I have done a rigorous job of self diagnosis. I am autistic. I’ve also had the privilege of being able to pursue meditation, therapy, and other self development practices: I’m not as severely autistic as I was as a young man. I also have childhood trauma that I know contributes to many of my autistic presentations — see the last section on comorbidity. I also have some distinct ADHD symptoms but have never pursued that path because my hyperfocus tends to win out often enough that it’s not a hindrance to productivity. But it still causes problems elsewhere in my life.
For some people these diagnoses will be a very good fit with clear predictive outcomes. But many of us have a grab-bag of traits from several categories and still mostly get along in life, maybe with some assistance particular to one of these diagnosis but no more help overall than anyone else needs otherwise.
The diagnostic models suck. They are too broad here, too narrow there, misunderstood by professionals. I had a psychiatrist (mis)diagnose me as bipolar based on a 45 minute appointment when I was in some sort of crisis in my early 30s and that ended up haunting me years later when applying for a job with a security clearance. I didn’t even know about it at the time. This was one of the top rated doctors in a major metro area. What a sham.
The field is a mess. It has a terrible history of horrific abuse. Some autistic children still receive involuntary-to-them ECT. I think we should be supportive of research into these topics while also being critical of the very obvious problems with them.
Not the OP, but after a couple of decades of people pointedly talking about eye contact, small talk, and body language, you learn “coping mechanisms” to deal with neurotypicals and make them more comfortable.
Did your sporting team have success on the weekend? Wonderful, direct eye contact, smile, mirror. Ok, now, to business:
BTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism. You have to squint your eyes a bit, for example both of these neurotypes involve social difficulties, like the subjective feeling of being alien in the world (known as Anderssein in German psychiatry). However if you peel off the social layer then the remaining autistic features become anti-correlated with the remaining schizotypal features on the scale of the population. There are also some decent theories that suggest this should be the case - for example in the predictive coding theory it is believed that autistic brains over-weigh sensory inputs over their model of the world, whereas schizotypal brains over-weigh their model of the world over the sensory inputs. Or the Big Five traits, openness to experience is usually low in autism and high in schizophrenia.
Given we're long evolved, and also tribal based animals, and that culture is an evolutionary pressure feedback mechanism, and prediction is fundamentally useful to our reality, different "thinking styles" (ways to predict/understand outcomes) are useful, aannnd, tribally we used people for their usefulness, I often wonder if "faulty" is the correct lens. That is to say, If prediction variation was useful to tribes, having both 'trust the model' and 'trust the senses' type people, I suppose framing these as disorders rather than trade offs is probably the wrong lens entirely. Society/culture/reality is so narrow and predictable these days, faulty in what context, you know? If you breed 20 generations of "best night watchers", in the jungle at night looking down, quiet, still, dark... you'd probably be selecting for specific traits, and creating new traits, retinal rod density and sensitivity, faster dark adaptation/contrast etc, attention/vigilance traits, pattern detection, anxiety adjacent traits in hypervigilance,
prob something about circadian rhythm tolerance etc etc. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40886135_Not_By_Gen...)
it becomes a disorder when the person faces "too many" difficulties due to their difference (instead of enjoying the advantages)
and of course there are extreme cases, like the many non-verbal people (who likely wouldn't be able to live alone, their communication is limited to poking at pictures on a board), and the truly end of the spectrum where nothing sort of institutionalization can provide the environment and care necessary for survival
but of course having our society somehow become so narrow allows for the economic efficiency to even have the surplus that then we give to people with these disorders (in the form or care, attention, medical research, and so on)
Yes, but not always faulty. My (diagnosed) OCD and Anxiety have saved me from many bad situation. I see the many many many possibilities that something can go wrong and I have very low risk tolerance.
Yeah, the "mirror image" idea makes a lot of sense to me. Both groups feel out of sync socially, but for opposite reasons: autistic cognition leans too hard on raw sensory input, schizotypal cognition leans too hard on internal interpretations
Wouldn't the implication of them being "opposite" be that in some sense they are mutually exclusive? I don't really see evidence of that. Your example of sensory input vs world model weight is a bit flawed, because both of those are extremely multifaceted. One can have extreme weight in sensory input in one sense but not others, as well as extreme weight on world model for certain aspects of life.
> BTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism.
And I disagree with that. There is a wide overlap of symptoms in all mood disorders. People with ASD show many traits of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. This paper might change your mind:
Yeah, at face value the two diagnoses are positively correlated. This is simply true. And traits of these two only become negatively correlated if you remove the shared social difficulties, which includes a lot of the negative symptoms. Unfortunately everything is positively correlated in psychiatry. If you want to explore this deeper I recommend the "p factor" (general psychopathology factor), which is a serious, multi-year attempt at identifying something like the "first eigenvector of psychiatry", a loading common to all psychopathology, including substance use, affective disorders, psychotic disorders, conduct/personality disorders, ... The idea is that if you only know that someone has whatever goes into this vector then you know that person is quite likely to develop some disorder, but you don't know which one.
I would only add that ASDs do not have "real" negative symptoms of schizophrenia, but what they do have can look a bit similar. The research on anti-correlation was using questionnaires and binned the social questions taking that into account.
You're saying that relative to the 'typical individual', autistic brains weigh sensory inputs more heavily than their internal model. And that in schizotypal brains, relative to the 'typical individual', the internal model is weighed more heavily than the sensory input, right?
I don't know much about this area, so I can't comment on the correctness. However, I think we should be cautious in saying 'over-weigh' and 'under-weigh' because I really do think that there may be a real normative undertone when we say 'over-weigh'. I think it needlessly elevates what the typical individual experiences into what we should consider to be the norm and, by implicit extension, the 'correct way' of doing cognition.
I don't say this to try to undermine the challenges by people with autism or schizotypy. However, I think it's also fair to say that if we consider what the 'typical' person really is and how the 'typical' person really acts, they frequently do a lot of illogical and --- simply-put --- 'crazy' things.
>However, I think we should be cautious in saying 'over-weigh' and 'under-weigh' because I really do think that there may be a real normative undertone when we say 'over-weigh'. I think it needlessly elevates what the typical individual experiences into what we should consider to be the norm and, by implicit extension, the 'correct way' of doing cognition.
No biggie, there's a real normative undertone to the world in general too.
Norm itself means "what the majority does" or the socially (i.e. majority) accepted yardstick ("norma" in latin was a literal yardstick-like tool).
It's not about the typical person _always_ doing things in a better way, or the autistic person always doing things differently. It's about the distribution of typical vs atypical behavior. So, it's not very useful to characterize such atypical behavior better or worse based on absolute moral or technical judgement. Morality changes over time, cultures, and even social groups, to a bigger or smaller degree.
If, however, we use "degree of comformity with majority behaviors/expectations" as the measurement, autistics do perform worse on that.
Isn't "what the typical individual experiences" pretty much the definition of "normal"?
Whether "normal" is also "correct" is a completely separate question. There are plenty of fields where the behavior of the typical person is also widely perceived to be incorrect, like personal finance or exercise routines.
The day-to-day impact of being diagnosed is practically non-existant for me. It might explain "why" I might react to a specific stimuli but it doesn't stop the reaction. At best it's something to laugh about with my wife. It does also offer an early-warning system when I'm over stimulated and that I need to 'get home' soon.
> The day-to-day impact of being diagnosed is practically non-existant for me.
Yeah, as the old adage goes: with an ADH?D diagnosis you get to try drugs like lisdex or methylphenidate (or the non-stim options if those aren't suitable), but with an Autism/ASD diagnosis you get some pamphlets, coffee morning invites and a reading list.
I don't have a formal diagnosis but my child does and that made me read lots on the subject. Authors like Eliza Fricker, Ellie Middleton, Pete Wharmby amongst others.
It's opened my eyes to many other related aspects, specifically Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD) and Pathalogical Demand Avoidance (PDA) and how those play into both ADH?D and ASD. In reading about them I've worked out just how much they apply to my-undiagnosed-self and how understanding the triggers and recognising the early behaviour has allowed me to adapt to minimise their impact.
If you happen to have built a functioning support nets already, being diagnosed is at best a curiosity. If you didn't, or your existing ones have crumbled, it gives you tools to do that.
Being able to laugh about it, and know what is going on however is huge. Especially compared to being shit on all the time by others and self blaming (a common pattern!).
For my sister, getting diagnosed was important to her because she always felt like she was broken but now sees herself as simply different. I'm not aware of any workplace accommodations she has requested but it has been good for her self-esteem, which is a benefit in of itself.
the agenda with all these "people are saying they're autistic when they're really not" I think has mostly to do with RFKs overarching claim that people who are autistic are all suffering a horrible, debilitating disease, where in his words verbatim: “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date” [1] , which from there goes into his bigger goal which is to create a "database" of autistic people: [2]. By redefining "autism" to be only those who we've decided are those severely disabled who "will never pay taxes or hold a job", then creating a catalog of exactly who these people are, the final step is quite obvious if you've studied the treatment of autistic people in Nazi Germany [3].
So I'm going to flag these posts for now because the goal in the current US climate is pure eugenics. RFK is at his core a eugenicist.
> Autism exists, to the extent that any psychiatric disorder exists.
Which is to say, not really. I say this as someone who has been diagnosed as autistic, and identifies as autistic. All of these diagnoses are presented as clear, well defined constructs that exist in the world, but in reality they’re fictions that that committees have drawn around a vast gradient of human traits.
No individual human truly fits any single diagnosis. For example, I have two family members that depending on how you frame their behaviors could be described as either autistic or narcissistic, yet these are supposedly completely different disorders. Prior to being diagnosed as autistic, I’d been diagnosed with some of the ones suggested in the article as well. Was I misdiagnosed? I don’t think so. None of those constructs are real either. So, they’d not even wrong. For a time, some were useful. Some were harmful. But seeing myself as autistic has been a lot more useful.
What matters to me about identifying as autistic is that it allowed me to find other people who experience the world similarly to me. Until I found other autistic people, I felt like I was a single alien stranded on Earth, alone. Finding other autistic people was like finding out that there were millions of other aliens like me hiding in plain sight.
I hope that someday we can move beyond the 1950s-style nosology of the DSM and have a more rigorous science of mental health, but right now, it’s what we’re stuck with.
I am sorry, but if you’re saying there’s no biological, physiological or neurophysiological evidence of these conditions then you’re just plain wrong. I cannot emphasize that enough.
That’s not what GP is saying. He’s saying that a term like “autism” is a lasso trying to capture a gigantic number of individual traits and symptoms. This is true of any other “psychiatric disorder” as well. There is no “autism”, there is no “ADHD”, there is no “OCD”, any more than there are tables or chairs.
Something being a table is a label we slap on it to abstract certain attributes, that allows us to reason about it without having to think about all of the non-table-attributes it has. What do tables do? What can we do with them? We can put things on, eat off them. We can’t feed them to our pets. We can’t use them as a trampoline. The object being “a table” is just a categorization we make to allow us to think about the object; it isn’t something that the object is.
Similarly, people aren’t “autistic”. They’re just people, who have certain traits, which psychiatrists have decided should be lumped into a category called “autism”, because they’ve noticed a cluster of other people who have similar traits. So, from this standpoint, someone “being autistic” does not tell us anything. We can already see that person’s traits or characteristics. That categorization might be helpful to some people, and it might be harmful to other people; and they should use or avoid using it accordingly. But they can choose to do that, because “autism” isn’t a “thing” - it’s a mental construct.
I would say people who are not as disabled as I am should not get a diagnosis. My condition is obvious. I was hospitalized several times and now I cannot work, I have one friend, and I am homeless living in a minivan.
