An honest question: is there a Positive or even neutral one-line summary of ASD?
> Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by [...] restricted interests and repetitive behaviors.
as
> ASD is characterized by an ability to focus intently on an area of special interest, developing an unusually detailed level of knowledge of that topic.
There's always a tension with efforts to depathologise things, because some people do need support and the way they get support at the moment is via diagnosis.
However, this is not true. It doesn't apply to all people with ASD. I volunteered with adults with ASD about ten years ago. One person in the group really had a special interest fixation (a person), but he didn't know more than the average person would know after reading a single biography. He was barely able to read or remember complex facts, so I don't think he had the ability to develop an unusually detailed level of knowledge of that topic or any other. The rest didn't have any memorable interests, but I guess it's also possible that it wasn't cultivated in them.
I'm good friends with an autistic man, he's got a special interest for a certain branch of mathematics and swing dance. He's also great with regards to social interaction, he's seemed to keep close connections with every person he comes across when he's traveled.
There's a saying that "if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism", symptoms present differently in everyone and they're highly responsive to environment. As a trend I'd say special interests are probably a decent contender for a hallmark, probably along with language difficulty and eye contact avoidance.
"Disorder" is a medical term for "badness", especially weird to apply to a condition that is notable for its extreme mental... orderliness.
> "Disorder" is a medical term for "badness", especially weird to apply to a condition that is notable for its extreme mental... orderliness.
I don't see anything weird about that; are you suggesting that there is no extreme of inflexible attachment to order which would be ever be bad?
(You can be extremely orderly and not have autism, for example, if you had Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder which is different from the more familiar OCD.)
While I respect the message of neurodiversity, it has often come at the expense of individuals with profound autism where one would be hard-pressed to not apply labels like disability, impairment, and such. Profound autism represents a substantial proportion of the autistic spectrum, but they are the least able to represent and advocate for themselves.
I suspect >90% of so called ASD cases have little real clinical basis these days and the entire disorder looks very fishy.
Death redefined as a situation where people continue to have the ability to occupy space and don't require any food or oxygen.
I wouldn't mind a few more of the latter.
There's nothing wrong with preferring that people have the ability to communicate with others (vs them not having that ability).
The moral issue is externally-enforced selection (AKA eugenics), which seems to persistently rear its ugly head as soon as you start talking about disability.
My friend (edit: redacted) chose not to have kids, because every ancestor he could trace on his paternal line had died of cancer around age 40, and he didn't think it was fair to inflict that on somebody else. I think that was a wise and moral choice - but it would not be wise or moral to take the choice away from him.
Then you merely have to marry someone from that same family.
Or just marry a single mother who already has children.
And calling any single person "diverse" is icky.
Many are diagnosed with “autism”, seemingly not for any lack of ability, but præferences the diagnostician does not necessarily agree with.
I also object to “neuro-” morpheme. The diagnosis of these conditions are psychiatric, not neurological, and in many cases where such a diagnosis was made, there is nothing neurologically unusual that could be found, but in some cases there is.
Autism is simply with the current understanding not a neurological, but a psychiatric disorder. — the understanding may grow such that it might become one one day, but that is not the current level of understanding, and such understanding would most likely lead to the realization that all which is currently grouped under “autism”, has many different underlying neurological causes.
Oh, I'm pretty new to this myself, but my understanding was that autism was considered a neurological disorder, not a psychiatric one. [1]
"Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) refers to a group of complex neurodevelopment disorders..."
1. https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/Patient-Caregiver-Educat...
All psychiatric disorders ARE neurological...i.e. is rooted in the brain and associated systems. Moreover, there are plenty of neurological differences between ASD and TD groups, both at the cellular and morphological levels. However, a lot of the morphological differences are too small, and heterogeneity too large, to be useful as a means of diagnosis.
It's entirely possible that there is nothing neurologically objectively different about an autistic person from a non-autistic person, and that it's simply a cultural quirk that led to it; this has been the case with many historical diagnoses.
In fact, I would argue that this is not simply possible, but likely, given that usually, if such a neurological discriminant exist, it is typically quickly found. That they have searched for so long without being able to find it, is indicative of a nonexistence.
Nevertheless, the biggest claim is trying to claim that some behavior/symptomology/quirk does not involve the brain.
Tim Burton – Movie Director / Lewis Carroll – Author of “Alice in Wonderland” / Charles Darwin – Naturalist, Geologist, and Biologist / Emily Dickinson – Poet / Albert Einstein – Scientist & Mathematician / Bobby Fischer – Chess Grandmaster / Bill Gates – Co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation / Temple Grandin – Animal Scientist / Thomas Jefferson – Early American Politician / Steve Jobs – Former CEO of Apple / Stanley Kubrick – Film Director / Barbara McClintock – Scientist and Cytogeneticist / Michelangelo – Sculptor, Painter, Architect, Poet / Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Classical Composer / Sir Isaac Newton – Mathematician, Astronomer, & Physicist / Nikola Tesla – Inventor / Andy Warhol – Artist
https://www.appliedbehavioranalysisprograms.com/historys-30-...
For perspective: Arguing "I know I guy who needs to squint to see things that are far away but he's an amazing pianist" doesn't add to a discussion about early detection of vision impairment and vision loss.
They typically can’t deliberately choose the subject of the focus, but it’s usually the case that any bit of deep knowledge is useful for something.
I cannot agree with your perspective comparison. Vision many help someone learn piano more quickly at first, but is immaterial to their maximum ability as a pianist. A better comparison is early detection of the development of additional fingers or exceptionally large hands (example: Rachmaninoff), both of which directly and permanently affect a person's ability to play difficult piano pieces. This too would be a concerning eugenics issue.