I almost wonder if nerfing autism to the point where it's a fun thing to talk about having on tiktok is a way to demonize effective interventions so insurance companies won't have to pay for them.
It's a mix of romanticization and a change in acceptance and understanding of the two, and they do often go hand in hand as we've seen.
But things like the tiktoks mentioning "My Ausistic brain" or "My ADHD brain" are a bit over the top and are making it feel like it's being treated as a 'cool thing' to have.
For me personally I knew I had some sort of autism or ADHD decades ago. It was only when I started having massive issues focusing on work a couple of years back, combined with stimming and an increase in sensory issues that I decided it was time to investigate and sure enough, diagnosed with both. Out of the ~20 developers at my workplace a good 2/3 of them are either diagnosed with one or the other, or exhibit strong signals that would indicate they've likely got at very least ADHD.
There are two competing pressures in psychopathology that are essentially incompatible with each other. On the one hand, healthcare administration and especially the nightmare that is the privatized and insurance-driven US healthcare system puts pressure on justifying needs. Since insurance really tries its absolute best to never help you if it can get away with it, people with extreme divergences are incentivized to insist that only the most extreme manifestation of something is real, everyone else is faking it, and that makes them bad. If something starts to be "not a disorder" in the public perception, insurance companies will use this to try to weasel out of providing necessary support.
Basically every point on a given spectrum exists in some living person though. I'm close to someone who probably couldn't get diagnosed with autism as he can speak fluently and mostly take care of himself, as well as socialize among some circles of people, but certain kinds of social pressure just completely break his brain, and on top of that he has pretty extreme and disabling reactions to certain kinds of overstimulation, including reverting to hitting his head on walls, a behavior he had to pretty meticulously train himself not to do. I would definitely describe him as autistic. I think he's a less extreme case than people who are nonverbal. People like him might not need or want or benefit from medical intervention or navigating the other insane bureaucratic nightmare of disability benefits, but also might not be able to function in society. Specifically, I think he'd have been screwed if not for finding circles where people are aware of these traits, structure their social norms to not function as a minefield for people who are like that, and treat him with compassion. This comes from recognition that autistic people exist and may not be completely categorically obvious, and people like him have to push back against gatekeeping "real" disorder because doing that means people bicker about that and accuse you of stealing valor and then conclude it's too much effort to try to understand the nuances and who's allowed to call themselves what, and in this situation, most people will just throw up their hands on understanding and do what comes naturally to them: Exclude and ridicule people they find weird
I think we could solve both of these problems if we provided more paths to success for people without strong social skills, didn't exert so many conformity pressures on people in every context, didn't put amoral paperclip maximizing bean counters in charge of crucial services like healthcare, and didn't have the neoliberal dogma that most people who say they need help are faking it and thus we need to torture people with hoops to jump through if they want any hope of getting it
Mental disorders are real. They're also made up. We choose what differences are salient and how to cluster them. We set a threshold of difference that's adequately disabling because the rules say we need one. We try to see what we have in common with people different from us, and try to describe them and empathize with them. When it's apparent someone is "sort of weird in the vague direction of spaciness" it makes sense to both assume this might be what we call ADHD but milder, and even if you don't think that's literally neurologically true or whatever, we often describe things in directions or by analogy.
I think it's impossible to get this right. I still want to make private insurance illegal. I still think we should do less harm to people for not learning to politic well. I still think that the internet made everyone so obsessed with words that they have holy wars about the true meaning of several of them. Rather than get drawn into them, I think we should solve the problems that make them feel like important battles, because words are at the end of the day mostly just attempts to communicate. Besides, we're many of us programmers here. We all know most names are fungible
I fully sympathize with people who worry about this delegitimizing their condition, but I am at the same time endlessly grateful that it allowed my wife some peace and closure in better understanding herself.
Its a disservice to both worlds and I am not sure why was it done.
People with asperger syndrome need guidance to navigate the world, while traditionally autistic people need to be taken care of, why lump both together with a single term
One of the reasons is that autism was recognized to belong to a spectrum. It is not a boolean (you have aspergers or you have not, you have autism or not). It is, to keep with the metaphor, a bunch of stats expressed in floats. To what degree are you unable to filter external stimuli? How can you handle social situations? What about social cues? And so on.
The binary classification came with lots of issues.
Another issue was that Hans Asperger was funded by the Nazi regime, and protected intelligent children, while allowing other children to be "euthanized". So there was pressure to remove the actual name too.
