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“Science” under capitalism is not just political. It’s literally fascist.
“I thought I was autistic. It turns out I’m retarded.”
This is my darkest fear.
But you could end up on a Netflix dating show, so that’s cool.
Coming this fall. Retarded dating.
Holy shit, it actually exists. It’s called “Down for Love”.
I thought it was Love Island.
SHOTS FIRED
This feels like another recycled playbook: take vulnerable people, create doubt, then sell it as “concern.” People deserve support, not weaponized stigma.
But supporting people is hard and I don’t want to do it. Why do that when I can just exploit them instead?
But how come?
Supporting people is rather easy actually. Being compassionate, caring and listening the other person and being supportive is generally rather easy and oftentimes just words are enough to encourage or console them. That stuff is so easy it can be even faked on autopilot without any effort.But at the other hand, taking advantage of others/exploiting them just feels bad and even if it’s possible to get used to it. It’s kinda exhausting to constantly look over ones shoulder for the inevitable repercussions from the person being exploited and to avoid being exploited by anyone else?
Even if taken from the perspective of trying to exploit people. Helping them become better is a more profitable long term investment.
Names and addresses.
abigail (the person below, philosophy tube on nebula & youtube). did so on her video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S5w18sjYLk
so many companies/entities mentioned are headed/linked to the same bunch of people. I watched it few weeks ago, sorry couldn’t specify the timestamp. but also heads up, 2 hours video.
It’s funny since if you think you’re autistic and it turns out you’re not the consequence is literally nothing; your life continues the same as it was before.
Also let’s be honest; Christina Buttons is 100% an AI generated character.
Her hair is fantastic.
It’s probably also AI generated if I’d have to venture a guess
Well what are their names?
Yeh this is not doxxing if they are literally attempting to shape national policy. If you want to be left alone you should leave the fucking laws alone
They are a clear and present danger to people and must not be spared criticism and shaming for their actions.
They are a clear and present danger to people and must not be spared
criticism and shaming for their actions.
IMHO, in a way, it’s the desperate, desperate, oh so desperate need of people who can’t deal with the uncertainty of Probability and Statistics and thus require everything to be a clearly defined something, no variance, no deviations.
It’s the same reason why some people simply can’t accept the Theory Of Evolution: the idea that “countless” (not literally, but figurativelly) random variances will yield incremental changes which over time add up to major change is just beyond them, so better have a single (or a handful) of fantastical all powerful beings of unexplained (and never questioned) provenance be the designers and agents of creation of all we see.
As I see it, shit like this is mainly stupid people compensating (in the Psychology sense of the word) for their own inability to comprehend the World as is and without mentally simplify it down to a handful of little labelled boxes.
Yeah I think we all have that little voice at some point that goes what it atoms aren’t real, what if things are exactly as they appear? What about germs? What about the “globe”? What about “other” ““people”” and— and then you think about it a bit and it unravels very very quickly, but it’s good to be able to throw your entire mental model into doubt sometimes.
I wonder if some people aren’t able to build a satisfying mental model for some reason. I don’t think it’s just a matter of intelligence either, but something more emotional.
i think cycles of abuse play a factor. just like who makes life the hardest for trans people are people saying shit like “DON’T YOU THINK IF I COULD JUST LIVE MY LIFE AS A MAN I WOULD” or who often is the hardest on lesbians are married women saying shit like “well when i was younger i thought maybe i was attracted to your aunt susan but then my parents sat down with me and had the talk i’m having with you. you’re just cofused. you’ll come around in time. but until you come around you’re not leaving this house”
i think some of these awful ablist people got bullied in middle school for liking pill bugs, collecting baseball cards, or reading tolkein and now “they got through it” so they think other “weird” kids should, too. meanwhile us neurodivergent people think maybe we should try seeing if the world must truly run on blood
I think that’s a big part of it. My father disowned me when I came out as a trans woman and from everything I know about him he didn’t have the easiest relationship with gender. He was bullied for being small and weak as a kid because he was a very late bloomer and never really internalized that he was a large man. Like he also fits the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, but I do think his relationship with the punishment for failure to sufficiently perform masculinity played a role. Hell when he tried to convince me not to transition he argued from the position that gender is entirely learned, which is absolutely not the official catholic position he thought it was, but is however consistent with what I’d expect from someone who had the background I described.
