A step forward in understanding Fragile X syndrome, a cause of autism

Of course, this is just my imagination, it may not actually be anything like that. But I will double down on the thrust of my original comment, which is that although autism is not simply a "disease" because the self has developed differently, doesn't necessarily mean that we want it to stay.

I think someone who can't do this from first principles is probably going to struggle if they try living in a very foreign country or amongst a different subculture of their own nation. Most people can't cope outside their comfort zone.

It's not, but people tend to be able to spot the difference between studied and natural behaviour if you know them long enough. Studied behaviour is called 'masking' and has a tremendous mental toll. Over time, someone will eventually see you tired, and therefore unmasked.

As a seven year old I studied Peter Curry (the most popular boy in school) and Michaelangelo (the most well liked ninja turtle) because it seemed everyone else had been given a set of social instructions and I had not, and that by adopting their behaviour I would be less isolated.

It was still a nine year wait until I had a friend.

Heh Heh Heh. Can totally imagine an engineering type person would figure out a way.

Back sized gyroscope, hidden in a backpack maybe? :)

Part of, not the whole

I am who I am, in part, because of my quirks. Saying they are not part of me would be denying who I am.

I don’t understand what’s offensive about people being happy with who they are.

Question: isn’t identity that which makes one distinct from others, like name or government identity number?

Not at all. You're judging by the standards of neurotypicals.

Suppose we discover a genotype that correlates with extremely high social competence, people who are just naturally much better at communicating and working with others. (This isn't much of a stretch; we know there are people like that; we just don't know if it's genetic.) If we document this new, higher level of social functioning, does that mean that neurotypicals are now also defective, diseased?

There are traits that can arguably be considered "suboptimal" that can be part of an ASD diagnosis. But they are neither necessary nor sufficient for someone to be autistic. That's why I said "autism is not [..] suboptimal in itself" (emphasis added).

Also, can we please stop pointing at children when talking about autism? Somehow everybody who does so stops caring about them as soon as they're old enough to speak for themselves. Autism isn't defined by autistic trauma, we just don't care enough about autistic people to acknowledge them for anything other than their trauma responses.

Another way to look at it is that some traits are harmful for the individual but beneficial for the group. Insomnia does a number on your health, but the tribe wants someone to jump at every cracking of a twig in the night, just in case it's something bad.

People who take issue with autism being described as a disease would generally believe that most autistic people live close-to-normal lives and simply aren't recognised as being autistic. This comes back to the question of whether there ought to be a separate label for those who are severely disabled by their cognitive differences vs. those who are more able to function in general society despite similar cognitive differences. But it does seem to be the case that there is a large subgroup of society that thinks qualitatively differently to the general population (but similarly to each other), has to work hard to compensate for that in order to fit in, and often has social and mental health difficulties both due to the effort of maintaining that facade and because of the backlash they get when they fail to consistently do so.

To improve my example, it’s like describing left-handedness as a disease because a small percentage of lefties experience extreme left-handedness where they can’t use their right hand at all.

So I do think the self-diagnosis trend is increasing thanks to social media networks. And in some ways it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

However, current psychology is realizing the previous ways of lumping people with vastly disparate needs into finite categories is bad and dumb and doesn't really help anyone. Turns out, making someone's mental illness easy for nobodies to talk about isn't that useful for treatment, while extreme nuance and personalization IS really good for treatment.

I legitimately want to know, because I don't know what to say here.

Remember aspies, the world believes you are only valuable due to your ability to produce, and specifically, to produce novel things.

Ultimately, for this reason, I'd love to see a "cure" for autism as it is a debilitating disease for many of those who suffer with it

There are also some hilariously dark moments in ABA’s history and even it’s present. The judge rotenberg center, still open, being the most infamous where they strap down kids and shock them with electric vests (aversives in ABA speak, a rare practice) while strapped down. People prominent in ABA’s history like Ile Ovar Lovaas were pioneers in transgender conversion therapy and they used the EXACT same techniques they used on the autistics. He also published an article about slapping children.

They overwhelmingly work with autistics (mostly because of insurance) who were instrumental in conversion therapy in the past. From my experiences reading their communities, forcing autistics to act more normal is still a common goal. They work largely for companies who hire a few BCBAs and they’re structurally under pressure to produce results as measured by parents or children. Even today it’s common for ABAs to be assigned to torture autisitc children by subjecting them too heavily unpleasant experiences over not maintaining eye contract or stimming which are pretty transparently against their interests and only suit the aesthetic preferences of the adults around them.

