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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

Autism has become a catch-all for "people who are weird". "Neurotypical" is the vaguely condescending opposite. Notice the sneer when she refers to "neurotypical 'experts'". The basic idea is that people who are weird are a subjugated minority, oppressed by people with boring, normal brains.

I don't doubt that Hannah Gadsby is weird but I think life is hard for everyone, including normal people. I think the struggles she enumerates are common: most of us have crises of identity or meaning, many of us feel intense insecurity, cut off and isolated from others. This isn't to minimize her suffering, it's to say that suffering is normal.

I have a strong objection to people who freely talk about negative experiences. Some of the people I respect the most have had extremely negatives experiences but mention them only with great reluctance. There's something about that that seems right. Columns like this debase the currency: by exalting empathy and understanding as the highest values, they devalue them.

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I have over the years developed an ever increasing disillusionment with the quality of medical providers. Not all of them, mind you, but it seems just as rare to encounter a smart, extremely competent doctor as it is a random person in the general population when one would expect the selective process to result in a much higher proportion. The sneer is well deserved. The attachment of “neurotypical” is inappropriate because it is unnecessary.

> Some of the people I respect the most have had extremely negatives experiences but mention them only with great reluctance. There's something about that that seems right.

This reminds me of the recurring story of the apparently happy upbeat person committing suicide to the surprise of almost everyone around them. Hiding your demons to survive and overcompensating chasing respect and accomplishments is one way to cope, this sometimes results in a quality life, other times it is just masked suffering. Promoting this ethic can be extremely toxic trapping people, especially if from childhood, into being afraid of letting anybody know about their problems.

Weirdly, this is the second time today I was reminded of the poem Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson - and it's only 5 AM.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

I think there's a difference between having a support network to share your emotions with and demanding that the world change. I can't really imagine the author being any healthier having published this article.

I don't think it's a sneering to point out that if most people who talk about something lack the direct experience of having it, they may not represent it well. Personal experience gives folk's different perspectives. Autism certainly seems to.

And whether the struggles she enumerates are common or not, if suffering is normal and near universal as you suggest, I think it's good to ask, does it have to be so? Are there things we can do to make the world better?

I think not talking about something is unlikely to change anything.

> But as the myths are so firmly embedded into popular (mis)understanding, I don’t have the luxury to skip over them, so it is just a sad reality that I have to waste even more of my time to bring many of you up to speed.

As the quote shows, the article is full of sneering, it’s just a sad fact that I have to waste my time pointing it out to you.

Apologies for that but I think directing her words towards you exposes the sneer without any doubt.

To be clear, this is a book extract, not something she wrote for the guardian, but for someone who picked up her book to read.

She says many of you. Why are you including yourself in the many, if you already knew what she has to say?

Why are you so upset by a comedian writing about her experiences that you have to engage with it at all?

I just don't see a sneer. I just took a bit and reread the while thing. What I read is frustration, not superiority.

I don't think she's looking down on folks who haven't had her struggles. I think she wants people to understand them, perhaps so they can be more understanding to autistic folks in their lives.

But I don't think I'll convince you to see it my way, so I'll drop this.

> But I don't think I'll convince you to see it my way, so I'll drop this.

You managed to have your say, which was just as snide as hers, so now I'll have mine.

> To be clear, this is a book extract, not something she wrote for the guardian, but for someone who picked up her book to read.

If this has a relevance, I fail to see it.

> She says many of you. Why are you including yourself in the many, if you already knew what she has to say?

That makes no sense.

a) I did not include myself in the many.

b) I also made no indication that I had. You can always quote me if you wish but as I only wrote two sentences, one of which was a parody of her words, I think that's going to be difficult for you.

c) I didn't know what she has to say, I made reference to the sneering, the delivery, not the content.

> Why are you so upset

I'm not upset, at least, not by her words.

> by a comedian

I'm yet to see her tell a funny joke but each to their own.

> writing about her experiences that you have to engage with it at all?

I was engaging with you. Are you telling me how to spend my time, on a forum, and implying that I shouldn't have my say, while having your say, on a forum?

What are you on about?

> I just don't see a sneer.

It’s just a sad fact that I have to waste my time pointing it out to you, repeatedly. <- Is that not a sneer? I can tell you that it is.

> I just took a bit and reread the while thing. What I read is frustration, not superiority.

I'd feel better if you'd taken the time to read my comment properly and not infer things from it that were only the product of your imagination.

