I'm always a bit uncomfortable with articles that uncritically use the disease model for all of autism.
As a person with Asperger’s, I really wish it remained a distinct condition in terms of its classification.
I legitimately want to know, because I don't know what to say here.
It's more like a 10 dimensional space, at least, with each dimension being a symptom or needs category. For example, I don't think anyone would diagnose me with autism, or even old asbergers, but I have a lot of sensory issues and struggle to parse speech and faces.
If you are aware of someone having some form of autism, and you want to know more about "where on the spectrum" they are, simply talk to them, ask what they struggle with, ask about their needs. If you didn't have to talk to a family member or nurse before talking to them, they probably don't need huge affordances.
Light is a spectrum. The frequencies composing a sound are a spectrum.
A volume control is _not_ a spectrum.
..
:)
Don't forget that she is also a teenager. Growing up is hard, socializing and fitting in can feel incredibly important -- but there's always an alternative cost: less time mucking about with mean girl types, more time to study the sword.
This is a blessing in disguise. The payoff will come, for that reason alone, and so will the true friends down the line. She probably wouldn't choose this now, but later on she absolutely would.
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
If the worse that comes out of the DSM-V’s reconceptualisation of autism is just muddied conversations then I’ll gladly take that over the old system where highly-capable people were being denied opportunities like going to uni.
Also, Asperger was a child-killing Nazi (yes, literally). I’m glad we don’t use his name anymore.
That being said, I don't doubt that the history of differential diagnosis is marked with widespread incompetence. And I obviously agree that being denied opportunity based on either diagnosis is a social crime.
But what you mention is not the worst outcome of the DSM-V reclassification. What they are now moving toward / doing is still classifying HFA people as Type 1 autistic. But for (former) asperger's patients they are tending to do is diagnose a social skills disorder instead.
Essentially removing anyone without a language impairment, at minimum, from the autism funded-services pool. Ignoring the arguable utility of services for HFA or Asperger's clients for one second, beyond the psychological and developmental benefits of simple social interaction.
What this also does is remove a population from the autism category that, to all but the patient and clinical professionals themselves, are often only detectable as different due to factors centered on how (often more capable) intelligence is cognitively distributed and manifests. Ignoring comorbidities.
Aside from affecting the important identity issue for the patient: essentially what they did was to remove any intelligence difference from being able to be a primary clinical marker for autism. Or sometimes the only obvious marker, depending on the individual's masking skill and ability to handle fatigue from it.
Why do they say this?
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.
Get over it. He was literally a nazi. It wasn’t even a great descriptor for a wide range of traits.
I would normally have been diagnosed with it. Now I’m just “Autistic” with ADHD and low support needs.
Clinging to the verbiage is like all the dipshits in my home state listing MLK day as “MLK Day/Genera Lee’s Birthday”. It serves no purpose and just makes people roll their eyes and tune you out.
I have also seen no evidence that Asperger's and Autism are in fact forms of the same condition. Forgetfulness is not dementia, chubbiness is not obesity. Don't leap to conclusions just because you don't like the guy.
You must be from VA, or another southern state...
It absolutely serves a purpose, and it's sending a signal to a very specific (maybe 2 very specific) groups of people.
There are a multitude of spectrums of symptoms, support needs, issues, and attributes that are all lumped together. The idea of taking that huge parameter space and mapping it to only two classes was nonsense. There is an important shift in psychology to move beyond really dumb and old classifications into actual evidence based treatment.
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.
I'm not convinced that self-diagnosis is any less accurate than professional diagnosis for conditions like autism or ADHD.
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.
It ain’t great!
The biggest problem I have with self-diagnosis is the idea that self-diagnosis (along with formal diagnosis) is actually capable of diagnosing a neurodevelopment disorder. It just ain’t so and autism is a social construct that LARPs as a medical one.
"Treating autism as a ‘disease’, rather than a neurotype that exists as a result of natural biological variation, paves the way for a level of discrimination and stigmatisation that would not be acceptable if it were applied to other minority groups. At worst, it raises serious fears of eugenics. But the traditional understanding of autism as a deficit also plays a huge role in day-to-day discrimination against autistic people..."
edit: removed a poorly worded section.
