Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk

I'm organizing a self help group for autistic/AuDHD/ADHD people and over the years I've realized that a lot of things that bother our members are based on interpretations of social contracts.

"Normal" people (whatever that means) tend to forget things quite quickly, and for us it's really hard when states change and contracts change. Meaning that if e.g. in a discussion 3 months ago we casually agreed upon "I do task X and you do task Y" then this will be the assumed state for autistic people until the end of time, because that's what we agreed upon.

When other people at work communicate their feelings, have a bad day and don't want to do those things, or are just lazy about it... Then this is a breach of a social contract. And dealing with those breaches of social contracts without getting very defensive about it is a huge problem for a lot of autistic people I've spoken with. We tend to spiral quickly into a defensive argument that won't help either involved parties and it tends to escalate into a "mudfight" instead of a rational debate.

I just wish that a lot of therapy would help prepare you for these situations of misunderstood (or misagreed upon) situations more. You can compensate for them to a small degree, but they put a lot of stress and burden on us because it's quite a big deal if the state of assumptions changes without having a discussional part in it.

Additionally, talking in conversations about the assumed outcome first before you get into detail helps a lot. Do you need emotional support? Do you want to feel that we are together in this? Do you need a practical solution? Do you need a change in what we agreed upon?

This way we can prepare much easier for what's about to come in the following discussion, and we realize it's not about critique and rather about finding a mutual compromise that both parties are happy with.

Also don't use sayings like "you always do X" or "you never do X" in those conversations when it is not always, because autistic people tend to interpret these as accusations very quickly because to us they sound excessive and are huge trigger points, because they are essentially lies.

If you say instead something like "I feel like you do never X" or even better "I feel like I am alone doing X, can you help me more with it in the future?" we can realize that it's more about the perception and how to improve our contributions, because we can keep the discussion about the actual topic underneath which is "How to balance each party's contributions to the task at hand".

That's more like how the world is said to be working, but not how it actually works. There is a huge difference between how people express their tolerance and expectations and what they actually okay with, with no extra internal feelings. It really would be incredibly rude to say much more, and so it's not said, but it's all there in inside, coded in unspoken feelings and expectations.

I'd like to draw a parallel with disability. I don't think anyone in their right mind would express that they actively work against people with disabilities, and I'm sure most people would express support if asked directly. But this doesn't translate to actually accessible infrastructure and culture. That takes a lot of special work - and regulation actually, without which the work wouldn't have happened.

All this to say that intentions and expressions are a great first step, but there is much more to acceptance than that.

Hacker news (or social media in general) echo chamber

> you'd just start any conversation with "hey, I'm autistic, so if I appear a bit weird..."

Then people will criticize you for making autism your whole identity.

Which is a silly point to make but people can be pricks. Not saying you gave bad advice, just saying, it a damned if you do, damned if you don't with some people. I think it is generally good to be open about it, if not just to filter out intolerant people faster.

I read a paper once about female celebs/models and eyesight. They tend to have poorer-than-average vision. The theory was than poor eyesight increased thier percieved eye contact with stangers. (They could not see the other person and so would not look away.) This made them more noticable by others, which is not a bad thing when trying to get jobs in entertainment. An other theory was that they needed to try harder to focus when talking to people at a distance, say at a casting call, resulting in more eye contact.

Also, at extreem low body fat you start to loose the pad of fat behind the eyes, resulting in that sunken look of many supermodels. This of course can reshape the back of the eye and impact vision.

My eyesight’s rubbish. I learn very little from looking at people’s eyes. I almost never remember eye colours. It just doesn’t register because I “don’t see it”.

I have to make a special effort to make eye contact, and when I do I feel like my “trying to see better” habits and postures make others uncomfortable. I’ve no idea what “normal eye contact” feels like.

I might also have some autism traits (I’m a coder, after all), so that feeds into it.. but even if I wasn’t coder/austistic, I’d be struggling in this domain.

I offer this as anecdata for your “everyone is different” suggestion.

Your point is unclear to me. Are we like chimps, or are we not?

jumping to a mad level of conclusions here to justify your discomfort with other people

The social protocol that low support needs autistic people use is similar to the social protocol that some higher (meaning those who can communicate) support needs autistic people use. The fundamental difference in my opinion (which is primarily formed from fairly extensive personal experience and thinking about it) is that autistic communication is fundamentally collaborative, while allistic communication is fundamentally adversarial. This is not to say that anyone is always collaborative or adversarial, or that the communication mode necessarily matches intentions.

