It's very possible that they are simply attention-seeking or enjoy the idea of being special. It reminds me of the relatively new phenomenon of a community on YouTube where kids faking multiple personality disorder upload videos displaying their "systems", and each persona in the system has some time on the camera before being taken over by other competing personae.
Most people are in agreement that these kids are faking it, and it doesn't necessarily follow that they shouldn't be deemed "sane". It's more likely that they don't value the time of medical doctors and are willing to mimic a YouTube celebrity's tics for self-serving reasons, even if it is wasting their parents' money and the time of others.
Perhaps this is the end result of valorizing difference.
What a weird way to try to tie this to modern politics. You do realize that the movie "Sybil" had a similar effect (people copying a mental condition) in 1976, predating any kind of acceptance movement?
To be clear, this is an extremely small cost to pay for difference to be broadly accepted.
Oooh, I think I'm going to steal that.
To be fair, maybe it's just another mechanism for culture transfer. Hours per day on a phone filled with highly evolved addiction algorithms are proving their value, God knows what the future will bring.
If kids never absorbed silly things, we'd never have had bellbottoms.
Those were appropriated from the Navy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-bottoms
What we see is this phenomena where autistic people today have less actual impairments, who might even take offense to the idea that they are impaired, but with more tiktok videos of "stimming" and flapping their hands on YouTube. An emphasis on the preformative over the substantive. There has even been a counter-backlash in this community that too much funding is going towards people with few impairments, and too little funding is going for people so disabled they're completely unable to be independent.
I do wonder why people view this as offensive or obviously fake though.
I am a pretty well-adjusted adult who has not been formally diagnosed with anything, and I still "flap hands" when I am in private/can hide it from others. It's hardly performative.
However if you go onto tiktok, you primarily are going to see the stim that everybody knows that real autistic people™ have. There is even some far-left advocacy within this community about having "loud hands", and even said activists have expressed discomfort with "staged stimming"
https://www.autistichoya.com/2012/01/having-loud-hands.html https://www.autistichoya.com/2018/10/neurodiversity-needs-sh...
It's just a very bizarre thing that when you're on tiktok, people desire to share what makes them look the most autistic. The other genre is incredibly attractive women getting indignant about people believing they are not autistic because they are incredibly attractive women. I get this sort of twilight zone vibe going into autism tiktok where everything seems slightly wrong.
I’m not trying to be contentious or combative, but what makes these people/trends far-left?
(Absolutely agree about how people dismiss «attractive» women as not possibly being autistic tho, it’s both sad and infuriating)
https://www.autistichoya.com/p/blog-page_19.html?m=1
I don't mean to say all people who day people should stim openly are exactly far left. It's pretty mainstream especially in health/education nowadays to not suppress stimming so long as it's not unduly disruptive or harmful (i.e. stimming by screaming, smashing head into wall), as it's thought to be harmful for the suppressor.
I would say that if somebody is stimming as a political statement or identity I'm almost invariably going to assume they're pretty left of center, because they're making an identity out of nonconformism and because of blog posts from radical leftists like the above.
This is what I'm confused by - were the links you posted meant to shed light on that?
"But sometimes I have also seen activists engaged in stimming that was not authentic — stimming deliberately used to get attention or to make a statement. I’m not sure if this staged stimming is good and true: I’m not even sure if it could properly be called “stimming” (if stimming becomes divorced from its joy, its delicious rush, its natural high, is it still stimming?). And when we aren’t stimming for joy, because our bodies want and need it, because it is physically releasing us from neurotypical oppression (the rule of quiet hands), then who or what are we stimming for?"
Essentially making the point that stimming for the approval of others is still surrendering to ableism because you're performing for other people's acceptance when you should just be accepted. It's just that instead of trying to look more normal than you are, you try to look more different than you are.
This is to me what gets at the heart of what bothers me about TikTok. It seems to create pressure on autistic people to confirm to stereotypes of autistic people.
To me, this is a deeper problem with identity politics itself.
When group identities are recognized over individuals, there is pressure is to display group identity, regardless of whether that is autistism, blackness, queerness, etc.
TikTok is a Petri dish that amplifies the phenomenon.
That said, even if hundreds of thousands of people upload videos indicating they are autistic that seems in line with the statistics on the matter.
I could be convinced stimming videos are fake, but a high number of young people with ASD is consistent with the data.
Is that useful though? I disagree with this need people have to categorize themselves. It seems just going on without labels would be better
> It's very possible that they are simply attention-seeking or enjoy the idea of being special.
It depends on what you mean by mentally unwell. If mentally unwell means that they are unhappy, a danger to themselves or others, or having difficulty functioning in the world in an acceptable way - then being attention-seeking to that degree is also clearly being mentally unwell.
If mentally unwell means that there's some physical problem with their brains, then very few people who are mentally well are provably mentally unwell. I would prioritize for help a malingering Tourette's sufferer whose life is falling apart because of that over an "authentic" Tourette's sufferer who has found strategies to cope with the disease in their daily life.
The question shouldn't be to determine if they're really mentally unwell, but to determine whether their illness springs from the same causes that treatments that assume this is a physical problem are effective on, or from different causes (e.g. lack of/need for attention) which might yield to different treatment.
It's perfectly normal to keep up a lie alive to an extreme degree just to avoid having to awkwardly admit you were lying. Think about the rape accusers who take it all the way to court before eventually admitting they made it up, or all of the married people who keep up the pretence of religion to avoid awkwardness with their actually-religious partners.
On a more innocuous level, every one has bullshitted to avoid revealing that they don't know someone's name because it has got to the point that saying "sorry I don't know your name" would be too embarrassing.
But one other danger from this phenomenon is the overuse of already-stretched-thin counselors and therapists. If you've tried to acquire any mental health services over the past year... every counselor and organization seems severely overloaded and under-staffed.
Food for thought. Is there really such a thing as a mentally sane person? Anyway the first thing which came to my mind when I read this was not 'mentally insane' but 'oh, puberty'. I'm not claiming all of this is completely normal, or all of these are pre-adult (heck even adults are still known to copy other's behavior) but I'm also quite careful of leaning towards the claim that all these people need help.
A sane adult, sure. Kids? Hell no. Doing stupid things is a basic right of childhood. Kids always need help from adults in general, but I would not read to much in this single case. Overall from the kids perspective this seems rather harmless as nobody was harmed.