Hmm kind of sour grapes mixed with “I turned out fine” and then universalising that to a global proscription
More like “I thought I was autistic. I know I am autistic.”
Yes, I’m actually autistic. Seriously!
Isn‘t autism and many other psychological conditions under and over diagnosed at the same time? A friend of mine got her diagnosis at the age of 31 (under diagnosed) and her doctor talked with her about social media bringing more people to her, which think they have autism, but don‘t (over diagnosing).
I don‘t want to talk anyone out of their diagnosis or give them doubts. As long as there are tests there will always be false negatives and positives and so if you test more it will influence the outcome.
PS: The article is probably bullshit.
Isn‘t autism and many other psychological conditions under and over diagnosed at the same time?
Yeah, that’s what happens when there’s no objective, scientific criteria and the “diagnoses” are based on the subjective observation of behavior.
Yeah, and there does seem to be an increasing number of people who self-diagnose medical conditions such as autism, and then use them as excuses for their own shitty behavior.
Or sometimes that of others. I had a relative try to excuse Elon’s bullshit as autism. No, aunt Grace, autism does not make people throw out Nazi salutes.
Often it’s the same people who dismiss legitimate challenges other people face due to medical conditions yet have one of their own (self-diagnosed) they use to excuse shitty behavior.
What you’re describing isn’t really an over-diagnosis thing though, it’s more that visibility has increased and the stigma has been reduced, so more people go to a professional to have it investigated.
Over-diagnosis would be people who actually get diagnosed with autism but end up not having it.
I think the criteria and diagnosis evolving as the science gets better also has an impact. The idea that only young boys have autism was the prevalent one not that long ago, but we know better now so now more people are being diagnosed with it since we understand it better.
I’m trans and wasn’t diagnosed as a kid because i had high masking autism (“girl autism”) instead of the “boy autism” they were looking for.
I disagree, I think the anecdote of an adult over 30 years of age being diagnosed is a fair example of under-diagnosis. And since your comment was more on the over-diagnosis side, I think it’s fair to point out. That the visibility and lowered stigma contribute to the over-diagnosing. It can’t be helped. Medical professionals are subject to the same biases of visibility that the rest of us are, even if they should know better.
Also some patients are certainly self-diagnosing based on freely available information, be it valid or not, and sharing their diagnosis as if it was a real one. When others encounter these claims, their instinct typically isn’t to argue or accuse someone of being a fake autist so they update their own mental models with a “this is what autism looks like” and the trend continues.
Oh trust me a LOT of peoples instinct is to accuse autistic people of being “fakers”. It’s something autistic people without an intellectual disability deal with regularly from general public and the government (various ones, I’m not even in the US) aren’t helping at the moment.
Ah, I misinterpreted you then, that’s my bad. :)
It is exactly what I am describing. In any test you will have false positives. Then the broader you test the more false positives you get. This was also a thing during Corona in Germany. At the start of the pandemic only people with symptoms should get tested, because with low case number and even a very good test and test procedure you can easily get more false positives than true positives. This is true for every test where true positives are rare. The math is pretty simple here.
Well, there’s two things to consider.
One is just how many folks “self diagnose”. Rather than a stigma being reduced, it’s often held up as a trait of superiority to the “normies”, so some folks will assert it. There’s a fine line to walk between unfair stigma versus unjustified glorification. The internet is full of this.
Two is that ultimately, there’s room for being subjective even among professionals. See the parents of a kid that my kid was friends with. They lamented they got told by 5 psychologists that their kid was not autistic before they finally found one that “correctly” saw the kid’s autism. They were so excited to have proof that their kid was one of those autistic folks that are super smart…
One is just how many folks “self diagnose”.
I’m not sure this would count towards any statistics of over-diagnosis though, as a self-diagnosis isn’t a diagnosis.