For example, an allistic (meaning not autistic, but perhaps neurodivergent in some other way) person is more likely to keep their goal unstated and only known through subtle semi-involuntary signs that others evolved to pick up on due to the advantages that come from understanding such semi-involuntarily-shared information. Autistic people who can speak generally just say, with words alone, what they want to communicate, and are less inclined to make such subtle inferences and less likely to perform them in the way that allistic people do. For some people this manifests in an autism accent where the speech is completely well formed in a grammatical sense (not necessarily the same grammar that's in formal writing) but has no tonal information.

This difference is also reflected in conflict resolution: most autistic people will each say what their goals are and then try to find a way to satisfy everyone's goals. Allistic people I have observed are more likely to not want to put that effort in, and will this via the aforementioned subtle communication decide on some particular resolution or will play social status games to get their way.

There is also some scientific research in this area that provides support for this understanding of different modes of communication. For example this¹ provides evidence that there is a different mode of communication, although it doesn't explore what makes up those differences. It filtered for typical IQ scores, but not for support needs.

1: Crompton, C. J., Ropar, D., Evans-Jones, M., Adams, C., Pearson, A., Scott, F., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2019). Autistic people’s social camouflaging in daily life. Autism, 23(3), 606–613.

The labeling of every little thing as a pathology is part of a broader trend. Nobody can be down for a few weeks, it must be a "depressive episode". If you feel nervous before a big test or presentation, you have "anxiety". It's an overcorrection from the under-diagnosing of the past, and a phenomenon reflective of the intensely political environment around funding for research and services. You could say it may have to do with increasing billables, you could say it's because sub-clinical cases might still benefit from a few sessions of therapy that are covered by insurance only with an insurance code, but whatever.

In the case of autism, "social awkwardness" used to fall under aspergers, a diagnosis that was removed over the protestations of many aspergers advocacy organizations in the DSM-V. See, the DSM-V was massively influenced by a lobbying effort or "intelligence" operation. They were hugely focused on things like eradicating any mention of "sub-clinical" autism or recovery criteria. The abolition of aspergers was a concerted effort to essentially force people with aspergers to fight the stigma suffered by "somebody who might have to wear adult diapers and maybe a head-restraining device." As the committee representatives claimed, "it was our belief that the best way to address stigma was to confront it across the spectrum. Why did we deserve protection that other autistic people did not receive?"

"This was... reflective of our commitment to 'cross-spectrum solidarity'." To be clear, this was an effort towards imposed "solidarity", where people with one disorder that often presented mildly enough they could make an attempt at passing for normal were forced to identify as and engage in activism on behalf of said adult-diaper-wearers if they wanted recognition, destigmatization, or access to services. It was an effort I can see only as malign to re-stigmatize or explicitly block "normalization" for those who could enjoy it.

Really, the consolidation of autism into one "spectrum" diagnosis involving a massively diverse constellation of systems was a political mistake not a scientific choice. It's one based fundamentally on presentation, not on etiology, despite dealing with a massively polygenic disease that appears to have many different potential causes. It only served to slow down efforts towards management and a cure (no surprise, given many "advocate" types continue to assert it is simply wrong that the world has norms in a tone similar to those deaf people who oppose cochlear implants.)

You can see this intellectual thread carried forward to recent times. A piece from 2023 reflects very similar sentiments, essentially saying that the consolidation of diagnoses is good because it "[protects] the most vulnerable": https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/weaponized-heterogen...

Those who have a shot at a "normal" life passing as "normal" are, naturally, not considered. You can see this pretty easily in the basic framing of the issue as "access to services", services which Asperger's patients required and used much less. This was a transparent and explicit effort to lower chances of "normalcy" in an attempt to benefit those who didn't have a shot at it; the "solidarity" framing was, in that sense, completely honest. I see it as nothing less than ascientific and contemptible.

(Much of this information is drawn from a paper the two men who liased with the DSM-V committee wrote some years later and which may be found here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337112539_Lobbying_...)