Reminder as always that over-simplifying autism to lean into the most high functioning description completely erases the existence of all of the severely autistic people out there who are barely able to function with their disorder.
Given the context of how I understand autism, and my personal experience with it, as a severe inhibitor in a normal life for the people who suffer from it, I find the whole quote you shared as despicable.
Further evidence that the autism you are talking about dismisses and denies the existence of many autistic individuals who are not as privileged to have such a high functioning variant.
Your empathy for autistic people stops at a certain level of capability, because you refuse to even recognize that they exist within your argument. It makes my stomach churn.
I truly want to understand more how that quote is despicable. As someone directly responsible for an individual with autism, I very much acknowledge that autistic people exist at several different levels of capabilities.
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.
Since we can agree on that I think we should all work together to change the definitions.
I get that it can be demoralizing, but I'd suggest it serves your cause better to be able to point to high-functioning cases as success stories to mitigate the stigma, lest the rest of the spectrum be dismissed as retarded beyond redemption (hence, eugenics).
You're also falling into a semantic illusion that everything currently or formerly classified as autism is actually all on the same spectrum. In reality "the spectrum" is a modern theory and literally no other range for any disorder stretches nearly as far. Which is a red flag. See the fact that many people that would have been formerly diagnosed as Asperger's will now not be diagnosed with autism at all, but instead with a social skills disorder.
The existence of Asperger's, or the inclusion or not of formerly Asperger's patients into the general Autism spectrum category does not threaten the identities of other people with Autism.
Neither professionals nor patients should seek to use other people with impairments as their political pawn or psychological security blanket. It is morally wrong to demand the direction of their classification because you or they believe that it helps you. Get a life.
All I hear is somebody calling me two insults, “disordered” and “privileged” who feels a sense of moral superiority for doing so. I never chose this label for myself, it was imposed upon me, I can’t choose to shed it, and I reject to being martyred for the sake of the severely disabled. I reject being labelled as having a neurological disorder without anybody looking at my Brain, taking my blood, doing any sort of objective testing, because some psychologist arbitrary deemed how I behave “deficits” through observation, an utterly subjective judgement. it’s some sort of moral obligation to believe I’m mentally disordered otherwise I’m hurting the severely disabled!
You know maybe we could help the severely disabled by volunteering or donating to charity instead of this nonsense??
Anyone that tries to ‘rectify’ me can fuck off.
Edit: as a user of HN since it was Startup News, and as someone who is very much aware of the HN guidelines, 'fuck off' was chosen very carefully towards anyone who would erase my existence.
Hopefully HN has a modicum of empathy for other people and can understand others not wanting to be destroyed.
Whether it is correct or not to see it _entirely_ in a disease model (which it's not clear to me, how should the study have been done with a hybrid model?), I have to disagree with the suggestion it shouldn't be seen as an issue.
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.
Neurotypical peopple often lie about things for social convenience, overly value fitting in, have trouble exploring the depths of their interests, and have a poor sense of smell and taste.
Maybe "ASD" umbrella is part of the problem, I don't have a "sensory integration disorder", I have emotions that tend to go from 0 to 65 with little in between and some other issues like poor facial memory (that would be nice to cure) and tendency to daydream.
Maybe that's consistent with Aspergers as originally understood, maybe not. But just for starters, can we stop inventing nonsensical umbrella terms like "ASD" and "AAPI" that serve no purpose except shared victimhood and shaming everyone else for supposed microaggressions? Hawaii is not the same as India, and I don't need a service dog to tell me there is a fire alarm in my building. Maybe then it would be easier for me to work on my unique needs. Like you know how one in a several hundred people finds your responses 100% natural and preferable to superficial norms without necessarily sharing the same personality themselves? Would be great to be able to find them efficiently to maintain a decent social circle rather than stumbling upon one randomly every ten years.
I wonder how many ASD diagnoses are made just because someone never learnt social skills properly due to circumstances or lack of effort/interest.