Two is that ultimately, there’s room for being subjective even among professionals.
This is true. Ultimately it’s humans judging humans and there will be errors in the process.
Good example. It‘s not only about how many people take a test, but also if the test is taken multiple times. Then you are in realm of statistics.
Probably to find the true result would be to consult those earlier doctors with the diagnosis of that last doctor. They might have missed something (or not).
Stop making everything political!
The national anthem of people who love the status quo!
The national anthem of people who love the status quo!
Of 40 years ago.
For now. They’d ideally prefer 400 years ago.
At least they think they would, and then it’s !leopardsatemyface@lemmy.world
Everything is political.
Someone: stop “making” everything political!!
I managed to get past the paywall on the article somehow, so here’s the actually important stuff:
But for a community organized around social impairment, they maintained an astonishing number of social rules. Certain language and beliefs were treated as harmful, and activists policed them aggressively. Terms like high-functioning, low-functioning, severe, and profound were condemned as “ableist.” Again and again, I watched popular accounts direct their thousands of followers to comment sections so they could scold people for using the wrong language or expressing the wrong views about autism.
AKA “muh free speech”
Activists reserved particular contempt for anyone who upheld the medical understanding of autism spectrum disorder, targeting organizations, researchers, and universities that treated autism as a disorder and supported work on its causes, treatment, or cure. They compared that work to eugenics and tried to shut it down through petitions, harassment, and public pressure. Too often, they succeeded.
“We should ‘fix’ autistic people, why doesn’t everyone agree with me??? 😢”
when I began referring to myself with the term Asperger,
The response was fierce. Activists rejected the idea that there was any sort of hierarchy in the autism spectrum.
“Why don’t people like it when I use an outdated term, removed from the DSM-5, that is often used to imply low intelligence of autistic people and want me to use the more broadly accepted inclusive term instead???”
Then, my life changed. In 2022, after working for several years as an artist, I became a journalist. The career shift was spurred by my discovering the stories of detransitioners: mainly young women who had once identified as transgender and now no longer did, and whose experiences were largely ignored by mainstream media. I could relate to them; many of them, like me, had struggled deeply as teenagers and searched for a label that seemed to explain their suffering. As I learned more about their experiences, I was forced to think more critically about how activism and media shape cultural narratives around identity and diagnosis, and how perverse social incentives can lock those narratives into place.
“I saw people detransition and that means that means autism can be a social contagion and because I see it as debilitating I want a reason to believe I’m faking it”
I soon began taking on stories that required heavy reporting. As I spoke with sources, built rapport, asked sensitive questions, and earned their trust, I realized something that should have been obvious much earlier: I do not have a social communication deficit. Not only was I competent at socializing, I was good at it, and I improved the more I did it.
“I’m good at socializing therefore I don’t have autism”
Which forced me to ask: What else could have explained my social discomfort? In retrospect, the answer was more ordinary than I wanted it to be. I was a sensitive, introverted child who felt social mistakes intensely. Instead of responding to them by becoming more resilient, I chose to retreat into my interests, because they felt safer than people. Over time, that withdrawal hardened into a pattern.
“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” but applied to emotions. If she’d just responded better to mistakes, she’d never have been diagnosted as autistic, guys!
My diagnosis unraveled further once I started questioning the other traits I had come to see as autistic. Introversion, high sensory sensitivity, intense interests, and social camouflaging are not exclusively the features of an autist; they are widely distributed across the general population. But using the female autism framework, I came to see them as a meaningful pattern.
“I have a ton of heavily correlated traits that are all often linked to autism, but if I look at them individually instead of recognizing the actual pattern, and say that non autistic people can have them too, that means I’m ‘normal!’”
This happened very swiftly, partially because an autism diagnosis is not especially difficult to obtain. The process, which has no objective medical test and relies primarily on self-reported traits interpreted by individual clinicians, leaves enormous room for confirmation bias and error. My own evaluation did not consider alternative explanations for my experiences, only that they had been present since childhood.
