! For example in one book from 1800s written by a relatively low-class person from my country there was a description of a person that pretty clearly was on the spectrum, but they weren’t described harshly at all. Just told to be an excellent worker, even if a bit strange for wanting to just spend all summers working in the forest alone.
Of course things have been pretty terrible for “low-functioning” people through recent history (we do have evidence at least some ancient tribes took care of their disabled so who can say if we go back enough), but I’ll argue that this development where autistic traits are becoming just a liability is very recent. Hell, when I was in university I could do fairly well because I could just read books and then write essays on them and pass courses, but some years after they changed that and now those require group-work and I would fail all of them.
Even though it’s true the “bridge” between autistic and allistic cannot be erased, it does not have to be so damn long
It’s all bollocks. I’m autistic. I was misdiagnosed as bipolar for 15 years including psychosis and sedated heavily for 15 years. THAT has had a major ongoing impact on my life. But there’s no “wave” of people who come out about being misdiagnosed as bipolar…or borderline personality disorder - both of which are common misdiagnoses for late diagnosed autistic people.
There’s a comfort in knowing who you are and being able to look after yourself and play to your strengths.
Anyone, with any diagnosis or not, can find a “reason” or “excuse” to not try or to be a shit person. That’s not exclusive to literally any demographic or diagnosis. Lazy people exist, bad people exist, etc. autistic, non autistic, man, woman, young, old, mental illness, whatever isn’t the thing that makes a person lazy, good, bad, etc.
Wait, Asperger’s is considered a bad term? I did not know that as someone originally diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome myself (but I did understand that it became incorporated as part of the spectrum).
Doing a bit more research, looks like it’s because of its origins in WWII Nazi Germany (and therefore being linked to eugenics, white supremacy, etc., the idea that these people are better than those people). Dang, I definitely did not know that. I will try not to use it then.
The last part is actually a thing that can happen after diagnosis. But pretending to not be autistic isn’t the fix.
Are they saying this is all part of an anti-trans campaign?
Everything that isn’t a perfect little Christian is a sickness or a lie.
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.
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?
you’d think so…
Seems very “conversation therapy” based. Including reversing diagnoses of mental health disorders.
No. Basically the folks who have been pushing the anti-trans shit (about 50 or so people) have now started to move onto autists. Probably because your average autist is just as unobservant to their insipid power structures as your average trans, probably also due to the overlap between both groups.
Probably part of the larger end goal of wiping out basically all social progress made over the last 100 years or so, it’s just that they are going after what they see as the weakest links. Because these people are a bunch of sub-human fascists, and I mean human in that in a Niezsche sense not a Nazi sense.