I had one good PDoc who helped me, with my genetics, not to diagnose me, but to help me find what helped me and my specific symptoms. Diagnosis is not as helpful as looking at your own symptoms and own history and using that to find what helps you.
Do you think neurotypical people often go, "I would like to spend significant time and money to get an autism diagnosis"?
I don't think it's particularly common. When I went through my dx, I was really hoping for adhd because then I could get meds, but my doc and all my screenings were like, "definitely not adhd, definitely autism".
So, maybe you are seeing rising diagnosis rates and considering that too easy? If encourage you to think about why you feel this way.
How do I know if I'm neurotypical? I have some challenges, I've done a few tests, but I could just be a lazy neurotypical bastard. I think if you go to therapy you can get to take yourself more seriously, look at the signs, self reflections and process that. Now that can easily lead to "I need to get diagnosed with XYZ". Just to be sure.
It's not about the rising rates, that could be explained in other ways.
You go to a testing center, not a therapist, to get a diagnosis. The online tests don't count. A thorough test will take a half-day or more, with tests ranging from conversations to Q&A to visual to a battery of multiple choice questions.
Yep. For some extra anecdata, mine included a 2 hour introductory session (briefly covering the many forms and [official] online tests she had me do ahead of time), and then two 4-hour test sessions, each of which left me utterly exhausted.
If you think you (or a loved one) may have a psychological condition, go to a psychologist and get a screening. The diagnosis isn't the important part. The value is in the 20-something pages of detailed analysis by a professional.
At a bare minimum, it will give you a fresh perspective on things you already knew. In my experiences, there will be things you didn't realize about yourself.
They aren't going to tell you what the solution is to all your problems; that's for you and your doctor to figure out. They will give you everything you need to make well-informed decisions, and that's priceless.
Get screened for whatever you think you've got. Think you've got ADHD? Go get an ADHD screening. Autism? It's not easy to find a psych who does adult Autism screenings, but they're out there. OCD? You get the idea.
Regardless of whether the conclusion is "yes you have x" or "no you don't have x" the diagnosis will be accompanied by a detailed analysis of your psychological condition. Whether or not you are diagnosed, that analysis will cover the issues that led you to believe you may have that condition.
I'm getting a full neuro-psych screening next month because my therapist suspects I may have OCD. It's a 4-6 hour series of tests/interviews (and probably other stuff, I'll find out). I'm guessing that's what they're referring to?
Also see specialisms WITHIN Autism that are different to the mainstream Autism
The one I know most about is
PDA: Pathological Demand Avoidance [1]
PDA presents differently and needs very different strategies to mainstream Autism.
Main signs… kids under 12 attend school. However they explode at home or in private. At school the PDAers are masking (pretending to fit in) which is draining. When they get home the pent up frustration is released (explosively). So the family at home see a very different kid to the one that school/extended family witness. If this is an A-Ha! lightbulb moment for you or your child, see the questionnaire at the PDA Society[1]
I enjoyed reading that. My daughter had recently been diagnosed with "social anxiety" but had suspected it was autism.
Somewhat related, "Health Secretary Wes Streeting is launching an independent review into rising demand for mental health, ADHD and autism services in England." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8q26q2r75o
Working in IT I've came across lots of extremely smart people with their quirks and eccentricity (not exclusive to smart people of course), I guess there's just a higher proportion of _quirky_ smart people in IT. A lot of the time it just seems to be introversion- it seems lack of interaction with society has to be justified.
It's worth noting the UK already commissioned a review that was published this year, that showed ADHD is in fact under-recognised here[0]. I can only assume they're commissioning a new one because that one gave the "wrong" answer.
For a long time ADHD was ignored or dismissed in the UK as an "americanitis", so it's no surprise that there's a backlog of people who weren't diagnosed in childhood.
I think a crucial bit of context is that in the UK, many people who are seeking diagnosis as adults grew up in areas where there were no or very few child psychiatry services in the 80s/90s. In such areas only very profound cases would be referred to out of area services. Most people with neurodevelopment disorders in such areas were diagnosed with SpLDs like dyspraxia or dyslexia which could be diagnosed by community paediatricians, usually with evidence from educational psychologists and occupational therapists.
In fact the pattern is almost the opposite of what you'd see in the US where it would be hard to get diagnosed with a SpLD and e.g. ADHD was more widely recognised. But the rub lies in the fact that ADHD, ASD and many SpLDs have fairly high rates of comorbidities with one another, to the point where if you've got dyspraxia and no other diagnosable comorbidity, you're actually in the minority of people with it.
Also the NHS ADHD/ASD services are completely overrun. Waiting lists for children can be more than 5 years long.
In order to cope with this the NHS has spun out much of the ADHD/ASD assessments through the Right To Choose program (well, in England at least, Scotland/Wales/NI are on their own), which means that private companies are being paid by the NHS to make up the shortfall. Ref: https://adhduk.co.uk/right-to-choose/
Some people say some of the private companies are too lenient with their diagnoses. Some people say that the NHS is too strict with their diagnoses. I'm sure the real answer is somewhere in the middle.
As you say, the sharp rise in diagnoses is probably more due to people become more aware, with less stigma attached, and having better access to assessment.
Shit like _Rain Man_ almost 30 years ago or, more recently stuff like _The Good Doctor_ really don't help though, as those just reinforce the negative stereotypes of Autism.
ADHD also has a strong genetic component with heritability around 75% according to various studies. My parents (undiagnosed but one definitely ADD+ASD) have 1/4 children diagnosed (and another 2/4 almost certainly undiagnosed, one neurotypical), and 6/10 grandchildren diagnosed (the other 4 are neurotypical).
Who knows, in 20 years time mainstream schools could have switched from 20% SEND and 80% neurotypical to 80% SEND and 20% neurotypical.
In my family it's been difficult for some to accept my sister's autism diagnosis because Rain Man is the prototype of autism they have in their heads. Younger family members who have been exposed to classmates who are on the Autism spectrum have been accepting of the diagnosis as their image of autism is very different than the one older family members have. Good thing is despite some not believing in the accuracy of the label, they're still supportive of her.
As a diagnosed autistic, I think I would ask -- does ticking these boxes make you feel like, "oh shit, this could explain some difficulties..." or just go, "huh, interesting?"
I tend to invite people to think about how their lives have been impacted. For example, I experience anxiety at late invites to events I'd enjoy. I panic and decline them because I'm experiencing a highly irrational anger fear response to changing schedules. This causes me to miss events I would otherwise enjoy, and then I feel guilty. Having to process all those feelings takes a lot of energy, and it's really draining. That has significant impact on my life.
Compare to a friend of mine who just prefers quiet evenings. She declines things all the time but never gives it a second thought.
Disability vs preference. It's ok if it's either! Neither of us are wrong, we just experience different impacts in our lives.
Well, I exiled myself to the countryside because I want to be able to choose how much exposure to society I want.
I guess I gamed the problems you are talking about, but as a side effect I am sometimes probably weirder than before (which is a non problem when you live where I live).
I would probably live a sad and boring life if I were to live in any small/medium/big city.
I'm reminded of a post on r/Factorio. (Factory builder game.)
(Paraphrase, I don't recall the words)
If you like Factorio you should be tested for autism because you might be autistic. If you like Pymods (a mod that adds an extreme number of hoops to the game) you should be tested for autism because there's a chance you don't have it.
lisp-1 (s) give me the chills: very much prefer doubled namespaces. Though these days I focus on systems security or threat analysis. I still fondly remember the days where I could launch Emacs with sbcl and write some Montecarlo simulations on Common Lisp with electric-parens haha Those were the days of stimulating learning
It was kind of a joke intent but it gives out to better naming position although unambiguous symbols to specify a symbol; such as #' for function names. Plus now that I remember the common Lisp ANSI specification is just awesome, free and locally installable and browsable from Emacs at symbols from ages. Common Lisp images were myriads ahead in an intospectable sense, like Smalltalk. Objects and primitives can use the built-in debugger to display their inwards. The environment is just plain astonishing, moreover ten years ago - when I started - and Emacs is free as in speech and compilable from scratch, plus org-mode is awesome as well. Nowadays I feel sorry of Python introspection capabilities although hinted typing improved it so much. Not to mention Common Lisp tight generated assembly and it's garbage collector which was ahead of its own: first with Boehm and then with parallel ones. SICP was nice although nicest was the one about gravitational physics, or brownian motions, also in Scheme. Good times.
I used to be an educator, and many of my students had an autism diagnosis. I would get to know them and often eventually decide that they were "just like" me, except that whatever their problems were, I had it worse.
So then I would look at these autism checklists and say, "yep, that's me," but when I actually looked at the strict diagnostic criteria, it wasn't that clear.
Looking at this article, I get it. There are other, more focused criteria that can be more appropriate. But those diagnoses don't trigger the special services, so they don't get used often enough.
What is my takeaway? People often don't conform to a model of average human behavior. Being unusual isn't necessarily a grave character flaw (which is what my mother had me believe) but merely an expression of the great variety of human intellect and behavior. It gives me license, without official diagnosis, to enjoy being who I am without shame or embarrassment.
The diagnosis criteria are written by and for neurotypical people. Autistic people are likely to dismiss them as not fitting because they are reading them too literally.
Also we tend to underestimate our own symptoms. As a ADHD person it took me a long time to understand that many of my struggles were not things everyone experienced. I still find it hard to really grasp that most people don't suffer from executive dysfunction and can just do things, even things they are not interested in.
Honestly if you relate to autistic people chances are high that you have some form of neurodivergence. It might be worth trying to get a diagnosis, even just to be sure.
If anything this just kinda suggests to me that the diagnostic categories are almost completely random/useless. It's just a set of pigeonholes made by people whose goal is to have a pigeonhole for every kind of thing so that the world doesn't seem messy and complicated anymore.
But the one thing we know for sure it's that the world is more complex than even this set of 10 pigeonholes. These are more like good insults for people. Haha, a loner, that guy's a schizo! The clinical coldness is almost a perfect mirror for the way we express personal cruelty to others. To reduce them to a factoid, an epithet. It's no wonder people want to reclaim these words as terms of identity, of pride, of nuanced meaning.
They are useful if they are understood properly. For example different "similar" groups respond to different treatments differently. Social phobia responds very well to exposure therapy, anti-social personality disorder does not. If you are able to follow the distinctions you are able to leverage more effective treatments. I don't think they have any use outside of psychological treatment though.
This is a great video on a good way of breaking down how personality disorders in general are broken down and function and are separated.
https://youtu.be/4mgifm3ftl8
I’m beginning to wonder whether one can qualify simply as an “eccentric” is a function of social + economic standing. Or whether whatever people think you are, or what you think of yourself are determined by these factors.
Often times it seems like the “soft diagnosis” of a condition can be used to hedge against less-than-desirable personality traits if the person is held in high enough esteem. If they aren’t held in popular regard to some extent or if there’s other factors that can be used to explain their behavior (e.g. the stereotypical “German coldness” or whatever) then they don’t get those benefits. Characteristics like their political views may also negatively affect the likelihood of this “psychiatric hedging”.
At what point do idiosyncrasies become subject to pathology.
This is the wrong framing: We all have degrees of “diagnosable” traits, it’s only when those traits become problematic do we need to seek help. For example, obsessive tendencies can help you stick with a tough problem or they can become an unhealthy fixation.
Also, if someone is mean they are mean: Diagnosis is not a “get out of jail free” card for bad behavior.
I'm autistic and the difficulty was high for me to learn, "being autistic is no excuse for also being an asshole". I had to work a little harder, sure, but it's doable for many of us.
This is kinda how I've come to view psychology because in the context I was raised mental health support was a luxury left for the wealthy. Albeit more about personality, upbringing and status rather than just individual idiosyncracies.