I personally see three points:
- People often expect that one reacts "intuitively" instead of analyzing the whole situation first
- Humans don't behave in an "easy" way like physical systems. So extracting the "hidden laws" is in my opinion nigh impossible.
- Even if one tries to find possible hypotheses, one has to run a huge amount of "experiments" to extract rules. What does "running experiments" here mean? Behaving in very weird ways all the time just to obtain data on the behavior of the people. And the required data volume is insane, so it means behaving consciously weirdly rather for decades.
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.
ASD is the same kind of problem but with social situations. No matter what they do their social interactions wont feel as natural and smooth as what normal humans do. And interestingly enough many with ASD also have unnatural and clunky walking styles as if they had a problem with balance, it is a known red flag to check for a diagnosis.
Obviously depends on the crowd
He just needs to work on not firing or picking fights with random people when in a bad mood.
And just to clarify, people with autism can have great theoretical understanding of people, doesn't mean that they perform well in direct social interactions.
But this discussions doesn't seem to go anywhere, you hate the guy and want to say he is evil rather than him having a disorder. There isn't much to argue about then.
Money makes A LOT of problems and difficulties and blockers go away.
I agree that no level of any autism-like issues should absolve him of being a massive narcissistic cunt though.
Similarly a person with balance disorder can write a paper explaining how balance works, and others can read that paper agree and fund the persons project for making self balancing robots.
Doesn't mean the ASD person can fluently navigate social situations, but luckily modern technology means he doesn't have to. When writing papers and proposals you can spend a lot of time thinking and preparing general statements, you can't put that sort of effort into more immediate interactions.
the vast majority of human beings can not "fluently" navigate social situations either...
the very small elite percentage of those who can are the 'social butterflies' that become actors, politicians, perfect 1950s social calendar wives, etc all depending on the culture they live in.
They are mesmerizing to watch, and rare like a lovely dancer or magician or elite athlete is rare. This is not normal, it's a special talent at the tail of the bell curve.
most ACTUAL normal social interactions involve simultaneous friction of many kinds under the surface-- as people have opposing motives (money, power, sex, pride etc) and limited face-saving default tools to navigate, dismiss, avoid, or paper over that friction.
(Maybe that's the difference, autistics suck at using or accepting the use of these shoddy tools as 'fake' and give resistance to all the sub-optimal goings on?? idk)
fake small talk and go-to phrases and lame jokes and polite chuckling and fake smiles and managed voice intonation ---these are the bread and butter of getting thru a interaction / dance while trying to still get what you want, balancing long term and short term incentives etc
Both people know it's fake and that's okay
----- it's exhausting to normal people too, at the 'end of a long day' it's not the physical toll
it is not evolutionarily normal to meet so many goddamn strangers every day and try to smooth over endless bits of friction (esp from so many cultures fundamentally at odds in core values and goals, but that gets into politics, so)
'normal' people deal with others sub-optimally and then let off the steam/ bitch and moan / insults and slurs to get out how they really feel in the safe space at home/ their tribe
Places where this is always at max capacity, it bubbles over and you see the failures and stress marks, i.e. strangers screaming at each other in new york traffic, littering and destroying things, unspoken boundaries (turf) being tested, shamelessness in breaking norms and criminality, helplessness/numbness to the disturbing etc
Most of the time, 'normal people' don't know what or why they are feeling / acting out the way they are either, they just relieve their tensions any way that comes up, angry at X person but take it out on Y person instead.
There are infinite ways to be dysfunctional and very few ways to achieve 'good-vibes only' haha
TV shows have skewed the sense of how smooth-talking and self-aware and charming normal real people are...
Most humans have friends, at least as children. They’re certainly not hated so much to be thrown down a flight of stairs and beaten to the point of being hospitalised as young Elon was.
Violence must be met with violence, enough said there... A weak person needs support for that, and that's the issue.
Elon's biggest problem in life seems to have been his garbage narc creep of a father, who I recall even managed to blame that incident on little Elon! saying 'oh well the boy who did that said Elon made remark on a family member's sensitive passing or something, so you have to understand it was a matter of honor see', blah blah....
Heh Heh Heh. Can totally imagine an engineering type person would figure out a way.