> I don't think she's looking down on folks who haven't had her struggles. I think she wants people to understand them, perhaps so they can be more understanding to autistic folks in their lives.

Like her "jokes", her attempts to provoke understanding look like the complete opposite of what I'd expect. I mean, it's just so draining for her to have to spend time explaining herself, in her own words, in her own book. How does she do it? Such a hero.

> But I don't think I'll convince you to see it my way, so I'll drop this.

Please do.

I don't think this comment section is supposed to be a competition. Neither do I think the article was a sneer towards others, but a way to ask for empathy for a certain situation. It wasn't about you, and you don't need to make it about you.

I didn't make it about me at any point - is there an underline function I can use to make that clear for those who like to read into things that were never written?

Or perhaps you can quote where I made it about me, here's the link to my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30885603

And this is the comment in its entirety, just pick it out for me:

> > But as the myths are so firmly embedded into popular (mis)understanding, I don’t have the luxury to skip over them, so it is just a sad reality that I have to waste even more of my time to bring many of you up to speed.

> As the quote shows, the article is full of sneering, it’s just a sad fact that I have to waste my time pointing it out to you.

> Apologies for that but I think directing her words towards you exposes the sneer without any doubt.

Good luck.

> I don't doubt that Hannah Gadsby is weird but I think life is hard for everyone, including normal people. I think the struggles she enumerates are common: most of us have crises of identity or meaning, many of us feel intense insecurity, cut off and isolated from others. This isn't to minimize her suffering, it's to say that suffering is normal.

"Everyone feels those things you describe" was how coworkers and supervisors dismissed a partner's attempts to seek accommodation for their auditory processing disorder.

This person had test results showing they struggled significantly more than others in noisy environments to focus or understand spoken language, and showed them to said coworkers and supervisors, who still insisted that "everyone finds that stuff distracting." Yes, but here are the scientifically validated, objective test results showing it is significantly worse for them was her response. They didn't care. They decided that "everyone goes through this sort of thing, this person is just fragile."

Your attitude is also strikingly similar to how people dismiss talk of racism and sexism. "I'm a guy and people are sexist to me" and so on.

> I have a strong objection to people who freely talk about negative experiences.

Says the person who went out of their way to post a comment complaining about people seeking accommodation for their disabilities (and I might add, has decided that they're mostly all a bunch of fakers.)

> Some of the people I respect the most have had extremely negatives experiences but mention them only with great reluctance.

Maybe they only mention them with great reluctance is because you're not a safe person to mention them around.

> Maybe they only mention them with great reluctance is because you're not a safe person to mention them around.

Based on OP's other comments, I wouldn't find this hard to believe considering their complete dismissal and misunderstanding (or perhaps intentional misinterpretation) of people's comments that antagonize open questions and considerations.

I think autism has become the IBS of neurodiversity, and will be retired someday just as the diagnosis of “hysteria” was retired as a catch all for women’s issues a century ago.

If we get a better understanding of what autism actually is, I'd expect we'd also establish more specific and accurate terms for it. I don't see any reason why it would just go away as a concept, though. It seems like it's pretty well established at this point that there is a collection of characteristics that some people have that fit the current understanding of what is meant by "autism". I'm not an expert in the area, though, so if you think that's not true it'd be interesting to know why not.

I expect it will be understood to be several separate things, which express themselves in vaguely similar ways, but are quite different both in origin and treatment.

(Adding to this) Similar to how depression, anxiety, PTSD, and a few other manifest similarly, but are labeled, diagnosed and treated as separate issues.

> I don't see any reason why it would just go away as a concept, though. It seems like it's pretty well established at this point that there is a collection of characteristics that some people have that fit the current understanding of what is meant by "autism".

The caveat being that this category exists within the current framework. The same could be said about "female hysteria", and pretty much all psychological conditions that have been left behind as symptoms of the zeitgeist.

I'm sceptical the concept of "autism" is tenable in the long term either, it's such a catch-all "spectrum" with diverse underlying causes which present in behaviour which is similar yet broadly defined enough that two people can be diagnosed with autism with entirely different symptomatic presentations with zero overlap.

At the same time, regardless of what you think the social conceptual juggernaut that is "Autism" is not going away overnight or even this decade, nor are the rest of DSM-V disorders. They serves a useful function, such as telling bosses to force their employees to attempt to work in a noisy workplace with flickering lights and off-gasses to fuck off. At this point the concept of autism has become tied up with peoples social identities, with the law, and with a whole lot of money on a massive scale and one doesn't simply unwind that all by going "This whole thing is dumb". One needs to start from the fundamentals, which is why was the social need for the concept of "Autism Spectrum Disorder" created in the first place and why was the concept promoted so readily by so many different interests?