The former patients in my experience give a mixed reaction to ABA (from “it let me fit in and live a normal life” to “I liked them they weee fun and funny” to “meh” to “fuckers tortured me” to “why did they have such a fucking problem with me flapping my hands?”) but their opinions broadly speaking don’t matter in any real way because they don’t sign the checks. Mind you, people with autism are overrepresented among BCBAs. Since autism diagnosis doubles every few years and is diagnosed in more and more marginal cases amongst people who are more and more lucid and articulate, who much more arguably never needed by therapy at all, the political correctness of what is in practice benevolent brainwashing of autistics is declining sharply. Were ABA only practiced on 80s autistics (autistics with high support needs, low functioning autistics) nobody would care so to be honest BCBAs reputation got screwed over by the broadening conceptualization of what autism means.

Hope that answer wasn’t too short.

There is a vocal minority, of which your source is a part of, who are trying to "normalize" Autism. In order for it to be "natural neuro-divergence" or "a super power" you have to intentionally omit the negative aspects of the medium-functioning, and completely deny the existence of the low-functioning.

Using woke language to try and assuage the insecurities of high functioning autistic people might make people feel like big strong social justice warriors, but I will die on the hill that they are actually doing grave harm to many disabled people. To use the parlance, they are being problematic. And they should be ashamed of themselves for it.

Again, not saying that low-functioning autistic people don't have a problem that they wish would go away, but it's sort of like having wheelchair ramps. Most people who are in wheelchairs wish they weren't in wheelchairs, but they still like having ramps into and out of buildings. It's still problematic to go to those people and say, "okay I get that you're disabled, but you need to learn how to walk up the library stairs, it's not our job to have ramps everywhere."

There are a lot of autistic people who don't think of themselves as neurodivergent, they think of themselves as disabled. It is still often harmful to those people to force them to (on top of their other struggles) also figure out how to constantly conduct themselves so they don't inconvenience anyone else. Being more accommodating can mean allowing them to stim (if the stimming isn't self-destructive), it can mean giving them access to tools that help with sensory issues (headphones, for example), it can mean recognizing if they're panicking and responding to the situation, rather than just ignoring it until they completely break down. Mostly, it means teaching people to understand that person better and to try and set up systems in such a way that the individual can have a better life, rather than forcing the individual to conform -- especially in the case of people on extreme ends of the spectrum who very clearly can't conform.

There is an element of accommodation for people who label themselves as neurodivergent that does deal with acceptance and celebration, and that's valid for them to bring up. I really don't think that neurodivergence/disability needs to be a contest, and it's fine for them to talk about autism in terms of social prejudice. But outside of of the neurodivergent movement, overall accommodation doesn't really have anything to do with whether someone is high functioning or low functioning as much as it has to do with not making their life more difficult than it needs to be. Especially in the case of someone who is on the extreme ends of the spectrum and needs help to take care of themselves, it's extremely important for the people around them to make some effort to learn about what they're going through and to learn to work with them and to treat them like a human being.

I think that's the case for any mental disability (again, whether or not someone describes their own experiences with autism as a disability or as a difference is irrelevant to what I'm talking about). But if you want an extreme example from the "disability" side of things, you can't go to someone with alzheimers and get mad at them for not remembering what they ate yesterday. If you want to interact positively with someone in that position, you have to work with them. You have to be able to understand what's happening.

A lot of social institutions (especially schools) for a long time never put in that work for autistic kids. And a lot of care for autistic people (including people who are best described as disabled) is still focused on making that person more convenient for society, not on caring specifically for that individual. One piece of advice I give when talking about autism care is "find someone who cares more about the autistic kid than they care about the parents." And I think that holds true both for neurodivergent and differently-abled people and for nonverbal kids who are extremely disabled and will require help to function in society for their entire lives. It doesn't matter, caring for that person should still be primarily focused on caring for that person, not the people around them.

By that rationale, Black, Asian, and LGBT Americans should keep to themselves and stop fighting for rights or having a voice.

In both cases we are talking about people with immutable traits or characteristics society as a whole isn't fond of. (If society was fond, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion, nor people fighting for equal treatment in society.) All of these people have been the victims of the genocidal lunatics in the 20th century.

The only difference is society has not progressed to a point where it is socially acceptable to condemn people for hating the neurodivergent.