I understand that this may be a categorical error, since psychology can be the categorization of symptoms, but a lot of the things I learned "from the outside" really still stick.
Like the wealthier populations getting neat little explanations/excuses whenever convenient. Theres the scholastic benefit of ADHD diagnosis and anxiety diagnosis, which can help a lot in school/academia and to everyone else who cant afford it they get the cheaper label: "being bad at school" or "dumb". And still requires even more effort.
Theres the trauma and therapy cycles for otherwise normal behaviors like separation anxiety from parents, not being popular or highly esteemed, stress from not attaining goals, etc. The cheaper treatment being to suck it up.
What is normal for the poor to carry is a diagnoses and special treatment for those who can afford it.
And this is also reflected within the office as well! The outcome can be better if the professionals empathize with the one seeking treatment (theres a whole class/racial component here).
I agree with your sentiment and I think it's really all down to wealth and/or availability.
Regarding your last sentence, typically when the individual seeks it. It's generally considered both rude and ineffective to diagnose others who are not seeking diagnosis.
The internet is turning society into a kind of "social emulsion" where everyone is their own little droplet in the fluid, but they don't merge together.
Back in the 90s early 00s the internet made us mesh together because each one of us there was a specific person. We had forum signatures and every single post was clearly made by a person, for a person.
Then social media took over and relegated every single person into a tiny unidentifiable avatar next to a non-prominent name, not unlike NPCs in CRPGs.
In turn this has been exploited by the powers that be to ensure the social glue gets even weaker: a society barely held together won't revolt. There's only one thing left to do: productivity, productivity, productivity.
The political opponent is no longer a person. Just a nameless, faceless NPC (personifying everything that's wrong) spawned there to be defeated and collect their social loot tokens.
But I might just be an old fart rambling about the good, old days.
I am on Discord and the balkanization+homogeneization is still as prominent there as everywhere else.
Server admins are just NPCs providing @everyone announcements from time to time, to keep the player engaged (spoiler: the average Joe is just irritated by those). Sometimes you get a quest from them.
Also: 99% won't read profile bios (and you have to pay for actual customization, don't you?) while forum signatures were front-and-center.
I have to say I'm surprised to see Discord mentioned as an opposite to social media instead of... just yet another iteration of the same ploy.
Fuck discord. Another big for-profit platform that is swallowing big chunks of the internet. before discord there were lots of self-organized forums with their own communities and rules. Now I need to register with some big overlord and download their shitty app just to read what has before been just an URL away?
Nah. Right in the browser works great: discord.com/app
You’re going to keep running into a wall thinking of discord like a forum replacement; It’s designed to be an IRC replacement.
The invitation system intentionally creates some privacy so you can build a sense of enclosed community around them, and so you have some control over who sees what. Not having your conversations on full automatic blast to the public is a feature.
I wouldn't say Internet is a problem, but centralisation towards big tech algos and clearly gamed social media comment sections do control the narrative of what the majority of people see most of the time.
I found this article very interesting, because I feel that I fall in the category of people that think they have it, although I probably don't. My psychiatrist who is not an expert on autism told me I display autistic traits but that doesn't necessarily put me on the spectrum. Also my RAADS-R scores fall into the autistic spectrum but on the low end. Another psychiatrist diagnosed me with OCD. I am in my late 20s and I don't see how I could ever know for sure or if I am autistic or not, but nowadays most people in my country would say "we are all somewhat autistic in some way or another"
> nowadays most people in my country would say "we are all somewhat autistic in some way or another
Careful with this. In small amounts it can be good -- recognizing that autistic traits are human traits and we should recognize each others humanity -- but in large amounts it is regularly used to deny autistic people experiences. Like, "it's not so bad. It's not a disability. We're all a little autistic." Etc.
I know that this is a slippery slope. I just meant with this that even if I get diagnosed it wouldn't really change anything in my daily life, because people in my country are not very well educated on these issues anyway.
I am in the same boat as you (Schizoaffective, OCD, Panic Disorder). My therapist said I had many traits but the overlap in these disorders is quite substantial.
I was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital once and my behavior had them thinking I was Autistic.
A diagnosis is literally just a heuristic category so they can do research on rough groupings of symptoms to evaluate how treatments impact them. That's it. To get a diagnosis is literally just a statement "my psychologist thinks my symptoms align with this group and that the treatments they found effective for those symptoms will be effective for mine."
The idea these things are identities or real categories is completely absurd and disconnected from why they actually exist. There is 0 basis to assume because two people have the same diagnosis they have the same underlying causes for what leads them to end up with that rough grouping of symptoms.
There may be some general similarities or correlations but again the whole point of these is literally just to establish heuristic groups so we can do research on how people respond to treatments. People allowing them or speaking in a way that makes them seem like more than that is extremely destructive.
a crumbling society is basically ideal for maximizing human stress and its various expressions ... or so dictated the deprecated term neurasthenia ... while many individuals are forced to deal with debilitating mental conditions , this situation is often incorrectly conflated with having experienced temporary behavioural breakdowns that later resolved (aka normal evolutionary response) ... this conflation wouldnt be such an issue if big pharma wasn't in the picture , overpathologization is definitely in somebodys best interests !
Even if you don't think it has validity as a single disorder, autism is at least diagnosed in a way that's fairly consistent between clinicians using ADOS.
I'm more dubious of clinicians who like to pick random dubious rare disorders that people can't even agree about the basic description of like schizoid out of the DSM like the author of this article.
Probably but at the risk of giving a bad analogy maybe the distinction here is like that between an itchy wool sweater (uncomfortable, broadly decreases mobility by making you not want to move) and a garment that actually restricts movement (a too small blazer that won’t let you reach straight up or, in the extreme, a straight jacket).
Yep. Psychiatry (or most of medicine really) is not trying to bring everyone up to the top 10% of the population, or even the top 50% along some dimension of interest. Psychiatry is mainly trying to move people from the bottom ~5% (what we call a "disorder") to the top ~95% of the population - which is then considered normal variability. So, if you take for example extraversion/social skills, then many "psychiatry-healthy" people will not be good at this at all, will make fewer connections, will not ask for raises, will be skipped for promotion, will have weak social support structures if shit hits the fan, etc. That's just normal trait variation.
I think a really good example of this is self-diagnosing with bipolar disorder (and thus mania). Let's forget for a second that mania must last at least a few days non stop; most people do not notice this part somehow :). If you read the DSM criteria you may think that you actually fit them sometimes: elevated/irritable mood, highly talkative, distractible, flight of ideas, ... . However, you probably don't, and it is mainly a matter of understanding the scale of the problem. Most people do not know just how wide the range of "mood" is in humans, and what does it mean to be on either of the far ends of it.
(percentages are much more illustrative than accurate)
> Isn't social awkwardness sort of inherently impairing in social relationships?
Yes, but I think the distinction is explained in the article: "show significant improvement with practice and maturity" and "generally achieve life goals despite awkwardness".
To put it another way, those who are socially awkward can get better, whereas some of the other diagnoses are lifetime impairments with little or no possibility for improvement or cure.
> I remember seeing a woman who was a classic example of someone with high neuroticism, poor self-esteem, and severe social anxiety, and she had believed for much of her life that she was autistic ... it fit in with her experience of being awkward-shy-weird.
I so strongly agree with this and it's not just based on my own experience, but many people I know.
Growing up broke and in sketchy places with sketchy people will induce plenty of anxiety. Then I managed to get out of all that as an adult and starting a career.
The anxiety never fully went away, but it now presents itself the way one would expect instead of "weirdness". Maturing and having a more stable life happened to my friends also and nobody says "I think I'm autistic" anymore like we did in high school and college. Now it's hard to distinguish if we were saying that to ourselves as a slur in self-deprecation, or if we really believed it. Young people are just awkward and too many people get older without letting go of the things they told themselves a long time ago.
Make of that what you will. I know my story is super common, but the only reason I bothered to write this is that it doesn't get said enough.
Based on personal experience with others, for some I think the diagnosis is a substitute for an identity that then brings belonging into a group, filling a need for them that has been otherwise unfilled.
People nowadays are just desperate to have a diagnosis. Everybody wants to be special and unique, everybody wants a stamp on their forehead that says "I have [x]" "I am [x]". People cant accept that the issues they have might just be not special at all and are mere human issues all of us have. Its the result of aggressive sensationalism and the desire to stand out from the crowd.
Yeah, of course. When a "normal" person asks for a reasonable accommodation--like being able to wear a smooth cotton polo alternative they bought with their own money rather than the piqué fabric one assigned by the company--they get "wow you want to be so special and unique, no you need to wear the shirt assigned by the company and get over it." Is it any surprise that someone would want to go get an autism diagnosis or whatever else so they can... just wear the damn shirt that doesn't make them half-grimace at all the customers?
They're going to be accused of wanting the special and unique stamp in either case, but at least in the second one they can feel somewhat comfortable.
People will, of course, conjure up an unreasonable accommodation (in an attempt to paint all accommodations as unreasonable) in their head to try to justify why this sort of request can't be accommodated, which just increases the fuel for the desire to get the autism diagnosis.
Put another way, if people were a little more accepting, less only-slightly-weird people would be seeking these diagnoses.
> People nowadays are just desperate to have a diagnosis. Everybody wants to be special and unique
I've never managed to understand this when it comes to autism. Autism used to be considered something as extreme as a severe disability (e.g. Rain Man), and latterly with the inclusion of Asperger's into the spectrum, at the very least a collection of undesirable behavioural characteristics. Do people really want to be diagnosed with something wrong with them, or has the perception of autism shifted to at least neutral (if not positive)?
I think it's useful to look at the alternative. It is still socially acceptable, even among progressives, to viciously mock people who are socially awkward and simply write them off as undeserving of help. At least with autism many people extend some degree of sympathy and willingness to help.
At the risk of offending some people, I think it's similar to why people lie about their dog being a "service dog".
It may genuinely be that their dog is their emotional support, but it's ultimately a bit of selfishness and wanting to be treated preferentially in a world that feels crowded and rigid.
> Everybody wants to be special and unique, everybody wants a stamp on their forehead that says "I have [x]" "I am [x]".
Spend a moderate amount of time with some humans-- e.g., war veterans-- and you'll find that denial of a diagnosis is common enough to trivially disprove this statement.
Upon realizing "I just have anxiety" and there's "nothing wrong with me" it initially reduced my anxiety... then I wondered why I'm so fixated on some mirage of "normal" and my anxiety flared up again thinking about it way too much.
Anxiety with intrusive and obsessive thoughts is definitely a real phenomena, but nowadays it's just a sign I'm getting fussy and need a break or a nap.
People are desperate for an identity. It has always been that people would latch on to things that seem fitting for them - maybe they put a lot of stock in their identity as a soldier, or as a fan of a band, or maybe as a member of a group like skateboarders. And, interestingly, most of these historic manifestations also have an aspect of "stamp on their forehead advertising their identity" - patches, shirts, other identifying aesthetics from their community.
I think it's less a result of a desire to be special and more a result of the way that late stage capitalism will throw away anyone who doesn't fit into its narrow mold of what makes an "ideal employee". When only a small number of career paths provide a good quality of life and employeers can fire people at will, then any divergence from the ideal becomes a disability.
This fits in with another thread on an article about over-diagnosis.
I think it’s safe to say that if someone appears “weird” to the hive mind of a community, that person is more likely to be correctly diagnosed.
There are people who desire a diagnosis for special treatment, but if the first time you find out about a person’s diagnosis is after knowing them as “weird” the whole time, then they’re not acting weird on purpose, or saying they are X for attention or special treatment.
