Comment by draw_down | Hacker News Reader

Comment by draw_down | Hacker News Reader

I’m not a woman but I do this too. It really just came from others’ negative reactions to certain behaviors I would do, which taught me that it’s not acceptable to behave in those ways around “normal” people. (Like some of the women in the article I knew I wasn’t normal but didn’t know why.)

Ironically, I have gotten so good at this that I sometimes get annoyed when a person I am talking to acts “weird”.

I feel “lucky” in that I’m not too far off from normal, whatever that is, on the spectrum. But I still find it exhausting and depressing, like they do. I have also had the feeling that certain friendships and relationships are fake because I act differently to who I am when around those people. I don’t feel that anyone at work really knows me. I don’t think it is worth trying to be yourself at work, even disregarding the spectrum stuff.

The bit about the difficulties with diagnosing autism in women is also interesting. There are many similar situations in regard to mental health, for example women are diagnosed as borderline much more often.

When I was in school I noticed I was off and completely not up to other people's magic sauce - whatever they did that I wasn't able to compete with. As for school it always left me a bit dizzy by cramming in all the subjects and leaving out all the cool details at a pace that just blurred everything for me.

I only got to know fun with people in various subcultures, and the more off people around me were, by looks or by spirits, the less I needed to worry about fitting in and learned to simply enjoy myself.

Until I realized what the actual problem was. Most people tend to make life hard for themselves by needing to fit in and pretending and aspiring. It's okay. Let go and drop your misery and do whatever the hell you happen to think is best.

If you want to build a UFO and take over the world, please go do it. Autism is a terrible name for whatever slight - or not so slight - imbalance of mental traits, and seeing the shit that regular people mutter you're probably better than that anyway - because you wouldn't believe what an autist's mental hygiene is like.

I’m not trying to argue against your premise about fitting in.

I would like to point out that autism is an actual specified condition. Being socially different or feeling inept about social situations does not put you on the autistic spectrum.

In some ways it’s incredibly insulting to imply that any discomfort in social settings is a sign of autism. Not least because is implies that autistic people can’t be capable, extroverted and able in social settings, which they absolutely can be.

A result of articles like this one which describes experiences of people with autism is that many of the readers without autism will attribute some of those adaptation behaviors as an indicator for autism.

It would be nice if the article provided more detail on the actual condition, the tests for it, and how it differs from the common 'i am a human' anxiety. Virtually everyone, men included, has experienced the same things that the article describes as being experienced by women with autism.

I think there is a risk with these sorts of articles that many people will make a lot of unwarranted assumptions about other peoples' abilities and behaviors.

"I do what I want and screw 'em if they don't like it" is great and all, but there are still large parts of life that don't work that way, like workplaces and dating. Having to choose between being oneself and having a career/dating life is still painful and depressing. Casting isolation as a bold act of rebellion and independence in a world full of conformists is just a different shade of camouflage.

Regarding subgroups, I found that they were just as unaccepting, they just have different standards for who/what is in/out.

I think your comment about autism is mistaking the cart for the horse. This happens because people are on the spectrum, not people are autistic because sometimes they don't fit in.

Lastly, I'd just like to mention that I didn't mean to only talk about school or work or situations like that, where there is always going to be some amount of difficulty fitting in. I could also tell that people very close to me, like my parents, thought something was off about me. They later copped to that when I was an adult, as well as their relief that I turned out to live a pretty normal life.

> It really just came from others’ negative reactions to certain behaviors I would do

Isn't this how everyone learns social skills? Maybe for you (and me) this just occurs a little later in life than most.

Maybe. It just seemed to me as a child that I would rather often do things that other kids wouldn't think to do in the first place, and then get mildly made fun of for it.

I can relate. I think kids are actually much better at grasping when something is "off" with other kids than adults are. They know who the weird ones are, and they'll definitely let you know if it's you... though if you're like me you may be oblivious to a lot of it. The worst was always when they would pretend to be nice so they could get you to make an even bigger fool of yourself when you finally felt safe enough to be yourself :(

To some extend. Neurotypical people do this without effort or thinking, it happens "automaticaly". You might even be unaware of the process, you just sorta kinda feel weird or bad after doing whatever caused negative reaction previously. Autistic have to think about situation and memorize it the same way as normal people memorize writers and their books for school.

I don't believe you. Either that or I've never in my life encountered a "neurotypical" child. Figuring out which behaviors are appropriate/inapproriate and changing accordingly, through self awareness and peer feedback, is most of what growing up is. Some people don't outwardly display as much effort, but it requires effort from everyone.