"Why should the school district fund accommodations for your child? It's not a disability, it's a different-ability lol!!!"

Actually medical professional will diagnose people who are high functioning, because that is what the diagnosis is. Autism criteria were never "can't talk, stims constantly, maybe bangs head against the wall, serious danger to themselves".

And conversely, autistic as a savant was a thing 25 years ago. Long before the social media.

"Neurodivergent" doesn't exist, it's just an umbrella term for any neurodevelopmental disorder (such as ADHD, autism, Tourette's, intellectual disability)

Would that not have been called Asperger’s in the past?

Euro teens seem a lot more comfortable in their own skin than American teens.

I know a few people who had the time of their lives in high school. Maybe 15% is high, I was just proxying the popular kids. I'm sure some of them were miserable. But some non-popular kids probably had a decent time.

It's probably both because you're 15ish in a herd of many other 15ish year olds. Maybe the fun factor is amplified, but so is the suck factor. Even a few traumas can leave a lifetime of scarring.

15 is definitely a rough age.

Maybe it's also being 15 in today's modern society that sucks.

Not every problem faced by your children is the fault of society.

> Serious question: what's your skin color and where do you live?

The obsession with skin color and race seems to be a very US-American thing.

You must live in a great green region I imagine

From my experience even if you have a loud bike and yell “on your left” 3 times many on a shared use trail will be surprised as you pass them.

Then there are the people who for whatever reason need giant over the ear headphones and also need to walk right in the middle of a bidirectional trail.

If you actually have autism, it's already one of the most significant parts of your identity, at least when it comes to the contrast with neurotypical people. Having the label just makes it easier to figure that out.

Doubt that's going to happen. "Normal" is whatever the educators believe: just like RP is the One True English, whatever WEIRD neurotypical men do is the One True Behaviour. We've been making this mistake for hundreds of years.

Tip-toeing around mechanically makes sense when one wants to be quiet.

I find walking on concrete is more comfortable when using the whole foot, so just barely tip-toeing rather than my usual heel striking. In general, it's not a good idea to walk on hard surfaces barefoot or in sandals excessively, no matter what the FiveFingers crowd might believe. I discovered plantar fasciitis the hard way [pun not intended].

I had a realisation recently that we’re pretty comfortable with regional dialect borders being an entrenched and normal thing that reach back in history a thousand years or more and that something as specific as how we move our mouths and tongues is strongly correlated geographically.

But we don’t often pay attention to other types of physical and behavioural culture being as geographically entrenched as they sometimes seem to be.

Accents hold some special place in being so recognisable but I think there’s no obvious reason we wouldn’t have many other layers of physical culture like this.

The signal is a bit harder to pick up but I’m sure it’s there.

I’m not trying to make any particular point for or against damaging stereotypes here.

IIRC, toe-walking is actually healthier and puts less strain on the foot. It's a very good way to run long distance, once the muscles are acclimated. I suspect some of us still do that naturally as children for that reason and therefore only adjust due to societal pressure.

Could be. There are also a bunch of physical reasons this might happen.

You could have just learned to walk weird, as well.

I don't really know the situation in the US. Here in Germany it is for sure rigorous.

I had three appointments and lots of questionnaires to fill out at home that were designed to exclude all kind of conditions. And with a diagnosis I was still far away from getting a prescription, that is whole other hurdle.

As for the US, well the CDC says in the section for conditions that must be met:

> The symptoms are not better explained by another mental disorder (such as a mood disorder, anxiety disorder, dissociative disorder, or a personality disorder). The symptoms do not happen only during the course of schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder.

https://www.cdc.gov/adhd/diagnosis/index.html

So it is pretty clear on that.

“Prescription”?

That sounds like the same moral panic trans people face. Oh, the children are turned trans by social media and all that shite.

No mentally healthy person is going to pretend to be autistic. There is still a huge stigma against it despite some parts of social media being progressive. I don't think a neurotypical person could even easily "fake" it. If you fit in with neurodivergent people, you probably are yourself.

People have always been gay, trans, neurodivergent, whatever. They just had to hide. Once they are tolerated by society, reactionaries will spread moral panic saying "Everyone is X these days". There were always who they were.

> because our diagnostic threshold for tallness has lowered?