“We can’t do a DNA test for autism, therefore doctors must be just guessing and patients must be making it up”
Research shows that more and more people, especially young women, are over-identifying with psychiatric diagnoses, desperate for some sort of label to explain their struggles or abnormalities.
“More people are self-diagnosing, therefore trained medical professionals using actual diagnostic methods will also be diagnosing a ton of people with autism that don’t have it”
Losing the autism label allowed me to regain something more valuable than certainty: agency. My difficulties did not disappear, but they no longer defined the limits of who I could become. There is comfort in a story that shifts responsibility away from the self. Sometimes that comfort is almost irresistible. But in the end, it is better to believe in the possibility of change than to embrace a narrative that says you never had a choice at all.
“If you think you’re autistic, you’ll assume you have innate limits and stop trying hard enough.” AKA “Autism stops you from reaching your full potential and is a crutch”
Oh yikes, she sounds just awful
It’s all bollocks. I’m autistic. I was misdiagnosed as bipolar for 15 years including psychosis and sedated heavily for 15 years. THAT has had a major ongoing impact on my life. But there’s no “wave” of people who come out about being misdiagnosed as bipolar…or borderline personality disorder - both of which are common misdiagnoses for late diagnosed autistic people.
There’s a comfort in knowing who you are and being able to look after yourself and play to your strengths.
Anyone, with any diagnosis or not, can find a “reason” or “excuse” to not try or to be a shit person. That’s not exclusive to literally any demographic or diagnosis. Lazy people exist, bad people exist, etc. autistic, non autistic, man, woman, young, old, mental illness, whatever isn’t the thing that makes a person lazy, good, bad, etc.
It’s so ironic, they spend quite some time insinuating these problems are just hurdles to get over with by getting gud, then they talk proudly about how they no longer label themselves autists and that’s liberating, as if accepting yourself was a hurdle that CAN’T be jumped over so I’ll just lie myself.
Wait, Asperger’s is considered a bad term? I did not know that as someone originally diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome myself (but I did understand that it became incorporated as part of the spectrum).
Doing a bit more research, looks like it’s because of its origins in WWII Nazi Germany (and therefore being linked to eugenics, white supremacy, etc., the idea that these people are better than those people). Dang, I definitely did not know that. I will try not to use it then.
The whole thing is disingenuous. The use of “Aspergers” is partly discontinued because of fascist associations. It shouldn’t be surprising that people don’t want to use a classification termed by people who wanted to sort useful autistics from the disposable (as they saw it).
I’m on the autism spectrum. I’m high-functioning, what would have been called Aspergers prior to DSM-V. What that means is that I largely function in day-to-day life, and that I don’t need significant supports. The term ‘Aspergers’ is helpful, because people have a rough idea of what you mean when you use it. Austism spectrum disorder is more nebulous. Treating differing levels of support as being ‘hierarchical’ is not useful, and will–in the long run–tend to mean that everyone gets the same levels of support, rather than people with greater needs getting more support. (Would it be nice to get therapy? Sure. Do I need it as much as other people might? Probably not.)
And fuck yes, if there was a magic pill that I could take and I’d suddenly be absolutely dead-average neurotypical? Yeah, I’d take it. I’d swallow a handful. I’m probably a lot older than a bunch of other people on the spectrum here, and lemme tell you, it does not get better. If anything, the older you get, the worse it is, because the friends you had in school drift away, and you don’t make new ones. I know that social lives tend to get worse as people age, but at this point, the ONLY social life I have is two hours of church (non-denom universalist unitarian; I gave up theism years ago) on Sundays.
I have a degree, I have a job that I’m good at, I own a house and land, I have a ton of cats that mostly like me, blah blah blah. But goddamn, I feel very alone. I tried for YEARS to do what I thought you were supposed to do to meet people and make friends, and shit always fell flat. And now I know that yes, it IS me, I’m the problem. I’m the one that’s fucking up. (And apparently it’s really really autistic to send out questionnaires to ask people where I could improve in my social skills.)
And fuck yes, if there was a magic pill that I could take and I’d suddenly be absolutely dead-average neurotypical? Yeah, I’d take it. I’d swallow a handful.
