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Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the frustration, but doesn’t this mean that there is a larger percentage of people trying to get help for mental illness that otherwise would not be? Sure trying to get diagnosed with something because it’s trendy is ridiculous, but it also means these people are talking to a professional and may uncover other mental health concerns

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No, it means there's a deluge of status seekers deceiving themselves into thinking they're autistic and then clogging up the system with their diagnosis requests. As I mentioned in a sister comment, many psychiatrists who have autism knowledge and training have stopped doing diagnoses because of this, thus exacerbating the problem.

I have trouble understanding what status seeking ends would be served by getting a diagnosis.

You get to put it in your social media bio. That's all a lot of them want. They don't want treatment, they don't want to get better, they just wanna be able to tell people they have it. It's a whole thing on Til Tok right now.

Why do you need to waste your time and money when typing “#actuallyautistic” into the box is free?

What status is conferred by having autism?

No clue, but it's a thing.

You keep talking about "status seekers", but you can't define what you think they believe they're after in trying to obtain that status?

If nothing else, makes me wonder if I missed out on a "welcome packet" or something I didn't know I was supposed to get. :P

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