> I think autism has become the IBS of neurodiversity, and will be retired someday

Absolutely.

But until then, do you have a better alternative label or (armchair) diagnosis to use?

Autism has a few biological sequelae so I don’t think this is gonna be the case. For example their brains grow faster than normal for the first few years of life but slower thereafter. And you can see differences in their brains under a microscope. Or at least that’s what I read in a book recently, I am not an expert.

Would be interested in knowing why this was downvoted —- is this wrong?

Where did you read about autism? What was the title of the book?

This one: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/An-Epidemic-of-Absenc...

An Epidemic of Absence, by Moises Velasquez Manoff.

> I have a strong objection to people who freely talk about negative experiences. Some of the people I respect the most have had extremely negatives experiences but mention them only with great reluctance. There's something about that that seems right. Columns like this debase the currency: by exalting empathy and understanding as the highest values, they devalue them.

I'm not sure I understand your objection. The struggles people go through and their ways of overcoming them help shape who they are, and sharing the journeys of these struggles can help people undergoing similar experiences. Especially when it comes to something as isolating and widespread as understanding self-identity. While I'd agree that yes, most people have similar struggles with identity/insecurity, her struggles with undiagnosed autism are relatively unique, and there is value in sharing her story and learning from it.

Apologies if I've misunderstood your comment.

There is a personality type that derives fuel from relating their tragedies to others. To some people that can be a trait that is cloying and indicates other issues that tend to accompany this personality profile.

What is this "personality profile" you're talking about, and what are these "other issues"?

Didn't mean to make you feel called out there

I dont feel called out, just trying to understand your position?

I find it bizarre how uncritically the social construct of doubling the ranks of the mentally ill/disordered in the course of decades has been introduced. There is no way in the last few decades the amount of mentally disordered people has expanded so greatly, it must be the case we're simply calling more people disordered. The growth of mental disorders is starting to plateau now but things are still growing.

I find it all to be part of a modern fetishization of victimhood as as something that ought to give you entitlements without responsibilities, and consequently has greatly expanded the ranks of victims in society. I find it straight up bizarre in some sense that a student in an elite school will get academic accommodations and access to amphetamines on the pretence they just can't be as successful as other students when it has to be the case many of these students would end up at community college or state school without the drugs and be fine. It's kind of like to me an athlete playing for a crappy school team getting diagnosed with "strength deficit disorder" getting on steroids and breaking records and this is justified with all sorts of pseudoscience about how steroids actually have the opposite effect on muscletypicals (proving steroids are a drug for only those with legitimate medical need) when the entire sports team is on steroids. We also give them a headstart in all races to ensure that they don't have any performance anxiety.

Re: Experts, The expert she's referring to, more than anybody, is Simon Baron Cohen and his research has been replicated many times yet only applies to MOST but not ALL autistic children. He famously applied the Sally-Anne test to autistic children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test to demonstrate "mind blindness". I would say the biggest issue with the research is that it took place is 1988 and autistics are not remotely the same group of people that they were in 1988, so it wouldn't even surprise me if autistics were no longer mind blind in this way, since autism is not even remotely consistent in its definition across time. I sympathize with any criticism of "Experts on autism" because they have shown nothing but incompetence as a group.

I think this chart expresses my opinion better than I could. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2015/09/...

Using that as a reference point, maybe we're at "1910" with regards to our awareness of neurodivergence, or maybe we're at "1950", but certainly there are many people who will be better off once we hit "1960".

Your argument only holds water if you presuppose that everyone who would have met the diagnostic criteria of 20-50 years ago was also evaluated against those diagnostic criteria. I have far better than typical access to diagnostic services, and it took a referral, several appointments, and thousands of dollars to get a formal diagnosis. If I had that same access 25 years earlier, I probably would have been far better supported through my education.

Do you have a problem with the words "disorder" or "illness"? Because it comes across to me that it rubs you the wrong way that so many people can be considered flawed in some way. I don't think that way of looking at people is untruthful or wrong, it's just a lot more nuanced to look at it than a person being either "sane" or "insane".

I really do wonder this as you so explicitly put "mentally ill" and "disordered" as interchangeable, which they clearly are not. Pretty much everyone has some kind of disorder, which they can address. Only a few have a mental illness, which they can learn to cope with.