If you still need a binary classification, I believe "high functioning" and "low functioning" are still in use.
But I believe that if you make criminal umbrella term for anyone who jaywalks to hitler and everything in-between then its quite useless term.
Because using it doesn't tell you much and you have to make multiple qualifiers.
You can have a spectrum of autism with rough labels that give you an idea of state of the person.
Like in the example, umbrella term criminal has all sub category as theft, murderer, teenager :)
The "my ADHD brain" stuff isn't my thing, though I am pretty sure I have an ADHD thing that's so mild it doesn't quite qualify for the second D, but I have a heavily ADHD spouse, and she likes them. I think it makes her feel less crazy/dumb for doing the admittedly sometimes amusingly boneheaded things she does, like bashing her arms and legs into things or making tea and forgetting it a moment later. But also she has grappled with how that content flattens ADHD into, her words, "quirky ditz syndrome" and much rarely goes into the darker aspects she struggles with, like being completely unable to accomplish a basic task for hours on end and getting increasingly frustrated with herself, or her "zombie hours" when she gets absolutely stuck in her phone (I eventually helped her setup parental controls on iOS to boot her off after awhile, but even that being couched in things called "parental controls" is humiliating for her).
Didn't investigate and get treatment until it imploded my career...
The people that think it's trendy are young, they often live at home with parents so I think it's a case of their ADHD / austism not yet having serious repercussion's.
So they’re ’normal’ in that environment.
I've spent a lot of time trying to avoid things that challenge my attention span, mediating and journally, and trying really hard to use organizational tools/apps. With some pretty decent success.
I really struggle with knowing when disorder is just code for anti-human (or anti-your personality) work.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/23/outcr...
(after the outcry, the decision was reversed)
But yes, it is a serious condition and feeling awkward is not in the same basket.
The only reason to appropriate the term "autism" and associate with that condition is to medicalize one's psychology and obtain funding and services that previously were reserved to "low functioning" autistics (before that term was even necessary).
(edited to clarify)
At 7 years old, she has mental capacity of 2 year old.
With the right help, she can be somehow functioning, but surely won't get into STEM. Being "weird nerd" is pretty orthogonal to being actually autistic.
Even assuming that someone is a high-functioning autistic person - now what? As far as I know, there is no course of treatment that can cure it.
Is it just about wanting a label for one of many reasons (to find a tribe, evade responsibility, get accommodations of one form or another, etc)
Don't know anything about the topic and am kind of curious.
Look at every thread about the subject on these boards: it's filled with people claiming to be "on the spectrum" (aren't we all?).
>nerfing autism...is a way to demonize effective interventions so insurance companies won't have to pay for them
What a bizarre conspiracy. Are treatments even expensive?
It’s much easier to pretend it’s all a scam and not do anything, or penalize/force people to ‘act normal’. At least for insurance companies, teachers, employers, and often parents.
Which is why a lot of folks with ‘actual’ ADHD/Autism have a lot of PTSD from their childhoods. (And no, not a joke.) Severe, triggering, legit PTSD. Objective, causes the same physiological symptoms as those in war zones type PTSD. Except for it being around ‘weird’ things like school, childcare, interactions with their parents, teachers, peers, instead of when their buddy got blown up by an IED.
To make things even more complicated, persistent and repeated traumatic events that a person is powerless to prevent (usually in childhood, but not required) tends to cause Complex PTSD - which has a lot of overlap with ADHD and Autistic symptoms. Like 80-90% depending on which set of definitions one uses.
A really good way (in my experience) to get Complex PTSD is to be around someone like a parent/caregiver/partner with Antisocial Personality Disorder/NPD/BPD and suffer repeated adverse events because of it that they can’t escape. Something that if it’s a Mother doing it, Society will actively prevent someone from escaping.
Fun times, eh?
As to how to stop or get out of this? Who knows. A big underlying problem (and why society defers to the Mother in most cases here) is that there is no chance there will ever be enough resources to actually figure out the underlying truth for most of these situations.
That is because the real problem cases fundamentally work via manipulation and hiding abuses, so good luck. It would require an objective, unbiased expert (if such a thing is even possible) to follow the kid around 24/7 to see what is actually occurring. For months, or even years. And frankly, in my experience a large portion of scientists, engineers, medical doctors, nurses, police, special forces, and firefighters have backgrounds like this. So maybe this kind of thing is actually essential for society to function.
And regardless, solving this may be like solving the obesity crisis by getting everyone to run on treadmills and get fit or the like. That just ain’t happening.