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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

The redefinition of "autism" from "can't talk, stims constantly, maybe bangs head against the wall, serious danger to themselves" to "kinda awkward savant" seems like it has been profoundly harmful to people who want to find new therapies for those in the former group. Maybe normalizing it was a way for insurance companies and school districts to get out of funding appropriate measures for people who literally can not function in day to day life.

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Autism wasn't redefined like that. Not by the medical community. Social media took hold and it became the new OCD. People think liking straight lines on their desk means they have OCD. Same with autism, people think not liking a loud noise is autism.

I think a lot of people confuse neurodivergent with autistic as well.

The whole field needs a reorganization anyway. I've talked to dozens of therapists about this and I've received wildly different answers on what autism even is.

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)

It hasn't been redefined at all, you just weren't aware of all the intricacies and conflated every possible symptom into one large, uncommon stereotype, while in reality people in the spectrum are more common than you think but show some symptoms more than others and some not at all.

John, 38 yo virgin, spending 50% of his income on Gundam figurines while living with his aging mother and having no IRL friends is supposedly not "autistic enough" for you if he can hold a job, walk and talk normally? What about that one girl you went to high school with who couldn't stop talking about Supernatural and had a full-on meltdown in front of the whole class on more than one occasion, to the point where she had no friends by junior year and got severely depressed?

These characters were seen as "just weird" until actual scientists started figuring out they were autistic, and now they might have a better life with treatment and the necessary disability benefits

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

It would, depending on some factors. The false belief that there were fewer female aspies was pervasive, for example, and that was troublesome for many girls.

Anyway, I suspect "in the past" is further in the past than you think: the distinction between Asperger's and ASD has been officially ditched by the medical community for 12 years now, at least insofar as the DSM represents consensus.

>The false belief that there were fewer female aspies was pervasive, for example, and that was troublesome for many girls.

I'm gonna push back on this. There isn't an objective way to diagnose someone with autism like there is with, say, a vitamin B deficiency.

What we do know is the medical community continues to diagnose boys with this condition at a much higher rate than girls.

This would not appear to imply a "false" belief.

I was thinking of the 90’s.

I think there's a wider band of children than you think who can end up in either of those two camps depending on how they are treated, with traditional bullying pushing them to the former.

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