As another on the “high-functioning” category (though not very high I guess since I’ve failed in life already), I find this always so heart-breaking. I understand exactly where it’s coming from, but it is still so sad to me. We are conditioned to see ourselves so flawed, so unworthy, there’s no understanding to be given. You look at the others and there’s the glass wall you can’t cross, and they tell you to come over as if it isn’t there. We just can’t fit in the narrow roles society has to offer without diminishing ourselves by masking, and that’s just suffering alone in a different way anyway.
I can look at myself and think I wouldn’t change a thing, since I’m selfish enough to see the problem to be how others treat and perceive me, and very scared of becoming someone else as changing myself on such deep levels would mean. But I also fully agree; it does not get better. Society will not change and people don’t even want to, and you cannot change either, because you are you. The mismatch is always there.
I do hope you end up finding people that vibe with you, even if it’s totally hopeless now. I’m deeeeep in depression so I have only kind words to offer anymore
You look at the others and there’s the glass wall you can’t cross, and they tell you to come over as if it isn’t there. We just can’t fit in the narrow roles society has to offer without diminishing ourselves by masking, and that’s just suffering alone in a different way anyway.
I don’t blame other people. I know that there’s this idea that if people just treated autistic people like allistic people, that everything would be fine. But that completely ignores that way that allistic people make and maintain relationships. You don’t really have direct control over who you like, who you don’t like; insisting that allistic people can just be besties with autistic people is a pipe dream. There’s no ‘fault’ in any of this. It just sucks, that’s all.
Anyways.
There’s no cure, so it’s just, y’know, keep muddling along. I’ve got a nice house, I’m married again to someone that’s very probably also on the spectrum–not that we always understand each other, but we’ve managed to make it work for almost a decade now–I’ve got a job, I’ve got an ungodly number of cats. I keep busy enough that I don’t think about it much any more.
insisting that allistic people can just be besties with autistic people is a pipe dream
Oh yeah definitely, things like these depend on the personalities, and at least in my experience us autistic folks tend to just clash with most allistic people. Not with everyone, but it’s a lot harder to find any circles you can fit into… Anyway things could still be better than they are now, if autistic traits weren’t seen as such weaknesses, which increases how badly we are perceived socially. The modern times are a terrible match! For example in one book from 1800s written by a relatively low-class person from my country there was a description of a person that pretty clearly was on the spectrum, but they weren’t described harshly at all. Just told to be an excellent worker, even if a bit strange for wanting to just spend all summers working in the forest alone.
Of course things have been pretty terrible for “low-functioning” people through recent history (we do have evidence at least some ancient tribes took care of their disabled so who can say if we go back enough), but I’ll argue that this development where autistic traits are becoming just a liability is very recent. Hell, when I was in university I could do fairly well because I could just read books and then write essays on them and pass courses, but some years after they changed that and now those require group-work and I would fail all of them.
Even though it’s true the “bridge” between autistic and allistic cannot be erased, it does not have to be so damn long
Wow.
Per the article (thanks for posting it all!): autism is a social construct.
Do they just throw random things to the wall to see what sticks?
Per the article (thanks for posting it all!):
I actually didn’t post all of it! The full article was probably about 4-6 times as long as just the snippets I showed, if not more. I cut out a lot of either repetitive points, or stories that just didn’t really make a point and were more there just to illustrate this specific person’s life in general for emotional attachment.
I mean, I think autism could be partially a social construct, in the sense that many people who have been diagnosed with autism (though nowhere close to all) would have very few symptoms if society were geared towards them. My autism is mostly problematic because of how other people react to it or because of getting overwhelmed by things that would be greatly reduced in a world where (at least a subsection of) autism was neurotypical.
I am not trying to minimize the experience of people whose autism is a significant disability that wouldn’t be noticeably affected by societal change, to be clear.
It’s absolutely a social construct in the same way Mexico is
Yeah, it’s a social construct in the sense that it’s just natural differences among humans, specifically differences that don’t as often square with societal/social norms as the average person. If society were comprised of all autistic people, you wouldn’t have the label “autism”, you’d just have “people that are the way people are.”