Disabled people, mentally or otherwise, usually like to keep their business to themselves, unless they absolutely don’t need to. Some mentally disabled people might even forgo getting special treatment via disability services at their colleges, or getting parking permits for disability because they’re not interested in bringing attention to their difficulties or differences, or using these issues as a cause for special treatment. Though, I’d advised that people who need accommodations should get them.
I also saw a comment about disability becoming normalized due to late stage capitalism, which sounds like a thesis out of postmodernist thinking. The fact is that group behavior has always isolated “weird” behaviors and put undue negative attention on them, but it just happened to be the case that that weird behavior was evolutionary helpful, which is why it has persisted for millions of generations of humans across their evolutionary history.
This only applies to high-functioning categories of behaviors. But I’ve found that more often than not, it’s the social reaction of groups that is the problem for high-functioning autists, and less the autism itself. Maybe neurotypical behavior or neurotypical mindedness is the disease because I don’t understand why or how some people find it so hard to think differently. Are they not individuals, are they zombies?
Let’s also shed light on what behaviors neurotypicals usually have a problem with that they cast as negatives in high-functioning autists:
1) Not being mindful of hierarchy
2) Not being mindful of socially determined rules, that is rules which are not codified in any official language of conduct
3) Not wanting to socialize, or wanting to socialize differently
4) Trouble with emotional regulation, possibly due to social issues
Tell me, which of these points, and there are many more, point to this being an individual’s problem?
For high-functioning autists, the problem is other people.
People need to realize that they’re not great to deal with on average, and if someone chooses to not engage with you, don’t take that as an insult. Maybe you’re all better off not interacting with each other, but that doesn’t imply causing someone financial, emotional or physical harm just because they’re autistic.
Society both explicitly and implicitly punishes high-functioning autism.
This is the third article in a row that I am seeing on hacker news that is spreading misinformation about autism.
This seems to be targeted campaign. I urge people to not be fooled by ill-researched blog posts. Listen to autistic people. Listen to researchers that represent the scientific consensus.
Any diagnosis for autism will first consider whether the symptoms can be explained better by another diagnosis. This is why you fill out a lot of questionnaires and the like when you get your diagnosis. This is the state of art.
Also women are systematically underdiagnosed when it comes to autism, they often get labeled with boderline and the like. The idea that someone is labeling everything as autism is silly.
This honestly tracks with what I've seen: autism has become the catch-all public label for "socially struggling person," even when the underlying cause is anxiety, trauma, personality patterns, or just plain awkwardness.
Based on what I've read lately, my consensus perspective is that 80% of what people consider autism is actually just the western diet's effect on normal brain chemistry.
This is a remarkably stupid comment. I’m not going to go into detail refuting it, but you might want to read more about autism in children or just think before you type.
"I prefer to do things on my own, rather than with others."
"I prefer doing things the same way - for instance my morning routine or trip to the supermarket"
"I find myself becoming strongly absorbed in something – even obsessional"
These are all questions everybody living in a modern society can relate to.
Of course autism is a real condition, but modern society somewhat requires people to be machine like and that can easily look like someone is on the spectrum.
> Social communication disorder is rarely diagnosed in favor of autism primarily because autism provides access to critical services, insurance coverage, educational support, and legal protections that social communication disorder does not reliably offer
As some on with Schizoaffective Disorder, OCD, and Panic Disoder, I know why people want to have an Autism diagnosis. It is because people with Autism are more studied, get more assistance, and are get more sympathy from the general public.
Someone with Autism can act out and people will be like "That's OK, he has Autism". But when I act out, there is no understanding.
What is missing in the article is there does exist overlap in these condiations, not only symptomatically, but also genetically. As far as genetics, just take a look at the calcium channel gene CACNA1C:
I would probably had an Asperger's diagnosis when I was a kid, but most of my Autism was beaten out of my by my older brother's and kids in school. I mean, I was so deep into astronomy when I was 10 and I would not let go if it even though everyone teased me about it and I talked about it all the time anyway.
I am in my early 60's now, homeless, living in a Minivan, driving around, researching my genetics obsessively to the point where I communicate with some leading specialists in the United States, but still no one cares.
So yeah, do I wish I could say I had clinical Asperger's? Yes. Yes. Only so I can be accepted for my neurodivergence.
No worries. I am schizotypy but I have suffered plenty. It's not so much better than Asperger's but I can lead an autonomous life. I could prefer to be normal but there's that. Some people use it for greatness, some suffer it for live; thing is you're not alone. Please give some time to the outward world and focus on some socials from time to time. Things will be fine.
I find all these conversation around neuro-divergence extremely weird, for the simple reason that I have a never seen a proper definition of what a "normal" person actually is, and for good and obvious reasons:
I personally believe that "normal", when it comes to people's behavior, social interactions, and the way their mind works, is a completely broken idea. All of these attributes are completely fluid, depending on the when, where and who with you happen to be.
On that premise, the whole idea of neuro-divergence and the idea that you can classify people in arbitrary categories such as ADHD, Autism, etc ... and that this classification will lead to a way to "fix them" is complete and utter BS.
Lot to unpack from what you said, but whatever you want to make of the classifications (created by people much more knowledgeable than you or I in this field, but with plenty of conformist baggage), my time with ADHD or whatever you'd like to call it has absolutely shaped the experience of my life, and taking medication has objectively helped. My brain objectively processes things differently from whatever you'd like to call the median of people, and functions different with different chemicals. Personally, because of this medication that allows me to focus, I have been able to remain on par with my peers, if not with more elbow grease -- so I quite benefit from the label, weird and fluid as it may be.
An interesting fact is that caffeine will often affect the "ADHD mind" differently. It's been reported to have no effect, or have very limited effect, or make people even sleepy, but almost always something non-standard. Once, in high school, without the supervision of my parents, I drank maybe 2 red bulls and 2 cups of coffee, 1 black. I remember feeling disappointed it didn't work, and I didn't feel any rush of energy.
I was certainly not trying to say that differences between people do not exist and most certainly never claimed that your brain should work the way other people's brain do (At my age, I absolutely know mine does not, by a wide margin, and never has, and I'm in fact quite fond of that fact).
I'm simply saying that the way we're classifying people is utter BS, and assigning labels is very hurtful
Everyone is different. The "median man" does not exist. Or if he does there are maybe 3 on the whole planet, not something significant.
Much like your fingerprints, your brain is completely unique, and what chemicals / lifestyle / circumstances affect it in what way is a hugely personal affair. And to make matters even more complicated, it changes very much over time.
If you agree to let any kind of random bozo, with a so-called specialist title and a diploma tell you that you are a "typical neuro-divergent belong to class XYZ", run like hell.
The only way is to experiment with the way your mind works: chemicals, social groups, type of work, meditation, yoga, sports, more or less social interaction, whatever ultimately gets you to where you want to be.
But if you let every other snake oil salesman out there, or the rest of humanity in general, tell you who you are and who you ought to be ... good luck to you.
> I find all these conversation around neuro-divergence extremely weird, for the simple reason that I have a never seen a proper definition of what a "normal" person actually is, and for good and obvious reasons:
The problem is that no-one can easily understand how their brain works compared to other people. People on both sides don't talk about it enough or openly enough. If you look at the science it quickly descends in to endless confusing/impenetrable psychiatric terminology.
You can study things like anaemia as you can objectively measure the red blood cell count of a patient's blood. You can't objectively measure a patient's "focus" or "motivation". It's really hard to even get a good subjective measure of those things.
For example, it's just one aspect, but prior to diagnosis and taking methylphenidate (Ritalin/Concerta) I thought everyone had hundreds of competing thoughts running through their head all the time. I thought everyone just had better ways of dealing with it than I did. I had no idea that's not the case. I'd got to 50+ years old, got several degrees, married and had a family, had a successful career, not quite FAANG but earning more than 6 figures, all in spite of how my brain works. Surely there can't be anything "wrong" with me.
But when the medication first kicked in I was simply astounded how quiet my brain became and how clearly I could think about just one thing (it may not be the thing I actually wanted to focus on at that time but that's another facet of the fun). How the hell did I manage to get by all this time without this? It's only then in speaking to other people do I find out that, no, most other people don't have hundreds of competing thoughts running through their head all the time snapping at their focus.
> On that premise, the whole idea of neuro-divergence and the idea that you can classify people in arbitrary categories such as ADHD, Autism, etc ... and that this classification will lead to a way to "fix them" is complete and utter BS.
I agree with point about broad classifications, but medicine is far from the exact science that people believe it is. Got these symptoms? Does medication A improve them? Can you live with the side effects of medication A? Does medication B help with the side effects of medication A and not interfere with the improvements given my medication A? etc...
I have done a rigorous job of self diagnosis. I am autistic. I’ve also had the privilege of being able to pursue meditation, therapy, and other self development practices: I’m not as severely autistic as I was as a young man. I also have childhood trauma that I know contributes to many of my autistic presentations — see the last section on comorbidity. I also have some distinct ADHD symptoms but have never pursued that path because my hyperfocus tends to win out often enough that it’s not a hindrance to productivity. But it still causes problems elsewhere in my life.
For some people these diagnoses will be a very good fit with clear predictive outcomes. But many of us have a grab-bag of traits from several categories and still mostly get along in life, maybe with some assistance particular to one of these diagnosis but no more help overall than anyone else needs otherwise.
The diagnostic models suck. They are too broad here, too narrow there, misunderstood by professionals. I had a psychiatrist (mis)diagnose me as bipolar based on a 45 minute appointment when I was in some sort of crisis in my early 30s and that ended up haunting me years later when applying for a job with a security clearance. I didn’t even know about it at the time. This was one of the top rated doctors in a major metro area. What a sham.
The field is a mess. It has a terrible history of horrific abuse. Some autistic children still receive involuntary-to-them ECT. I think we should be supportive of research into these topics while also being critical of the very obvious problems with them.
It’s never occurred to me that someone could become more or less autistic…could you say more about what that has been like for you?
Not the OP, but after a couple of decades of people pointedly talking about eye contact, small talk, and body language, you learn “coping mechanisms” to deal with neurotypicals and make them more comfortable.
Did your sporting team have success on the weekend? Wonderful, direct eye contact, smile, mirror. Ok, now, to business:
If you teach this to children while their brains are young and have high plasticity, they might "grow out" of many autistic symptoms entirely?
> Some autistic children still receive involuntary-to-them ECT.
Adults too; ask me how I know.
BTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism. You have to squint your eyes a bit, for example both of these neurotypes involve social difficulties, like the subjective feeling of being alien in the world (known as Anderssein in German psychiatry). However if you peel off the social layer then the remaining autistic features become anti-correlated with the remaining schizotypal features on the scale of the population. There are also some decent theories that suggest this should be the case - for example in the predictive coding theory it is believed that autistic brains over-weigh sensory inputs over their model of the world, whereas schizotypal brains over-weigh their model of the world over the sensory inputs. Or the Big Five traits, openness to experience is usually low in autism and high in schizophrenia.
If the mind is a kind of "prediction machine", wouldn't that make ALL psychiactric disorders a specific variation of faulty prediction mode though?