Your example also serves to reduce attempts at nuance even further, by trying to make mental illness only understandable through the lens of a physical one. So one has got to wonder: maybe you are lumping way too many things onto one pile?

First, I’ll say the APA defines mental disorders as a subset of mental illness which contradicts your definition [1]. In my experience, people tend to define these terms incredibly inconsistently and I don’t get caught up in the semantics.

Second, I would say I have both social and scientific objections to the concept of mental disorders.

Scientifically, the definition of what is considered a disorder is INCREDIBLY subjective. The DSM-V definition includes language like “impairment in an IMPORTANT area of functioning” and “reflects a dysfunction”. Being gay and transgender are two things that were considered disorders and no longer are. Generally the reasoning as to why these are not mental disorders is that being gay/trans does not make somebody intrinsically unhealthy and some of the things we see like higher suicide rates in those groups are a result of social stigma… which are ALL things I can rather trivially claim about many cases of autism.

Socially, it’s just unnecessarily insulting to call people dis-ordered. In the context of autism, it is well known it can present as a combination of strengths and weaknesses, but the mere existence of weaknesses gets the insulting label of “disorder”. This shows a condescending sense of superiority among the doctors who coined “Autism spectrum disorder”. I don’t feel medical language like disorder or illness is very nuanced at all, I feel it’s reflective of blasé and thoughtless generalization and the language mostly serves to stigmatize which is why people got mad about it being used to describe trans people.

[1] https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/what-is-mental-...

I’m not too surprised if there were tons of people who historically would’ve been just considered crazy or possessed or the village idiot or “retarded” or a thousand other things that we now have more specific categories for. Now how much schizophrenia and anxiety and autism have in common as a umbrella category of “mentally ill” — probably not much.

The discussion around “academic doping” seems spot-on to me.

Regarding the increase in diagnoses of autism-spectrum, I think a few decades ago, those people would have just been called “weirdos” or “creepy” or “special”. They might not have had a diagnostic label, but it was not as if they were unlabeled by those around them.

The amount of people that allegedly have ADHD, the U.S is a big outliner when you compare it with other, similarly developed nations. I believe it will be looked back at some point like opioid crisis.

My prediction is that the whole song and dance where you need to prove you have ADHD will fade away, and people will be able to basically just be able to get ADHD drugs from a doctor on the condition you get your blood pressure checked and such.

I think if the culture can normalize coffee, it certainly can normalize amphetamines and methylphenidate. Like to me it's hilarious in a way how offices will literally provide drugs (coffee, tea) to their employees for people to self-medicate with.

you're fairly judgmental, you think there's a way people should be, and other ways people should not be. this is exactly the type of attitude that exacerbates the alienation autistics already feel.

> you're fairly judgmental, you think there's a way people should be, and other ways people should not be.

Yes. The reason we have brains is so we can make judgements.

I think you have opinions, on the other hand judgements need argumentation. You've simply stated that you object "to people who freely talk about negative experiences" because some other people you like a lot don't do that. That's not a judgement, it's just you expressing your personal preferences. It's not very interesting per se to be completely honest with you.

And the reason we have words is so that you can be told that you're confusing function with design/intent.

There is no intent nor design of a brain, they are a product of the evolutionary process.

Autism is not an emotional cycle, it's not a circumstantial state

it's a disorder determined by genetics.

Either you got the genes, or you don't. Pretty binary.

Just had to call out a nuance here - Disorder is an extremely strong word. People living with ASD are not "weird" or "abnormal" in anyway whatsoever, they are just different. As a society, we accept people's genetically predetermined sexual orientation, regardless of whether it represents the majority. ASD is no different, lets avoid calling it a disorder.

ASD: Autism spectrum disorder

Though I agree, in certain aspects is a super-power. In certain aspects it's a hampering disability. Semantics.

Disorder is a medical term that means an illness that disrupts normal physical or mental functions. This describes autism but not homosexuality (which, I was not aware, has now been declared to be of entirely genetic basis?)

Even if they were to both fit the definition, I’m not sure what the objection to the word is.

To slap down my lived experience: gay and on the spectrum.

And the spectrum part is definitely a disorder. It’s a deep-down and profound inability to connect. We are a fundamentally social species, to a fundamental inability to get socialization at a visceral level is pretty disordered.

If this is true, where can I read about these specific genes, when and how they were discovered?

> It's a disorder determined by genetics.

This is wildly inaccurate.

> Either you got the genes, or you don't. Pretty binary.