That said, unlike the article implies, autism is, of course, not just something everyone is choosing, making up, or using to justify not doing work.
I will note the article doesn’t technically say “everyone with autism is faking it and it’s not real”, it just implies that because a lot of people self-diagnose with it now, that must mean that the real numbers are way lower than they actually are, and that people who have autism, but don’t experience major social or productivity related issues from it, aren’t actually autistic and are just “introverted” or some other general term that could theoretically apply.
BIG yikes. I hope they find themselves a deep, dark hole to crawl into and never come back out of.
The last part is actually a thing that can happen after diagnosis. But pretending to not be autistic isn’t the fix.
Autism (neuro divergence in general really) under capitalism, is the engineering equivilent to being a sacrificial gear in a gear box. You have your purpose, you do it well when placed in the proper gear set. But you wear out faster than all the other gears, not because you are a bad gear, but because the system itself was designed to crush you rather than crush the bigger more expensive gears. It was built for their longevity and success, not yours. This is them giving the squeeky wheel or “gear” “the grease” in a fucked up way.
They are trying to gaslight different groups into thinking they are just a regular normal gear, and they need to just work harder, even if it means the gear breaks quicker as a result. We are cheaper to replace than we are to repair, and that is the logic that makes capitalism unworthy of human participation, it is inherently anti human in all spectrums.
I don’t think this is a Capitalist thing explicitly.
Being significantly outside the norm in visible ways is often a problem in any human societies, mainly depending on which traits one has which are most different from the masses and the time and society one is in. I mean, a highly intelligent woman with knowledge of herbal remedies in a 12th century European village would likely be deemed a witch, in a Native American tribe would be a healer and in present day society either nobody would notice or think her as old-fashioned “with all those teas”.
I expect that Neuro-divergence, being behavioural, is one of the hardest to accept as “normal” things in any human societies since humans are generally social beings. I mean, in present day in most of the West even Introversion (which is much more prevalent) is often perceived as a problem that people must overcome (“You need to go out more”) rather than just another perfectly normal way of being.
As I see it the neuro-divergent are just unlucky of living in an age of cities were it’s pretty hard for people to just live away from the rest most of the time and being out of the norm behaviouralliy ratther than say, in terms of body shape or having a preference for unusual foods.
PS: Now that I think about it, the whole insane “grift everything” culture of the current Late Stage Neoliberal Capitalism probably makes life way harder than it need be for people whose more variant traits negativelly affect social interaction, since in so many areas where merit in that domain was usually enough, now one must “pitch” and “network” a lot to get ahead.
My point was that we live under capitalism, therefore this is one way capitalism handles neuro divergence. We can go day and night about what we think or know about other times and systems and how they treated “others” but i was merely pointing out the propaganda that is marketing under capitalism, and how they use it to make us self regulate ourselves out of commonality and acceptance, to save money on the next quarter, at the cost of human life.
Is it just capitalism that alienates and destroys the lives of people who are different? No, absolutely not. However, this specific article is a prime example of how capitalism (today) handles neurodivergence by gaslighting us against our own existence via marketing and propaganda. Corporations hate paying for accomodations, it effects their bottom line. And thats the point i was making. This is how capitalism views us, this is how it handles us, this is how they weaponise our existence, for power and profit.
I understand your point and mostly agree. However i just dont have anecdotal experience living as a herbalist in the darkages, lol. And i dont believe whataboutism addresses the issues we face specifically from the system we live under right now in the present.
I don’t think Capitalism cares about most individuals as much as that would imply and in fact one of the strengths of it (for its own survival and expansion, rather than in the sense of being a good thing) is that it adapts around the variance of people - just look at phenomenons like Greenwashing.
Human societies have long harmed and even killed people for being different, no Capitalism required.
Just because one thinks Capitalism is a bad thing doesn’t mean one has to blame it for all bad things - that’s just intellectually lazy and reductive.