Given we're long evolved, and also tribal based animals, and that culture is an evolutionary pressure feedback mechanism, and prediction is fundamentally useful to our reality, different "thinking styles" (ways to predict/understand outcomes) are useful, aannnd, tribally we used people for their usefulness, I often wonder if "faulty" is the correct lens. That is to say, If prediction variation was useful to tribes, having both 'trust the model' and 'trust the senses' type people, I suppose framing these as disorders rather than trade offs is probably the wrong lens entirely. Society/culture/reality is so narrow and predictable these days, faulty in what context, you know? If you breed 20 generations of "best night watchers", in the jungle at night looking down, quiet, still, dark... you'd probably be selecting for specific traits, and creating new traits, retinal rod density and sensitivity, faster dark adaptation/contrast etc, attention/vigilance traits, pattern detection, anxiety adjacent traits in hypervigilance, prob something about circadian rhythm tolerance etc etc. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40886135_Not_By_Gen...)
it becomes a disorder when the person faces "too many" difficulties due to their difference (instead of enjoying the advantages)
and of course there are extreme cases, like the many non-verbal people (who likely wouldn't be able to live alone, their communication is limited to poking at pictures on a board), and the truly end of the spectrum where nothing sort of institutionalization can provide the environment and care necessary for survival
but of course having our society somehow become so narrow allows for the economic efficiency to even have the surplus that then we give to people with these disorders (in the form or care, attention, medical research, and so on)
Yes, having society "somehow" become ordered for a certain "norm" on a spectrum certain does create a disordered reality for the others...
Yes, but not always faulty. My (diagnosed) OCD and Anxiety have saved me from many bad situation. I see the many many many possibilities that something can go wrong and I have very low risk tolerance.
Yeah, the "mirror image" idea makes a lot of sense to me. Both groups feel out of sync socially, but for opposite reasons: autistic cognition leans too hard on raw sensory input, schizotypal cognition leans too hard on internal interpretations
Wouldn't the implication of them being "opposite" be that in some sense they are mutually exclusive? I don't really see evidence of that. Your example of sensory input vs world model weight is a bit flawed, because both of those are extremely multifaceted. One can have extreme weight in sensory input in one sense but not others, as well as extreme weight on world model for certain aspects of life.
> BTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism.
And I disagree with that. There is a wide overlap of symptoms in all mood disorders. People with ASD show many traits of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. This paper might change your mind:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8931527/
Yeah, at face value the two diagnoses are positively correlated. This is simply true. And traits of these two only become negatively correlated if you remove the shared social difficulties, which includes a lot of the negative symptoms. Unfortunately everything is positively correlated in psychiatry. If you want to explore this deeper I recommend the "p factor" (general psychopathology factor), which is a serious, multi-year attempt at identifying something like the "first eigenvector of psychiatry", a loading common to all psychopathology, including substance use, affective disorders, psychotic disorders, conduct/personality disorders, ... The idea is that if you only know that someone has whatever goes into this vector then you know that person is quite likely to develop some disorder, but you don't know which one.
I would only add that ASDs do not have "real" negative symptoms of schizophrenia, but what they do have can look a bit similar. The research on anti-correlation was using questionnaires and binned the social questions taking that into account.
I think I understand what you mean.
You're saying that relative to the 'typical individual', autistic brains weigh sensory inputs more heavily than their internal model. And that in schizotypal brains, relative to the 'typical individual', the internal model is weighed more heavily than the sensory input, right?
I don't know much about this area, so I can't comment on the correctness. However, I think we should be cautious in saying 'over-weigh' and 'under-weigh' because I really do think that there may be a real normative undertone when we say 'over-weigh'. I think it needlessly elevates what the typical individual experiences into what we should consider to be the norm and, by implicit extension, the 'correct way' of doing cognition.
I don't say this to try to undermine the challenges by people with autism or schizotypy. However, I think it's also fair to say that if we consider what the 'typical' person really is and how the 'typical' person really acts, they frequently do a lot of illogical and --- simply-put --- 'crazy' things.
>However, I think we should be cautious in saying 'over-weigh' and 'under-weigh' because I really do think that there may be a real normative undertone when we say 'over-weigh'. I think it needlessly elevates what the typical individual experiences into what we should consider to be the norm and, by implicit extension, the 'correct way' of doing cognition.
No biggie, there's a real normative undertone to the world in general too.
Norm itself means "what the majority does" or the socially (i.e. majority) accepted yardstick ("norma" in latin was a literal yardstick-like tool).
It's not about the typical person _always_ doing things in a better way, or the autistic person always doing things differently. It's about the distribution of typical vs atypical behavior. So, it's not very useful to characterize such atypical behavior better or worse based on absolute moral or technical judgement. Morality changes over time, cultures, and even social groups, to a bigger or smaller degree.
If, however, we use "degree of comformity with majority behaviors/expectations" as the measurement, autistics do perform worse on that.
Norm is descriptive. Normative is prescriptive.
Knowing the difference is important to understanding and empathizing with the person you replied to.
The center of the normal ditribution is “normal” or “normative.” That’s where the term comes from.
It’s like saying we shouldn’t call immigrants “aliens” because that conjures images of space. Where do you think the term comes from?
Isn't "what the typical individual experiences" pretty much the definition of "normal"?
Whether "normal" is also "correct" is a completely separate question. There are plenty of fields where the behavior of the typical person is also widely perceived to be incorrect, like personal finance or exercise routines.
That is fascinating, I have seen the schizophrenia model of having "trapped priors" before.
I figured that this is probably something Scott Alexander has written about, and lo and behold: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-a...
The day-to-day impact of being diagnosed is practically non-existant for me. It might explain "why" I might react to a specific stimuli but it doesn't stop the reaction. At best it's something to laugh about with my wife. It does also offer an early-warning system when I'm over stimulated and that I need to 'get home' soon.
> The day-to-day impact of being diagnosed is practically non-existant for me.
Yeah, as the old adage goes: with an ADH?D diagnosis you get to try drugs like lisdex or methylphenidate (or the non-stim options if those aren't suitable), but with an Autism/ASD diagnosis you get some pamphlets, coffee morning invites and a reading list.
I don't have a formal diagnosis but my child does and that made me read lots on the subject. Authors like Eliza Fricker, Ellie Middleton, Pete Wharmby amongst others.
It's opened my eyes to many other related aspects, specifically Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD) and Pathalogical Demand Avoidance (PDA) and how those play into both ADH?D and ASD. In reading about them I've worked out just how much they apply to my-undiagnosed-self and how understanding the triggers and recognising the early behaviour has allowed me to adapt to minimise their impact.
Yeah, that's basically the best-case scenario: the diagnosis doesn't change who you are, but it gives you a map of the terrain
If you happen to have built a functioning support nets already, being diagnosed is at best a curiosity. If you didn't, or your existing ones have crumbled, it gives you tools to do that.
Being able to laugh about it, and know what is going on however is huge. Especially compared to being shit on all the time by others and self blaming (a common pattern!).
For my sister, getting diagnosed was important to her because she always felt like she was broken but now sees herself as simply different. I'm not aware of any workplace accommodations she has requested but it has been good for her self-esteem, which is a benefit in of itself.
the agenda with all these "people are saying they're autistic when they're really not" I think has mostly to do with RFKs overarching claim that people who are autistic are all suffering a horrible, debilitating disease, where in his words verbatim: “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date” [1] , which from there goes into his bigger goal which is to create a "database" of autistic people: [2]. By redefining "autism" to be only those who we've decided are those severely disabled who "will never pay taxes or hold a job", then creating a catalog of exactly who these people are, the final step is quite obvious if you've studied the treatment of autistic people in Nazi Germany [3].
So I'm going to flag these posts for now because the goal in the current US climate is pure eugenics. RFK is at his core a eugenicist.
[1] https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5256614-autism-communi... [2] https://www.npr.org/2025/05/08/nx-s1-5391310/kennedy-autism-... [3] https://mjhnyc.org/blog/autism-and-disability-in-nazi-vienna...
> Autism exists, to the extent that any psychiatric disorder exists.
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder which causes and contributes to various psychiatric disorders.
The author is not seeing the forest for the trees, which is incredibly ironic.
> Autism exists, to the extent that any psychiatric disorder exists.
Which is to say, not really. I say this as someone who has been diagnosed as autistic, and identifies as autistic. All of these diagnoses are presented as clear, well defined constructs that exist in the world, but in reality they’re fictions that that committees have drawn around a vast gradient of human traits.
No individual human truly fits any single diagnosis. For example, I have two family members that depending on how you frame their behaviors could be described as either autistic or narcissistic, yet these are supposedly completely different disorders. Prior to being diagnosed as autistic, I’d been diagnosed with some of the ones suggested in the article as well. Was I misdiagnosed? I don’t think so. None of those constructs are real either. So, they’d not even wrong. For a time, some were useful. Some were harmful. But seeing myself as autistic has been a lot more useful.
What matters to me about identifying as autistic is that it allowed me to find other people who experience the world similarly to me. Until I found other autistic people, I felt like I was a single alien stranded on Earth, alone. Finding other autistic people was like finding out that there were millions of other aliens like me hiding in plain sight.
I hope that someday we can move beyond the 1950s-style nosology of the DSM and have a more rigorous science of mental health, but right now, it’s what we’re stuck with.
I am sorry, but if you’re saying there’s no biological, physiological or neurophysiological evidence of these conditions then you’re just plain wrong. I cannot emphasize that enough.
That’s not what GP is saying. He’s saying that a term like “autism” is a lasso trying to capture a gigantic number of individual traits and symptoms. This is true of any other “psychiatric disorder” as well. There is no “autism”, there is no “ADHD”, there is no “OCD”, any more than there are tables or chairs.
Something being a table is a label we slap on it to abstract certain attributes, that allows us to reason about it without having to think about all of the non-table-attributes it has. What do tables do? What can we do with them? We can put things on, eat off them. We can’t feed them to our pets. We can’t use them as a trampoline. The object being “a table” is just a categorization we make to allow us to think about the object; it isn’t something that the object is.
Similarly, people aren’t “autistic”. They’re just people, who have certain traits, which psychiatrists have decided should be lumped into a category called “autism”, because they’ve noticed a cluster of other people who have similar traits. So, from this standpoint, someone “being autistic” does not tell us anything. We can already see that person’s traits or characteristics. That categorization might be helpful to some people, and it might be harmful to other people; and they should use or avoid using it accordingly. But they can choose to do that, because “autism” isn’t a “thing” - it’s a mental construct.
I have all the symptoms listed by the author. I went to get professionally diagnosed and I have… autism AND anxiety AND ADHD surprisedpikachu.jpg
extremely high comorbidity rates
It feels like that whatever you seek to get diagnosed with you can get it.
This has been my experience, it’s not very convincing and doesn’t give me confidence in the field.
I would say people who are not as disabled as I am should not get a diagnosis. My condition is obvious. I was hospitalized several times and now I cannot work, I have one friend, and I am homeless living in a minivan.
I had one good PDoc who helped me, with my genetics, not to diagnose me, but to help me find what helped me and my specific symptoms. Diagnosis is not as helpful as looking at your own symptoms and own history and using that to find what helps you.
If you don't get the diagnosis before it causes a crisis, it can be _much_ harder to get appropriate support _after_ a crisis.
Do you think neurotypical people often go, "I would like to spend significant time and money to get an autism diagnosis"?
I don't think it's particularly common. When I went through my dx, I was really hoping for adhd because then I could get meds, but my doc and all my screenings were like, "definitely not adhd, definitely autism".
So, maybe you are seeing rising diagnosis rates and considering that too easy? If encourage you to think about why you feel this way.
How do I know if I'm neurotypical? I have some challenges, I've done a few tests, but I could just be a lazy neurotypical bastard. I think if you go to therapy you can get to take yourself more seriously, look at the signs, self reflections and process that. Now that can easily lead to "I need to get diagnosed with XYZ". Just to be sure.
It's not about the rising rates, that could be explained in other ways.
You go to a testing center, not a therapist, to get a diagnosis. The online tests don't count. A thorough test will take a half-day or more, with tests ranging from conversations to Q&A to visual to a battery of multiple choice questions.
Yep. For some extra anecdata, mine included a 2 hour introductory session (briefly covering the many forms and [official] online tests she had me do ahead of time), and then two 4-hour test sessions, each of which left me utterly exhausted.
