Comment by jrowen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrowen | Hacker News Reader

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I too experience many of these things, and I have been called autistic by numerous people independently, but in that tongue-in-cheek manner of our generation that has watered it down a lot. I'm nothing even close to the people on Love on the Spectrum, or the kids in grade school that were essentially in special ed.

I think yeah the language has gotten very ambiguous and the "spectrum" is so wide and ill-defined that we need more and better words, but, I do also feel like it isn't just everyone's shared experience. I do feel like there are a lot of people who don't really experience these things, that aren't stuck in a constant self-conscious hyper-analysis and reflection loop, and are able to just kind of go with the flow a bit more (which is not to say that they don't have troubles or anxieties).

Edit: I will also note that I did have a similar reaction to you to this game. I didn't even go past the intro because I felt like I knew what it was. I would call this something like autism-lite, and it probably is pretty widespread, particularly in HN-like circles. It does feel a little bit confusing and even offensive to compare it to "capital A autism," an actual disability, but that's where our lexicon is right now.

> I think yeah the language has gotten very ambiguous and the "spectrum" is so wide and ill-defined that we need more and better words, but, I do also feel like it isn't just everyone's shared experience.

We used to have other words. Asperger's used to be a separate condition but was merged into one diagnosis. I wonder if there was a reason the experts who study this decided to go with fewer words?

Have you tried adding additional adjectives? That's usually what I do when the word I want is too general, and isn't as specific as I want to be.

In the DSM-5, they merged several conditions into one diagnosis called Autism Spectrum Disorder. At the same time, they defined ASD as having levels 1, 2, and 3. Those levels are defined by how much support the individual needs. Level 1 is "requiring support", level 2 is "requiring substantial support", and level 3 is "requiring very substantial support". Asperger's diagnosis would generally correspond with Level 1 ASD.

That doesn't really help with the social side of describing it though.

There's a small problem with the definition of "requires support", because growing up, I was smart enough, and good enough at masking, that I never "required support." Arguably, I still probably don't. But once I grew up, and started to look for ways to improve my mental health. My life very quickly shifted from, surviving ok-ish. To thriving and improving.

So many people insist that it doesn't count unless you're completely or meaningfully incapacitated. But that's stupid place to put the bar.

"Requires support" does not mean you are completely incapacitated without that support, nor does it mean you will always require the same support. If your life shifted from surviving ok-ish to thriving and improving when you found tools to help yourself, to me that sounds like you were meaningfully incapacitated before.

There are many conditions that a key point of diagnosis is impact to your life, and that's a conversation to have with the practitioner doing the diagnosis. It's a starting point not a bar, unfortunately nuance gets lost a lot once it's talked about in the social sphere/used as common parlance.

I think it's because it did kind of used to mean that. It described people that couldn't mask, couldn't totally function in society, couldn't have the kind of job depicted in the Autism Simulator. It's been expanded officially and colloquially which may not have been the right direction with the terminology. I think the DSM and the approach of trying to follow and fit in with more concretely diagnosable medical conditions may be considered harmful and too rigid.

For more mild and gray-area cases, it's really more akin to personality and it should be about understanding the particular combination of traits or symptoms of an individual. I wouldn't be officially diagnosed with OCD, or depression, or BPD, or maybe even ADD, but I can relate to all of those on some level and I feel like learning about them helps me understand myself better (with a grain of salt just like any health thing). It doesn't make me go around telling people I'm disabled and how they need to accommodate or support me, that's just narcissism.

> I think it's because it did kind of used to mean that. It described people that couldn't mask, couldn't totally function in society, couldn't have the kind of job depicted in the Autism Simulator.

If you mean "Autism", that might be true. But I don't think "Asperger's" meant that. So we might have taken a step backwards there.

I don't really talk about it, I don't go around telling people I'm autistic, whatever it is is minor enough that I'm able to mask easily, if anything I casually reference "my ADD."

I sometimes jokingly refer to "my spectrum," but I think that word is not great either because it implies a linear gradation, when I think it's a higher dimensional space like a personality star chart.

There's some controversy around Asperger too, which made the name problematic anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Asperger

"Spectrum", by definition, covers all the range of behaviours, both those that society deems to be a disorder and those that it deems not.

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