All the kids I know pick huge amount of behaviours the way I described. Not all of it, not complicated stuff, but definitely a lot. They also tend to like what other kids like - without them trying to imitate interest as strategy. It just happen naturally.

Especially things like smiling or crying to get something (depending on circumstances) etc - they do it before they have logic and before they have ability to plan. Two years old has tendency to do stuff adults around find cute and react to, but it is not conscious plan. Autistic kid won't or will to lesser extend.

It's not just effort vs no effort. Here's my personal anecdote with autism.

Every conversation I have I run every input someone says through a decision tree to determine what the appropriate response is. I do this in my conscious mind. I didn't realize this wasn't normal until much later in life.

Unless you're displaying a caricature of "happy" or "sad" emotional expressions I have no idea what your emotional state is. I'm completely blind to it. I have to consciously analyze the shape of your mouth, where your eyebrows are, compare it to the context, etc. to try to determine your emotional state.

Not only am I blind to other peoples' nonverbal communication I don't express my own naturally. Every emotion I express through non-verbal means is largely "acting" on my part. I have to consciously make my expressions match my emotional state.

My anecdote may not match exactly what another person's with autism, but that's the kind of difference that's meant by doing things "automatically."

Yes, and I will add the more cumulative result is more one of being judged, unincluded, and isolated, not one of acknowledgement that the communication was impaired. When I have a conversation or a job interview and someone asks me how it went, I never can say. I can speak to practical and obvious fumbles or difficult questions to which I am proud of having known the answer but this seems to not be what is means when I am asked how it went. I literally have no idea how it went and saying I did would be just as well done with a roll of dice. For most of my life, I thought I knew, but I was just working from what I had. Without very explicit novelty displays of preference or emotion, I would just assume things are fine. This is a very bad road to travel.

> it requires effort from everyone.

Yeah, but it doesn't require the same amount of effort from everyone, and neurotypical children will eventually get it. It takes an order of magnitude more effort for children with ASD and in the most extreme cases, they simply can't.

It's like red/green colorblindness - some afflicted eventually manage to tell the difference between the same shade of grey, but for normal sighted people, the number inside the circle of colored dots is blatant and obvious, and requires no studying of the picture.

There are children with ASD that are highly-functioning and if they manage to get good grades, it's possible for them to escape notice. However, there are those for whom social situations simply don't make sense, and no amount of effort, self awareness, or peer feedback can enlighten them.

A more analogous vision example would be the ability of people (especially children) when not wearing glasses to force focus which requires effort and temporarily decreases their ability to keep eyes in alignment (if they have amblyopia or strabismus.)

> I don't believe you.

It's kinda shitty to imply that someone is lying or delusional because their lived experience doesn't match with yours. There's plenty of literature on how autistic people learn socialization and how it differs from neurotypicals.

I've never been diagnosed with autism, and if I am on the spectrum it is only barely, but I'm pretty sure all people experience the "can't fall asleep because thinking about embarrassing social-interaction" phenomenon. What might differentiate neurotypical from autistic people in this regard is the sheer amount of information that they are able to glean from a social interaction. That is, a neurotypical person will remember body language, facial cues, and coded language (e.g. "oh.. that's interesting...") as being significant parts of that social interaction to a greater extent than people on the spectrum.

Not necessarily. People with autism tend to score very low in recognizing social expressions for example, lending reason as to why they cannot learn social skills the same as others. Neurotypical people tend to be able to pick this up naturally. From what I remember, an autistic brain has a Lower than normal response when seeing faces.

Why are women more likely to be diagnosed borderline?

Not least because of gender assumptions (see, e.g., implicit bias) on the part of the clinicians.

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/10/the_diagnosis_of_bor...

The same reason why schizophrenia, ADHD and a plethora of others are more likely to be diagnosed in men? We diagnose on symptoms not on biological origins.