Or it’s entirely predictable that those who have a set of symptoms get diagnosed with the stuff that tends to cause all those symptoms
You had to catch them all ;)
If you think you (or a loved one) may have a psychological condition, go to a psychologist and get a screening. The diagnosis isn't the important part. The value is in the 20-something pages of detailed analysis by a professional.
At a bare minimum, it will give you a fresh perspective on things you already knew. In my experiences, there will be things you didn't realize about yourself.
They aren't going to tell you what the solution is to all your problems; that's for you and your doctor to figure out. They will give you everything you need to make well-informed decisions, and that's priceless.
Autism diagnosis has targeted screening questionnaires. So what kind of general purpose screening do you mean?
Get screened for whatever you think you've got. Think you've got ADHD? Go get an ADHD screening. Autism? It's not easy to find a psych who does adult Autism screenings, but they're out there. OCD? You get the idea.
Regardless of whether the conclusion is "yes you have x" or "no you don't have x" the diagnosis will be accompanied by a detailed analysis of your psychological condition. Whether or not you are diagnosed, that analysis will cover the issues that led you to believe you may have that condition.
I'm getting a full neuro-psych screening next month because my therapist suspects I may have OCD. It's a 4-6 hour series of tests/interviews (and probably other stuff, I'll find out). I'm guessing that's what they're referring to?
While this topic is here
Also see specialisms WITHIN Autism that are different to the mainstream Autism
The one I know most about is
PDA: Pathological Demand Avoidance [1]
PDA presents differently and needs very different strategies to mainstream Autism.
Main signs… kids under 12 attend school. However they explode at home or in private. At school the PDAers are masking (pretending to fit in) which is draining. When they get home the pent up frustration is released (explosively). So the family at home see a very different kid to the one that school/extended family witness. If this is an A-Ha! lightbulb moment for you or your child, see the questionnaire at the PDA Society[1]
[1] https://www.pdasociety.org.uk/what-is-pda/
I enjoyed reading that. My daughter had recently been diagnosed with "social anxiety" but had suspected it was autism.
Somewhat related, "Health Secretary Wes Streeting is launching an independent review into rising demand for mental health, ADHD and autism services in England." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8q26q2r75o
Working in IT I've came across lots of extremely smart people with their quirks and eccentricity (not exclusive to smart people of course), I guess there's just a higher proportion of _quirky_ smart people in IT. A lot of the time it just seems to be introversion- it seems lack of interaction with society has to be justified.
It's worth noting the UK already commissioned a review that was published this year, that showed ADHD is in fact under-recognised here[0]. I can only assume they're commissioning a new one because that one gave the "wrong" answer.
For a long time ADHD was ignored or dismissed in the UK as an "americanitis", so it's no surprise that there's a backlog of people who weren't diagnosed in childhood.
[0] https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/report-of-the-independe...
I think a crucial bit of context is that in the UK, many people who are seeking diagnosis as adults grew up in areas where there were no or very few child psychiatry services in the 80s/90s. In such areas only very profound cases would be referred to out of area services. Most people with neurodevelopment disorders in such areas were diagnosed with SpLDs like dyspraxia or dyslexia which could be diagnosed by community paediatricians, usually with evidence from educational psychologists and occupational therapists.
In fact the pattern is almost the opposite of what you'd see in the US where it would be hard to get diagnosed with a SpLD and e.g. ADHD was more widely recognised. But the rub lies in the fact that ADHD, ASD and many SpLDs have fairly high rates of comorbidities with one another, to the point where if you've got dyspraxia and no other diagnosable comorbidity, you're actually in the minority of people with it.
Also the NHS ADHD/ASD services are completely overrun. Waiting lists for children can be more than 5 years long.
In order to cope with this the NHS has spun out much of the ADHD/ASD assessments through the Right To Choose program (well, in England at least, Scotland/Wales/NI are on their own), which means that private companies are being paid by the NHS to make up the shortfall. Ref: https://adhduk.co.uk/right-to-choose/
Some people say some of the private companies are too lenient with their diagnoses. Some people say that the NHS is too strict with their diagnoses. I'm sure the real answer is somewhere in the middle.
As you say, the sharp rise in diagnoses is probably more due to people become more aware, with less stigma attached, and having better access to assessment.
Shit like _Rain Man_ almost 30 years ago or, more recently stuff like _The Good Doctor_ really don't help though, as those just reinforce the negative stereotypes of Autism.
ADHD also has a strong genetic component with heritability around 75% according to various studies. My parents (undiagnosed but one definitely ADD+ASD) have 1/4 children diagnosed (and another 2/4 almost certainly undiagnosed, one neurotypical), and 6/10 grandchildren diagnosed (the other 4 are neurotypical).
Who knows, in 20 years time mainstream schools could have switched from 20% SEND and 80% neurotypical to 80% SEND and 20% neurotypical.
In my family it's been difficult for some to accept my sister's autism diagnosis because Rain Man is the prototype of autism they have in their heads. Younger family members who have been exposed to classmates who are on the Autism spectrum have been accepting of the diagnosis as their image of autism is very different than the one older family members have. Good thing is despite some not believing in the accuracy of the label, they're still supportive of her.
Eye contact makes me very uncomfortable.”
“I suck at small talk.”
“I have rigid routines.”
“I hyper-focus on my hobbies.”
“I am always fidgeting.”
“Social interaction exhausts me.”
“I really bad at making friends.”
“I don’t fit in; people find me weird.”
I never considered it althought I'm ticking all the buttons (bad gear ? [0])
[0] https://youtube.com/@audiopilz?si=g6iGJK3ygnCWESWW
As a diagnosed autistic, I think I would ask -- does ticking these boxes make you feel like, "oh shit, this could explain some difficulties..." or just go, "huh, interesting?"
I tend to invite people to think about how their lives have been impacted. For example, I experience anxiety at late invites to events I'd enjoy. I panic and decline them because I'm experiencing a highly irrational anger fear response to changing schedules. This causes me to miss events I would otherwise enjoy, and then I feel guilty. Having to process all those feelings takes a lot of energy, and it's really draining. That has significant impact on my life.
Compare to a friend of mine who just prefers quiet evenings. She declines things all the time but never gives it a second thought.
Disability vs preference. It's ok if it's either! Neither of us are wrong, we just experience different impacts in our lives.
Well, I exiled myself to the countryside because I want to be able to choose how much exposure to society I want.
I guess I gamed the problems you are talking about, but as a side effect I am sometimes probably weirder than before (which is a non problem when you live where I live).
I would probably live a sad and boring life if I were to live in any small/medium/big city.
You could add "I'm a HN regular" as a diagnostic criterium.
The HN crowd is surely over-represented in ASD, which makes sense for people enjoying debating nerdy topics and pedantry.
And "I like Lisp" should be an automatic qualifier.
I'm reminded of a post on r/Factorio. (Factory builder game.)
(Paraphrase, I don't recall the words)
If you like Factorio you should be tested for autism because you might be autistic. If you like Pymods (a mod that adds an extreme number of hoops to the game) you should be tested for autism because there's a chance you don't have it.
I am schizotypy and I very much love Common Lisp but not so much Racket haha
How do you feel about Scheme ?
lisp-1 (s) give me the chills: very much prefer doubled namespaces. Though these days I focus on systems security or threat analysis. I still fondly remember the days where I could launch Emacs with sbcl and write some Montecarlo simulations on Common Lisp with electric-parens haha Those were the days of stimulating learning
That's funny, I never found doubled namespaces that interesting; what are your opinions, why do you prefer them ?
> electric parens
I get you, I was amazed by the litterature around lisps (I always found the beginning of SICP (the wizard-programmer analogy) quite inspiring and fun)
It was kind of a joke intent but it gives out to better naming position although unambiguous symbols to specify a symbol; such as #' for function names. Plus now that I remember the common Lisp ANSI specification is just awesome, free and locally installable and browsable from Emacs at symbols from ages. Common Lisp images were myriads ahead in an intospectable sense, like Smalltalk. Objects and primitives can use the built-in debugger to display their inwards. The environment is just plain astonishing, moreover ten years ago - when I started - and Emacs is free as in speech and compilable from scratch, plus org-mode is awesome as well. Nowadays I feel sorry of Python introspection capabilities although hinted typing improved it so much. Not to mention Common Lisp tight generated assembly and it's garbage collector which was ahead of its own: first with Boehm and then with parallel ones. SICP was nice although nicest was the one about gravitational physics, or brownian motions, also in Scheme. Good times.
Yes, browsing the hyperspec (what a glorious name) inside of emacs was such a joy also.
That's truly a shame scripting/glue languages took a different path than lisp, but well, you can always lisp shape anything.
I honestly prefer C/assembly over lisp, which should be even more so.
I used to be an educator, and many of my students had an autism diagnosis. I would get to know them and often eventually decide that they were "just like" me, except that whatever their problems were, I had it worse.
So then I would look at these autism checklists and say, "yep, that's me," but when I actually looked at the strict diagnostic criteria, it wasn't that clear.
Looking at this article, I get it. There are other, more focused criteria that can be more appropriate. But those diagnoses don't trigger the special services, so they don't get used often enough.
What is my takeaway? People often don't conform to a model of average human behavior. Being unusual isn't necessarily a grave character flaw (which is what my mother had me believe) but merely an expression of the great variety of human intellect and behavior. It gives me license, without official diagnosis, to enjoy being who I am without shame or embarrassment.
The diagnosis criteria are written by and for neurotypical people. Autistic people are likely to dismiss them as not fitting because they are reading them too literally.
Also we tend to underestimate our own symptoms. As a ADHD person it took me a long time to understand that many of my struggles were not things everyone experienced. I still find it hard to really grasp that most people don't suffer from executive dysfunction and can just do things, even things they are not interested in.
Honestly if you relate to autistic people chances are high that you have some form of neurodivergence. It might be worth trying to get a diagnosis, even just to be sure.
agreed.
I studied philosophy during a large extent of my life, and I am a convinced Witgensteinian.
If anything this just kinda suggests to me that the diagnostic categories are almost completely random/useless. It's just a set of pigeonholes made by people whose goal is to have a pigeonhole for every kind of thing so that the world doesn't seem messy and complicated anymore.
But the one thing we know for sure it's that the world is more complex than even this set of 10 pigeonholes. These are more like good insults for people. Haha, a loner, that guy's a schizo! The clinical coldness is almost a perfect mirror for the way we express personal cruelty to others. To reduce them to a factoid, an epithet. It's no wonder people want to reclaim these words as terms of identity, of pride, of nuanced meaning.
They are useful if they are understood properly. For example different "similar" groups respond to different treatments differently. Social phobia responds very well to exposure therapy, anti-social personality disorder does not. If you are able to follow the distinctions you are able to leverage more effective treatments. I don't think they have any use outside of psychological treatment though. This is a great video on a good way of breaking down how personality disorders in general are broken down and function and are separated. https://youtu.be/4mgifm3ftl8
I’m beginning to wonder whether one can qualify simply as an “eccentric” is a function of social + economic standing. Or whether whatever people think you are, or what you think of yourself are determined by these factors.
Often times it seems like the “soft diagnosis” of a condition can be used to hedge against less-than-desirable personality traits if the person is held in high enough esteem. If they aren’t held in popular regard to some extent or if there’s other factors that can be used to explain their behavior (e.g. the stereotypical “German coldness” or whatever) then they don’t get those benefits. Characteristics like their political views may also negatively affect the likelihood of this “psychiatric hedging”.
At what point do idiosyncrasies become subject to pathology.
This is the wrong framing: We all have degrees of “diagnosable” traits, it’s only when those traits become problematic do we need to seek help. For example, obsessive tendencies can help you stick with a tough problem or they can become an unhealthy fixation.