Back sized gyroscope, hidden in a backpack maybe? :)
Suppose three armed persons draw a weapon and give you contradicting orders while threatening you. How will deep understanding of those individual orders help you reconcile them and decide how to act?
There is a good video on yt debunking his claims regarding his diagnosis. https://youtu.be/UCS0SuPsDH4
This video has logic like (all from the first 3 minutes):
- "Elon wasn't public with his condition before SNL, nor did his mother reveal this deeply personal information, maybe he has it buy maybe he's a sociopath?".
- Some people in our YouTube comments section have diagnoses and don't believe Elon. Here are their comments!
f.e. I don't think anyone has a problem with saying sickle cell is a disease, even though it has a large upside as well.
There are aspects of the kitchen sink that is Autistic Spectrum Disorder that can reasonably be argued to be an impairment (e.g. sensory overloads, situational mutism, etc) but autism is not in any way objectively suboptimal in itself, other than when it comes to interacting with allistics (but that goes both ways).
For this to be true, autists would have to communicate and/or work with other autists as competently as neurotypicals mesh with each other. Strictly speaking, we should be able to work with other autists more easily than we work with neurotypicals who have a basic familiarity with autism, since we also have that advantage. In my experience we are not. Replacing your left hand with a sword also has measurable advantages but that doesn't make it not an overall impairment. Personally I find this cultural trend where "your deviation is your identity" to be illogical and offensive.
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?
The entire community you are here representing with your comment is intellectually dishonest, at the least, and at the most, actively harming our understanding of autism.
I remind you, like others have in this thread, that there are non-verbal people who share the designation of autistic. There are people in jail, permanent homes, and who do not have power of attorney over themselves who share the designation of autistic. There are children who spend their days wanting to bash their head into the nearest wall, and who cry and cry due to sensory issues, that share the designation of autistic. I COULD GO ON.
By sharing the thoughts you just did you are directly denying that those things exist. The community who promotes those opinions operates as if those things do not exist. It is bad.
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.
Its undeniable that a dominant part of both the human experience and survival depends on social interaction success. In this context, its undeniable that autism is sub-optimal.
It doesn't go both ways, for the vast majority of interactions, because the vast majority of the population is not autistic. And they can easier cooperate with one another against you than you can gain any cooperation. Therefore, the playing field is not equal and your impairment is much more of a disadvantage than their impairment in communicating with you.
"Aspie supremacists" who think that their state is undeniably superior are ironically failing in logic. Insofar as they are actually aspie.
No adult true aspie (with inevitable comorbidities) with a lifetime of experience would want to repeat it. They'd opt out at the first opportunity. Rare exceptions aside, like for individuals with an engineer for a father who tracked them into the Ivy's and beyond.
My theory is that Asperger's individuals are perhaps a human genetic mechanism for slowly integrating genes for certain types of intelligence. With immense deselection pressure on those genes that assures that growing intelligence doesn't spread like wildfire in the population, perhaps to bad outcomes for other portions of what it means to be human (like reproduction speed, perhaps).
So I get the views of the aspies who want to recenter what it means o be normal on themselves. It just isn't the case. That's fine. There are worse lots.
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.
In general, the standard in mental illnesses is that in order for a diagnosis to be made, the condition must interfere with leading a fulfilling life; a narcissist is only diagnosed with NPD if their narcissism prevents them from achieving their goals in life (hold down a job, maintain relationships, etc).
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.
There is no debate, the answer to this is yes.
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.
And yes, my exact problem with it is that it is normative. Just because neurotypicals are in the majority does not make them better. Imagine if it were reversed, for example. In my view, the neurotypical fondness for drama is incredibly harmful. Ditto the way neurotypicals not only believe in all sorts of nonsense (UFOs, angels, gods, devils, etc.) but use that as justification for all sorts of dominance-driven behavior, up to and including genocide.
And in practice the normative nature combined with the disease model leads to "medicalization of deviance". E.g., queer people's deviance was medicalized, seen as illness. ANd since they were sick, treatment was necessary, sometimes violently enforced treatment.