Even more wildly inaccurate. It's not remotely binary. There is no autism gene or genes. Environmental factors (nurture) still factor heavily.

https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/autism-genetics-explained/

and a myriad of other articles and research papers one can find by googling "genetics autism."

> This is wildly inaccurate.

"Wildly" might be an overstatement. As your own link says, genetics are a significant (but not the only) factor.

I agree the whole binary thing is BS, but i think what the poster was originally trying to dispute is that its all in people's head as an emotional state, which is also clearly very wrong.

sure, and if there's half a dozen cases of autism in my family, it's because of what we eat (environment)

People would rather get a diagnosis to belong to a community than be an outcast who struggles to fit in and have their gifts recognized.

Disclaimer: am on spectrum, formal diagnosis at 8yo

> have their gifts recognized.

Please explain how _extreme difficulty in socializing_ is a "gift".

Autistic people have gifts and personalities just like everyone else does. People I know often have found a diagnosis liberating because they can often then identify the ways that being autistic has caused them friction with non-autistic society. If nothing else, they can find tools to help them work better in their environments. But they can also work to shape the world around them to be more accessible to autistic people like themselves. And that allows them to better use their gifts and express their personalities.

The parent comment discussed communities of people who have similar struggles. I don't think they meant that the struggle is also the gift (people can make something beautiful out of their pain, but I don't think the pain itself is something to be celebrated). I think they meant that people in a community brought together by a common struggle are better able to see the uniqueness in each other, because within the community the struggle is not what defines them.

People are sometimes less likely to recognize your true gifts if you don’t socialize well. Silicon Valley is probably an exception where people on the spectrum are stereotyped somewhat positively.

They didn't say it was. They said it's a barrier to having ones gifts recognized. Or at least that's my interpretation.

You have a very acerbic approach to the notion that other people have developmental disorders apparently borne out of a persecutory delusion that they have developmental disorders solely to declare the way your brain works boring, and brandish your ignorance about them with unusual glee. If someone tells you they're dyslexic, do you lash out at them because you think they're trying to throw shade on your boring normal ability to read?

Autism is not a catch-all for people who are weird. Psychiatrists diagnose autism using a set of defined criteria where autistic people differ from the average population, where those differences are not explained by other disabilities that often result in similar differences (https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html).

It's true that we don't have a full understanding of autism, or explanations of why individuals vary in the specific symptoms they exhibit, but that doesn't mean the diagnosis is a random label applied to anyone who is weird, it means that psychiatric conditions are often difficult to understand, and that we need more scientific research to understand them better. People with schizophrenia would also be considered "weird" by most of the population, but we don't label them autistic because of that. I, and I think many others, consider Snoop Dogg a bit weird, but I wouldn't attribute that to autism; I would attribute it to his Snoop Doggness.

Gadsby isn't saying that autistic people have a monopoly on suffering, but that autistic suffering comes from a specific set of limitations, and not understanding what those limitations are, or thinking that you could just rid yourself of them through sheer force of will is very frustrating. Paraplegic people also suffer, but it's not because they have limited social cognition or hypersensitivity to sensory input, it's because they lack the use of their legs in a world largely designed for those that can walk. Paraplegia is, however, much more visible and more easily diagnosed that a developmental disorder: we can easily see that paraplegics cannot move their legs, and paraplegics can easily see what people who can walk are able to do that they can't.

Developmental disorders are much harder to see: you cannot peer inside an autistic person's brain function and see how their brain functions, and autistic people cannot see inside the workings of allistic brains to see that they're using mental "limbs" that they cannot exercise. It'd be cool if we could! but science has a ways to go before we can.

The complaint about neurotypical parents and medical professionals isn't that they're oppressing or subjugating autistic people, but that they're describing the condition from the perspective of someone who lives without it and can't easily conceptualize that experience--the diagnostic criteria can identify who has autism, but they can't describe how it's shaped their lives. For lack of a more elegant description, if you're disabled, hearing someone who shares that disability "i know that feel bro" with you helps immensely to alleviate feelings of isolation, much more than a doctor explaining the diagnostic criteria you meet.

Your strong objection to people talking about negative experiences and view that emotional repression is a virtue are yours to hold if you so desire, but I hope you understand that many people don't feel the same, and will consider you a callous, oppressive person if you try to enforce that opinion as the correct one by treating their sharing their problems as a personal attack. This isn't a criticism of your boringness for lack of a developmental disability, it's a criticism of your wanton disregard for others' experiences and unjustified, self-centered offense that they have the gall to talk about them.

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