Also, if someone is mean they are mean: Diagnosis is not a “get out of jail free” card for bad behavior.
I'm autistic and the difficulty was high for me to learn, "being autistic is no excuse for also being an asshole". I had to work a little harder, sure, but it's doable for many of us.
This is kinda how I've come to view psychology because in the context I was raised mental health support was a luxury left for the wealthy. Albeit more about personality, upbringing and status rather than just individual idiosyncracies.
I understand that this may be a categorical error, since psychology can be the categorization of symptoms, but a lot of the things I learned "from the outside" really still stick.
Like the wealthier populations getting neat little explanations/excuses whenever convenient. Theres the scholastic benefit of ADHD diagnosis and anxiety diagnosis, which can help a lot in school/academia and to everyone else who cant afford it they get the cheaper label: "being bad at school" or "dumb". And still requires even more effort.
Theres the trauma and therapy cycles for otherwise normal behaviors like separation anxiety from parents, not being popular or highly esteemed, stress from not attaining goals, etc. The cheaper treatment being to suck it up.
What is normal for the poor to carry is a diagnoses and special treatment for those who can afford it.
And this is also reflected within the office as well! The outcome can be better if the professionals empathize with the one seeking treatment (theres a whole class/racial component here).
I agree with your sentiment and I think it's really all down to wealth and/or availability.
Regarding your last sentence, typically when the individual seeks it. It's generally considered both rude and ineffective to diagnose others who are not seeking diagnosis.
The internet is turning society into a kind of "social emulsion" where everyone is their own little droplet in the fluid, but they don't merge together.
It's not "the internet". It is "this internet".
Back in the 90s early 00s the internet made us mesh together because each one of us there was a specific person. We had forum signatures and every single post was clearly made by a person, for a person.
Then social media took over and relegated every single person into a tiny unidentifiable avatar next to a non-prominent name, not unlike NPCs in CRPGs.
In turn this has been exploited by the powers that be to ensure the social glue gets even weaker: a society barely held together won't revolt. There's only one thing left to do: productivity, productivity, productivity.
The political opponent is no longer a person. Just a nameless, faceless NPC (personifying everything that's wrong) spawned there to be defeated and collect their social loot tokens.
But I might just be an old fart rambling about the good, old days.
Maybe the issue is this perception that "the Internet" consists mainly of the big 4 social media sites.
Go on Discord. People have usernames, avatars. Discord Profile Bios are just as unique as forum signatures.
I am on Discord and the balkanization+homogeneization is still as prominent there as everywhere else.
Server admins are just NPCs providing @everyone announcements from time to time, to keep the player engaged (spoiler: the average Joe is just irritated by those). Sometimes you get a quest from them.
Also: 99% won't read profile bios (and you have to pay for actual customization, don't you?) while forum signatures were front-and-center.
I have to say I'm surprised to see Discord mentioned as an opposite to social media instead of... just yet another iteration of the same ploy.
> Server admins are just NPCs providing @everyone announcements from time to time, to keep the player engaged. Sometimes you get a quest from them.
Maybe you should join better servers. I'll also add that this was common back in the forum days too. Most admins would just... admin the site.
> Also: 99% won't read profile bios (and you have to pay for actual customization, don't you?) while forum signatures were front-and-center.
Wrong on both counts.
> I have to say I'm surprised to see Discord mentioned as an opposite to social media instead of... just yet another iteration of the same.
I did not present it as an "opposite to social media" - I presented it as a counter to the idea that we've lost the personality GP is talking about
You're one of the 1% who reads profile bios.
Of course, because the alternative - that they're wrong, and more people actually do read bios - couldn't possibly be true.
In any case, I see no reason to believe any higher % of people paid any particular attention to forum signatures back in the day.
Fuck discord. Another big for-profit platform that is swallowing big chunks of the internet. before discord there were lots of self-organized forums with their own communities and rules. Now I need to register with some big overlord and download their shitty app just to read what has before been just an URL away?
Nah. Right in the browser works great: discord.com/app
You’re going to keep running into a wall thinking of discord like a forum replacement; It’s designed to be an IRC replacement.
The invitation system intentionally creates some privacy so you can build a sense of enclosed community around them, and so you have some control over who sees what. Not having your conversations on full automatic blast to the public is a feature.
But you can enjoy it before enshittification arrives!
All praise our VC overlords.
Discord also is a centralized piece of proprietary totalitarianism. No thanks.
I wouldn't say Internet is a problem, but centralisation towards big tech algos and clearly gamed social media comment sections do control the narrative of what the majority of people see most of the time.
I found this article very interesting, because I feel that I fall in the category of people that think they have it, although I probably don't. My psychiatrist who is not an expert on autism told me I display autistic traits but that doesn't necessarily put me on the spectrum. Also my RAADS-R scores fall into the autistic spectrum but on the low end. Another psychiatrist diagnosed me with OCD. I am in my late 20s and I don't see how I could ever know for sure or if I am autistic or not, but nowadays most people in my country would say "we are all somewhat autistic in some way or another"
> nowadays most people in my country would say "we are all somewhat autistic in some way or another
Careful with this. In small amounts it can be good -- recognizing that autistic traits are human traits and we should recognize each others humanity -- but in large amounts it is regularly used to deny autistic people experiences. Like, "it's not so bad. It's not a disability. We're all a little autistic." Etc.
I know that this is a slippery slope. I just meant with this that even if I get diagnosed it wouldn't really change anything in my daily life, because people in my country are not very well educated on these issues anyway.
I am in the same boat as you (Schizoaffective, OCD, Panic Disorder). My therapist said I had many traits but the overlap in these disorders is quite substantial.
I was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital once and my behavior had them thinking I was Autistic.
A diagnosis is literally just a heuristic category so they can do research on rough groupings of symptoms to evaluate how treatments impact them. That's it. To get a diagnosis is literally just a statement "my psychologist thinks my symptoms align with this group and that the treatments they found effective for those symptoms will be effective for mine." The idea these things are identities or real categories is completely absurd and disconnected from why they actually exist. There is 0 basis to assume because two people have the same diagnosis they have the same underlying causes for what leads them to end up with that rough grouping of symptoms. There may be some general similarities or correlations but again the whole point of these is literally just to establish heuristic groups so we can do research on how people respond to treatments. People allowing them or speaking in a way that makes them seem like more than that is extremely destructive.
a crumbling society is basically ideal for maximizing human stress and its various expressions ... or so dictated the deprecated term neurasthenia ... while many individuals are forced to deal with debilitating mental conditions , this situation is often incorrectly conflated with having experienced temporary behavioural breakdowns that later resolved (aka normal evolutionary response) ... this conflation wouldnt be such an issue if big pharma wasn't in the picture , overpathologization is definitely in somebodys best interests !
Even if you don't think it has validity as a single disorder, autism is at least diagnosed in a way that's fairly consistent between clinicians using ADOS.
I'm more dubious of clinicians who like to pick random dubious rare disorders that people can't even agree about the basic description of like schizoid out of the DSM like the author of this article.
And then they enroll their patients in the Drug of the Month Club.
I think this is broadly well considered although I have a bit of trouble understanding this point:
> Social awkwardness refers to social ineptness without meaningful impairment
Isn't social awkwardness sort of inherently impairing in social relationships?
Probably but at the risk of giving a bad analogy maybe the distinction here is like that between an itchy wool sweater (uncomfortable, broadly decreases mobility by making you not want to move) and a garment that actually restricts movement (a too small blazer that won’t let you reach straight up or, in the extreme, a straight jacket).
Yep. Psychiatry (or most of medicine really) is not trying to bring everyone up to the top 10% of the population, or even the top 50% along some dimension of interest. Psychiatry is mainly trying to move people from the bottom ~5% (what we call a "disorder") to the top ~95% of the population - which is then considered normal variability. So, if you take for example extraversion/social skills, then many "psychiatry-healthy" people will not be good at this at all, will make fewer connections, will not ask for raises, will be skipped for promotion, will have weak social support structures if shit hits the fan, etc. That's just normal trait variation.
I think a really good example of this is self-diagnosing with bipolar disorder (and thus mania). Let's forget for a second that mania must last at least a few days non stop; most people do not notice this part somehow :). If you read the DSM criteria you may think that you actually fit them sometimes: elevated/irritable mood, highly talkative, distractible, flight of ideas, ... . However, you probably don't, and it is mainly a matter of understanding the scale of the problem. Most people do not know just how wide the range of "mood" is in humans, and what does it mean to be on either of the far ends of it.
(percentages are much more illustrative than accurate)
I read it as "without other psychological or psychiatric issues which cause social difficulties."
It seems very tightly focussed, and more behavioural - and open to behavioural training - than other categories.
> Isn't social awkwardness sort of inherently impairing in social relationships?
Yes, but I think the distinction is explained in the article: "show significant improvement with practice and maturity" and "generally achieve life goals despite awkwardness".
To put it another way, those who are socially awkward can get better, whereas some of the other diagnoses are lifetime impairments with little or no possibility for improvement or cure.
> I remember seeing a woman who was a classic example of someone with high neuroticism, poor self-esteem, and severe social anxiety, and she had believed for much of her life that she was autistic ... it fit in with her experience of being awkward-shy-weird.
I so strongly agree with this and it's not just based on my own experience, but many people I know.
Growing up broke and in sketchy places with sketchy people will induce plenty of anxiety. Then I managed to get out of all that as an adult and starting a career.
The anxiety never fully went away, but it now presents itself the way one would expect instead of "weirdness". Maturing and having a more stable life happened to my friends also and nobody says "I think I'm autistic" anymore like we did in high school and college. Now it's hard to distinguish if we were saying that to ourselves as a slur in self-deprecation, or if we really believed it. Young people are just awkward and too many people get older without letting go of the things they told themselves a long time ago.
Make of that what you will. I know my story is super common, but the only reason I bothered to write this is that it doesn't get said enough.
Based on personal experience with others, for some I think the diagnosis is a substitute for an identity that then brings belonging into a group, filling a need for them that has been otherwise unfilled.
People nowadays are just desperate to have a diagnosis. Everybody wants to be special and unique, everybody wants a stamp on their forehead that says "I have [x]" "I am [x]". People cant accept that the issues they have might just be not special at all and are mere human issues all of us have. Its the result of aggressive sensationalism and the desire to stand out from the crowd.
Yeah, of course. When a "normal" person asks for a reasonable accommodation--like being able to wear a smooth cotton polo alternative they bought with their own money rather than the piqué fabric one assigned by the company--they get "wow you want to be so special and unique, no you need to wear the shirt assigned by the company and get over it." Is it any surprise that someone would want to go get an autism diagnosis or whatever else so they can... just wear the damn shirt that doesn't make them half-grimace at all the customers?
They're going to be accused of wanting the special and unique stamp in either case, but at least in the second one they can feel somewhat comfortable.
People will, of course, conjure up an unreasonable accommodation (in an attempt to paint all accommodations as unreasonable) in their head to try to justify why this sort of request can't be accommodated, which just increases the fuel for the desire to get the autism diagnosis.
Put another way, if people were a little more accepting, less only-slightly-weird people would be seeking these diagnoses.
> People nowadays are just desperate to have a diagnosis. Everybody wants to be special and unique
I've never managed to understand this when it comes to autism. Autism used to be considered something as extreme as a severe disability (e.g. Rain Man), and latterly with the inclusion of Asperger's into the spectrum, at the very least a collection of undesirable behavioural characteristics. Do people really want to be diagnosed with something wrong with them, or has the perception of autism shifted to at least neutral (if not positive)?