I found a googleable meta study about it that concluded that BPD traits were associated with women, but also that women who don’t express gender normal behavior are perceived as BPD by men. Although men scored higher in individual BPD behaviors, they were not perceived as BPD by themselves or others unless they behaved outside of gender normal behavior (acted more “feminine”). There’s a genetic component by a twin study, but it’s unknown it’s causative effect to gender. There’s studies that women score higher in neuroticism(anxiety, depression, etc) as a personality trait. It is also known child trauma has a causative effect, and may be related to how women are sexually assaulted as children at higher rates than men. Basically, a complex mix of social expectations, social bias, how women are treated in society, and biological aspects of women’s personalities may contribute to an overall significantly higher rate of BPD diagnosis being a female diagnosis. Interestingly, a disorder on the same axis (antisocial personality disorder) has an exact opposite gender disparity (3:1 men over women) and that is also investigated in other studies.

http://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/skodol2003.pdf [2003]

How people perceive others is irrelevant to the question. Women are more often clinically diagnosed with BPD, not simply perceived by others to express it. The rest of your post is mostly unsupported speculation. Apart from the parallel you've drawn with APD, which has a lot of similarities to BPD, except with inverse gender distribution.

Nothing I wrote wasn’t a conclusion of a paper or genetic study, as according to the meta paper that attempted to understand all facets of why women make the majority of the BPD diagnosis. I understand that because humans are not formally mathematically provable, some conjectures may be made from surveys, genetic relations, and studying behavior to attempt to reverse engineer the program that produced this societal result.

You've started with a presupposition that all of the clinical evidence is simply a misguided outcome based upon social constructs. How we choose to define BPD is entirely constructed, but the evidence is not, and the evidence very clearly shows that this disorder overwhelmingly affects more women than men. Just as APD and various other disorders overwhelming affect more men than women. If you're going to assert that this is due to anything other than genetics, then you're going to have to come up with something better than a weak meta-data study that barely draws any conclusions. Because to do that, you'll be going against decades of clinical data.

I'm not the authors. I haven't started with anything. Someone asked a question, I googled and returned the first paper I could find which cited several surveys and clinical studies to prove its point, gave a quick TL;DR because the abstract didn't go into detail.

Why are you going so hard on what is essentially the messenger? I don't have beef with you. I don't even have a horse in this race. I just googled a question for someone else. Maybe consider emailing the authors, since you have some serious disagreements with the paper.

I'm not going hard on you at all, only on what you've said. The evidence about BPD is that it affects women far more often than men, the clinical data overwhelmingly supports this, and so does the genetic research on the topic. Instead of considering this evidence, you've tried to find some seperate evidence for gender bias, you found the one paper that examines this, and that paper doesn't even really draw any conclusions.

Any time a question is asked about 'why are men and women different in regards to x', you'll have people lining up (like yourself and other commenters in this thread) to say it's gender bias. When the answer is often just because men and women have differences, which is exactly what the evidence points to in this case.

I literally just returned the first thing I could find that was a study with citations and stuff. Nothing in my post said I was attributing anything. You’re reading into my actions assuming intent that simply isn’t there.

>Basically, a complex mix of social expectations, social bias, how women are treated in society, and biological aspects of women’s personalities may contribute to an overall significantly higher rate of BPD diagnosis being a female diagnosis.

By your own admission, with 5 seconds of googling, and 0 knowledge on the topic, you submitted a comment attributing this to gender bias. If you don’t want your comments to be scrutinized by others, then perhaps don’t post them on public forums...

Discussion is the point of the comment section, and the limit of the discussion you’re willing to participate in is “I posted a random study from Google along with some of my own commentary, that I’m not prepared to defend in any manner whatsoever”.

That comment wasn't even my own commentary. It's from the study's abstract. Nothing about my post was my own commentary beyond "hey I took this off google". I'm not against scrutiny insofar as I'm against having assumptions of intent thrown on me for little more than googling something and returning the first published paper I could find.

Can you provide any links to the "genetic research" please?

Women make up the majority of Cluster B personality diagnosis.

Cluster B is the over all group which has Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, and Anti Social (aka Psychopaths) personality disorders.

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/10/the_diagnosis_of_bor...

That article is interesting, in that it seems that the professionals have issues separating out the conditions.

At least 2 of the cases in linked article were more likely Narcissists, that borderlines.

I've dealt with borderlines, Narcissists and Histrionics, in a professional setting over the years, and they are pretty easy for me to spot now.

That's interesting to read in conjunction with the article. I wonder if it's a similar scenario in a lot of gender-skewed mental disorders. Perhaps many of them only appear to be more prevalent in one gender because symptoms are observed from mostly one gender, when in reality different genders express the same disorder differently (and maybe as a product of social pressures).

Not that I think there's no scientific process in evaluation, but if the only subjects with major expression are primarily one gender, it seems like it would create a kind of confirmation bias?

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