The threshold for being diagnosed as autistic has increased in recent years. As Asperger is not a separate diagnosis anymore but is part of ASD, some people that might have gotten an Asperger diagnosis would not get an ASD diagnosis today.

Again, a diagnosis requires that you have care needs. If you don't, you will not be diagnosed. There is no slippery slope of lowering standards.

There have always been neurodivergent people. Not long ago, here in Germany autistic children were systematically murdered during the Nazi regime.

The difference is that neurodivergent people don't have to hide anymore as much. We finally have at least a bit of a voice.

> If you've got autism and the biggest thing that stands out is the way you walk... I don't think dragging a kid to a doctor to be told they're not normal is really all that beneficial.

There are very strict criteria on how people are to be diagnosed. More importantly you are NOT getting diagnosed if you are just happy and don't need any help.

You can NOT be diagnosed with autism without any support needs.

Same as you can not be diagnosed ADHD if it causes you not trouble at all.

> being labeled as having some sort of neurodivergence and being told they can fix it is surely more damaging than just letting them be a bit strange.

You want to know what going through life without an diagnosis for your neurodivergence looks like?

People hate you. You don't know why but they just do. You are wrong. Everyone else seems to know when to say the right thing at the right time but you don't. You are some weird alien that does not belong. You try to memorize things to say, copy how other people act, it works but the mask often slips. You must be hyper-vigilant in every social situation to not let the real you slip out. It becomes so automatic that you don't even remember who you are anymore. It is exhausting, so exhausting and alienating. You crash and burn from time to time.

Things that are easy for other people. You can't even fold your laundry. You are lazy. If you would just apply yourself, you could do so much. Achieve so much. But you don't. You lack discipline. Everything you try you just give up after a while. You read a bunch of self-help books, you learn you to organize your time, all the tricks but they never work for you. You are a failure.

Not being diagnosed is absolute hell.

Just being able to know why you struggle, to learn coping strategies that work with your brain, to talk with people with the same struggles, to finally find people that understand you, is absolutely life changing.

And no, it is not about fixing people. You can not fix ADHD, people are born with it and that is how they are. It is about them getting the help they need and embracing that people are different.

> I was a quiet kid

Quiet kids can have ADHD

> my parents got calls from a teacher

Teachers don't diagnose children. They don't decide whether you need to get medicated or not.

Furthermore, yes people where probably very ignorant about ADHD in your childhood, we understand it much better now.

> drugged up

That not how ADHD meds work. They can give you the super power to fold your laundry in a single business day, they don't get you high. Some people hate how they feel but for many they work great. Medication is just one option, you can also learn better coping skills through therapy or coaching.

> It feels rational to me

As someone who was diagnosed late, it seems more like ignorance to me.

We can do science and extrapolate data:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8870038/

> As of 2018, 2.94% of 10- to 14-year-olds had a diagnosis (1 in 34), vs. 0.02% aged 70+ (1 in 6000).

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8870038/

> The ratio of males to females with ASD is generally quoted as 4:1,[..]The true male-to-female ratio appears to be 3:4. Eighty percent of females remain undiagnosed at age 18, which has serious consequences for the mental health of young women.

huh huh 4chan scienss

You’re going to love today’s perk: a cake.

I wear a pair of these in size extra wide: https://www.brooksrunning.com/en_us/mens/shoes/road-running-...

But you're right, I wasn't introduced to something like these until very recently, when a particularly knowledgeable shoe nerd touched my feet and instantly was like "oh, I know what your problem is, your feet are all weird, you can't be wearing standard sized shoes." Then he went to the back and brought me the above shoes and I had a legit Cinderella moment.

Before I became aware of extra wide, I would typically be caught wearing shoes a size too big, which is why I had so many problems.

I have such a pair for running longer distances. This scan was part of choosing them.

They hurt a lot to get used to (Mostly barefoot for 8 years makes for a hard transition) but now they are good (necessary even) for jogging and distance running.

They still feel like horrible rubber hooves you strap onto your feet.

As a former competitive tennis player, moving the weight to the balls of the foot is recommended when in a ready stance, or when actively shuffling. It isn't something that would be expected when walking.

They do this when they aren't competing? Just like, cooking, getting dressed, brushing their teeth?

We're not talking about how to use the body when performing in their sport/art, but how they hold their bodies at all times.