I think it's useful to look at the alternative. It is still socially acceptable, even among progressives, to viciously mock people who are socially awkward and simply write them off as undeserving of help. At least with autism many people extend some degree of sympathy and willingness to help.
Yes. Social awkwardness then is not seen as a character flaw but more like a birth defect.
At the risk of offending some people, I think it's similar to why people lie about their dog being a "service dog".
It may genuinely be that their dog is their emotional support, but it's ultimately a bit of selfishness and wanting to be treated preferentially in a world that feels crowded and rigid.
> Everybody wants to be special and unique, everybody wants a stamp on their forehead that says "I have [x]" "I am [x]".
Spend a moderate amount of time with some humans-- e.g., war veterans-- and you'll find that denial of a diagnosis is common enough to trivially disprove this statement.
Pretty sure war veterans dont hang out on TikTok or Instagram 24/7
"unique" and "diagnosis" are opposites. If you have a diagnosis then, by definition, you are part of a group of people with defined attributes.
Unique meaning unique within their social bubble, I agree with the general statement
Almost all of the people I know who are neurodivergent in some way are friends with a bunch of other neurodivergent people.
Either deliberately or because that's how all of the other train spotters/board gamers/coders they've ended up hanging out with are.
Upon realizing "I just have anxiety" and there's "nothing wrong with me" it initially reduced my anxiety... then I wondered why I'm so fixated on some mirage of "normal" and my anxiety flared up again thinking about it way too much.
Anxiety with intrusive and obsessive thoughts is definitely a real phenomena, but nowadays it's just a sign I'm getting fussy and need a break or a nap.
People are desperate for an identity. It has always been that people would latch on to things that seem fitting for them - maybe they put a lot of stock in their identity as a soldier, or as a fan of a band, or maybe as a member of a group like skateboarders. And, interestingly, most of these historic manifestations also have an aspect of "stamp on their forehead advertising their identity" - patches, shirts, other identifying aesthetics from their community.
I think it's less a result of a desire to be special and more a result of the way that late stage capitalism will throw away anyone who doesn't fit into its narrow mold of what makes an "ideal employee". When only a small number of career paths provide a good quality of life and employeers can fire people at will, then any divergence from the ideal becomes a disability.
This fits in with another thread on an article about over-diagnosis.
I think it’s safe to say that if someone appears “weird” to the hive mind of a community, that person is more likely to be correctly diagnosed.
There are people who desire a diagnosis for special treatment, but if the first time you find out about a person’s diagnosis is after knowing them as “weird” the whole time, then they’re not acting weird on purpose, or saying they are X for attention or special treatment.
Disabled people, mentally or otherwise, usually like to keep their business to themselves, unless they absolutely don’t need to. Some mentally disabled people might even forgo getting special treatment via disability services at their colleges, or getting parking permits for disability because they’re not interested in bringing attention to their difficulties or differences, or using these issues as a cause for special treatment. Though, I’d advised that people who need accommodations should get them.
I also saw a comment about disability becoming normalized due to late stage capitalism, which sounds like a thesis out of postmodernist thinking. The fact is that group behavior has always isolated “weird” behaviors and put undue negative attention on them, but it just happened to be the case that that weird behavior was evolutionary helpful, which is why it has persisted for millions of generations of humans across their evolutionary history.
This only applies to high-functioning categories of behaviors. But I’ve found that more often than not, it’s the social reaction of groups that is the problem for high-functioning autists, and less the autism itself. Maybe neurotypical behavior or neurotypical mindedness is the disease because I don’t understand why or how some people find it so hard to think differently. Are they not individuals, are they zombies?
Let’s also shed light on what behaviors neurotypicals usually have a problem with that they cast as negatives in high-functioning autists:
1) Not being mindful of hierarchy
2) Not being mindful of socially determined rules, that is rules which are not codified in any official language of conduct
3) Not wanting to socialize, or wanting to socialize differently
4) Trouble with emotional regulation, possibly due to social issues
Tell me, which of these points, and there are many more, point to this being an individual’s problem?
For high-functioning autists, the problem is other people.
People need to realize that they’re not great to deal with on average, and if someone chooses to not engage with you, don’t take that as an insult. Maybe you’re all better off not interacting with each other, but that doesn’t imply causing someone financial, emotional or physical harm just because they’re autistic.
Society both explicitly and implicitly punishes high-functioning autism.
This is the third article in a row that I am seeing on hacker news that is spreading misinformation about autism.
This seems to be targeted campaign. I urge people to not be fooled by ill-researched blog posts. Listen to autistic people. Listen to researchers that represent the scientific consensus.
Any diagnosis for autism will first consider whether the symptoms can be explained better by another diagnosis. This is why you fill out a lot of questionnaires and the like when you get your diagnosis. This is the state of art.
Also women are systematically underdiagnosed when it comes to autism, they often get labeled with boderline and the like. The idea that someone is labeling everything as autism is silly.
This honestly tracks with what I've seen: autism has become the catch-all public label for "socially struggling person," even when the underlying cause is anxiety, trauma, personality patterns, or just plain awkwardness.
Based on what I've read lately, my consensus perspective is that 80% of what people consider autism is actually just the western diet's effect on normal brain chemistry.
This is a remarkably stupid comment. I’m not going to go into detail refuting it, but you might want to read more about autism in children or just think before you type.
You should also think before you call people stupid. If you google autism test, you'll find this:
https://www.clinical-partners.co.uk/for-adults/autism-and-as...
"I prefer to do things on my own, rather than with others."
"I prefer doing things the same way - for instance my morning routine or trip to the supermarket"
"I find myself becoming strongly absorbed in something – even obsessional"
These are all questions everybody living in a modern society can relate to.
Of course autism is a real condition, but modern society somewhat requires people to be machine like and that can easily look like someone is on the spectrum.
If you think you've explained autism, I invite you to publish a paper.
> Social communication disorder is rarely diagnosed in favor of autism primarily because autism provides access to critical services, insurance coverage, educational support, and legal protections that social communication disorder does not reliably offer
That feels important
As some on with Schizoaffective Disorder, OCD, and Panic Disoder, I know why people want to have an Autism diagnosis. It is because people with Autism are more studied, get more assistance, and are get more sympathy from the general public.
Someone with Autism can act out and people will be like "That's OK, he has Autism". But when I act out, there is no understanding.
What is missing in the article is there does exist overlap in these condiations, not only symptomatically, but also genetically. As far as genetics, just take a look at the calcium channel gene CACNA1C:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31805042/
I would probably had an Asperger's diagnosis when I was a kid, but most of my Autism was beaten out of my by my older brother's and kids in school. I mean, I was so deep into astronomy when I was 10 and I would not let go if it even though everyone teased me about it and I talked about it all the time anyway.
I am in my early 60's now, homeless, living in a Minivan, driving around, researching my genetics obsessively to the point where I communicate with some leading specialists in the United States, but still no one cares.
So yeah, do I wish I could say I had clinical Asperger's? Yes. Yes. Only so I can be accepted for my neurodivergence.
No worries. I am schizotypy but I have suffered plenty. It's not so much better than Asperger's but I can lead an autonomous life. I could prefer to be normal but there's that. Some people use it for greatness, some suffer it for live; thing is you're not alone. Please give some time to the outward world and focus on some socials from time to time. Things will be fine.
I find all these conversation around neuro-divergence extremely weird, for the simple reason that I have a never seen a proper definition of what a "normal" person actually is, and for good and obvious reasons:
I personally believe that "normal", when it comes to people's behavior, social interactions, and the way their mind works, is a completely broken idea. All of these attributes are completely fluid, depending on the when, where and who with you happen to be.
On that premise, the whole idea of neuro-divergence and the idea that you can classify people in arbitrary categories such as ADHD, Autism, etc ... and that this classification will lead to a way to "fix them" is complete and utter BS.
Lot to unpack from what you said, but whatever you want to make of the classifications (created by people much more knowledgeable than you or I in this field, but with plenty of conformist baggage), my time with ADHD or whatever you'd like to call it has absolutely shaped the experience of my life, and taking medication has objectively helped. My brain objectively processes things differently from whatever you'd like to call the median of people, and functions different with different chemicals. Personally, because of this medication that allows me to focus, I have been able to remain on par with my peers, if not with more elbow grease -- so I quite benefit from the label, weird and fluid as it may be.
An interesting fact is that caffeine will often affect the "ADHD mind" differently. It's been reported to have no effect, or have very limited effect, or make people even sleepy, but almost always something non-standard. Once, in high school, without the supervision of my parents, I drank maybe 2 red bulls and 2 cups of coffee, 1 black. I remember feeling disappointed it didn't work, and I didn't feel any rush of energy.
I was certainly not trying to say that differences between people do not exist and most certainly never claimed that your brain should work the way other people's brain do (At my age, I absolutely know mine does not, by a wide margin, and never has, and I'm in fact quite fond of that fact).
I'm simply saying that the way we're classifying people is utter BS, and assigning labels is very hurtful
Everyone is different. The "median man" does not exist. Or if he does there are maybe 3 on the whole planet, not something significant.
Much like your fingerprints, your brain is completely unique, and what chemicals / lifestyle / circumstances affect it in what way is a hugely personal affair. And to make matters even more complicated, it changes very much over time.
If you agree to let any kind of random bozo, with a so-called specialist title and a diploma tell you that you are a "typical neuro-divergent belong to class XYZ", run like hell.
The only way is to experiment with the way your mind works: chemicals, social groups, type of work, meditation, yoga, sports, more or less social interaction, whatever ultimately gets you to where you want to be.
But if you let every other snake oil salesman out there, or the rest of humanity in general, tell you who you are and who you ought to be ... good luck to you.
> I find all these conversation around neuro-divergence extremely weird, for the simple reason that I have a never seen a proper definition of what a "normal" person actually is, and for good and obvious reasons:
The problem is that no-one can easily understand how their brain works compared to other people. People on both sides don't talk about it enough or openly enough. If you look at the science it quickly descends in to endless confusing/impenetrable psychiatric terminology.
You can study things like anaemia as you can objectively measure the red blood cell count of a patient's blood. You can't objectively measure a patient's "focus" or "motivation". It's really hard to even get a good subjective measure of those things.
For example, it's just one aspect, but prior to diagnosis and taking methylphenidate (Ritalin/Concerta) I thought everyone had hundreds of competing thoughts running through their head all the time. I thought everyone just had better ways of dealing with it than I did. I had no idea that's not the case. I'd got to 50+ years old, got several degrees, married and had a family, had a successful career, not quite FAANG but earning more than 6 figures, all in spite of how my brain works. Surely there can't be anything "wrong" with me.
But when the medication first kicked in I was simply astounded how quiet my brain became and how clearly I could think about just one thing (it may not be the thing I actually wanted to focus on at that time but that's another facet of the fun). How the hell did I manage to get by all this time without this? It's only then in speaking to other people do I find out that, no, most other people don't have hundreds of competing thoughts running through their head all the time snapping at their focus.
> On that premise, the whole idea of neuro-divergence and the idea that you can classify people in arbitrary categories such as ADHD, Autism, etc ... and that this classification will lead to a way to "fix them" is complete and utter BS.
I agree with point about broad classifications, but medicine is far from the exact science that people believe it is. Got these symptoms? Does medication A improve them? Can you live with the side effects of medication A? Does medication B help with the side effects of medication A and not interfere with the improvements given my medication A? etc...
> but medicine is far from the exact science
Truer words ...
As a matter of fact, calling it science ... quite the stretch when it comes to most medical professionals I've met in my long life.
Autism is over diagnosed, because you get government money as a doctor and a patient.
My niece has a disibility that they haven't really been able to diagnose.
If it is Autism, there is all kinds of free care available.
Usually when you follow the money, you get answers.