The best way to solve a problem is to analyze to figure out what causes it, not lazily blame it on the boggy-man.
Can we agree that cigarettes cause cancer, or is that lazy and reductive as well?
Other things cause cancer, sure, but we are talking about cigarettes right now. Because there is a cigarette right in front of us, causing cancer.
Analogies aside. I am talking (again) specifically about what made this article, who perpetuated it, spread it around, and for what reason? The same reason that imperialist fascism, the final evolution of capitalism before it implodes under the illusion of its own “infinite growth and adaptability”, did the exact same thing to trans people and neurodivergent people under the nazi regime in the 30’s and 40’s. Which, if you havent heard about, is back in style in the USA, concentration camps, and all.
This is a snapshot of propaganda with literal context in the photo that dictates exactly what im talking about. And you are out here ignoring analysis that you claim to want, and calling me lazy for pointing it out, giving further breakdown of my analogies, and giving my anecdotal experience of being neurodivergent under the capitalistic system we live in?¿
Pointing this out is not ignoring the history of human cruelty, it gives context as to how human cruelty can create a system that perpetuates it. and what that looks like. And more importantly, if we cant address the flaws of the system we currently live under, then we are doomed to repeat its agonies again, and again, until it consumes us all.
To simplify my statement, while including yours, so we can both go back to our families.
Humans can be big meanie weenies, capitalism rewards meanie weenie behaviour.
Your argument was equivalent to “all lung cancer is caused by cigarettes”.
You don’t start from your favored explanation and work backwards to explain the problem with it, you start from the problem and work forwards to all possible explanations, by which point you have several possibilities which you have to judge against each other to determine the most likely.
In simple terms not all meanie weenie behavior happens because it’s rewarded by Capitalism.
We’re spelling it wrong. It’s capitolizm.
The worst part about the article (see comment for source) is that in a sense, the author isn’t wrong. Developing skills helps with challenges, whether they are caused by a neurodivergency or not. Also, labels can limit people and people can hold themselves back because of seeing their condition as innate and not changeable (which it is, but everything around it can change). I don’t doubt that her autism diagnosis was not useful for her and she feels better letting it go. And there are very toxic elements in the neurodiversity community, just like in other communities.
The problem is that none of the above actually invalidates the diagnosis. It’s all context in which the life of the person with the diagnosis plays out. So she may very well still be autistic by any reasonable definition. I don’t know her. And the attitude which this kind of article permits others to take can be scary.
ADHD Sidebar Rant
(This doesn’t get into my big issue with a large swath of the DSM, which calls a bucket of symptoms a diagnosis without any understanding of underlying causes. With other medical fields we’ve often found that there are multiple diseases underlying the population of patients with a cluster of symptoms (e.g. recent discovery of multiple variants of Parkinsons with different origins). I personally suspect that there are multiple distinct conditions that underpin what we currently bucket as “autism”, and same with many of the other conditions in that section of the DSM. The only one we understand even reasonably well is ADHD, AFAICT. We at least have brain differences and some genetic components mapped out, but we’re still learning more all the time, e.g. recent study which suggests primary mode of operation of the condition is reward, not attention, which is why stimulants work.)
The thing that got me to finally go for my ADHD diagnosis was yes, I can get by, if I absolutely exhaust myself doing things that most people find trivial.
I can develop skills and workarounds to even things out, and that’s valuable. But it’s going to take me three times the effort and leave me empty.
The difference between thriving and surviving and all that.
It seems like nothing they wrote supports their conclusion. I mean look, if you have some challenges, and you find ways to handle them, that doesn’t mean you are (or aren’t) autistic… But somehow they worked hard to ignore this key point that undercuts everything they wrote.
“I do not struggle with X. I got a system.”
One of the most telltale signs of autism.
Or any mental illness. “I don’t have an anxiety disorder, I just have to work up the courage to go about my day and do this handful of specific things to ensure none of the things I’m worried about happen”
For me it was " I don’t struggle with understanding people’s emotions"
Then it was pointed out to me that I have spent years watching people and learning how they work.
Turns out people are my trains.
