11 ms·

Broader Autism Phenotype: What does it mean to have just a hint of autism?

68 points by Kaibeezy 5y ago

tgv 5y ago
Making something genetic without even being able to define what it is. It's self-report surveys and grouping by association all the way down. Says something about the state of psychology.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I've only skimmed the article, there was a lot of... ehhh in there. That said, ASD is a spectrum (as the S indicates), and it's not a "yes or no" spectrum, but more like a row of sliders that will be different for everybody, and THEN you have to make the distinction between sliders that people have, sliders that people show, and sliders that adjust over a lifetime of things like coping mechanisms, experiences, masking-turned-into-a-personality, etc. I'm pretty confident that a lot of sliders are shared with ADHD; it seems like more and more research shows (citation needed) that the two have a lot in common / overlap / etc. I'm not convinced it's environmental at all though. Genetic, I can see that; the one thing to note there though is that our parents and grandparents' environments dealt with ASD and ADHD differently from today, think of different education systems, different work, access to information, punishment for maladjusted behaviours, and diagnosis. In hindsight, people with ADHD and ASD, especially if only diagnosed as an adult, will see similar traits in their parents.
nicoburns 5y ago
Many people within the Autism community have pointed out that the diagnostic criteria for Autism tends to include mainly traits of distressed autistics: things like meltdowns, shutdowns, and poor social skills. Whereas there seem to be a much larger group of people who have similar traits and experiences but who are coping with it much better (although not necessarily entirely well) who get completely missed.
- moomin 5y ago
  Very much this. I’ve spoken to a lot of parents of autistic kids and a whole bunch of symptoms commonly associated with autism are actually stress reactions and nothing to do with autism at all. If you found that people behaved in weird and confusing ways every day you might get withdrawn too.
  - banannaise 5y ago
    Plus, instead of accepting autistic behaviors as quirks, we often try to psychologically beat it out of them (ABA therapy). This of course tends to make things worse rather than better, and you end up with a lot of autistic people who have two modes: pretending their best to be "normal", and complete meltdown when that fails.
- h0l0cube 5y ago
  Having a hint of autism, from personal experience, puts you in this uncanny valley, where you act in ways that confound other people, and you have a hell of a time fitting in, but not enough to make it click for them. If you mask almost well enough and fall a little short, people categorize you as eccentric, creepy, foolish, or all of the above. This is one context where I think identifying as autistic can be helpful, even though that can arouse some deeply held prejudices in some.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    "people categorize you as eccentric, creepy, foolish, or all of the above." This was the first time I've heard the foolish part. This is definitely making me question some of my past and pushing me even closer to consider getting evaluated. The main thing stopping me is, how will a diagnosis help me? I feel what it wouldn't change anything in my personal life. I would like to make my job better, but I'm not sure what they would actually do since my biggest issues are when they lie or otherwise don't honor their word. Then I have managers telling me things don't work the way the policies say they should and that I'm foolish for taking the approach that relies on those policies/systems.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      Honestly, a diagnosis probably won’t help very much. There just aren’t very many support systems available for autistic adults. What I have had good success with is asking for accommodations with a business justification. Why do I need X? Because I’m more productive that way and otherwise I’m prone to burn out. That might be because I’m autistic, but in some ways that's not actually relevant.
- erinaceousjones 5y ago
  This reminds me of how diagnostic criteria for autism all tends to focus on _presented behaviours_ rather than _internal experiences_. People who have different sensory perceptions of the world get overlooked when they're not getting overloaded by it, because there's less reason for them to try to describe their experiences if they're not distressed. You ask those people how they think/feel/perceive out of _curiosity_, though, and a whole bunch can be revealed! I relate to that a lot, having a recent ADHD diagnosis as an adult - there's definitely some overlap between autism/ADHD traits; in conversation with my autistic friends and ADHD friends there's definitely some stuff we share when it comes to sensory stuff, and it's even _more_ overlooked when it comes to ADHD d/x. Like, _why_ is that kid throwing a massive meltdown? Has anyone helped them to work out their triggers? Is it something as simple as: overhead fluorescent lighting, or the area is too busy with sounds? It really bugged me when I got my ADHD d/x that my psychiatrist, as lovely as he was, described me as "a mild case". Because psychiatry is all about quantifying "health risk" of "disorder". In his mind, because I had "no trouble holding a job down" and "had never been to prison", I was doing great. (Way to feed into my impostor syndrome, doc!) But after diagnosis, after access to the stimulant meds, and making much more sense of how my brain ticks - all the day to day stuff I was _silently_ struggling with _without even noticing that I was struggling_, I can handle better! Concrete example: Large, busy supermarkets and shopping malls. Those places don't make me melt down: I don't get angry or upset. But visually, audibly and olfactor-ily, those places can be really overwhelming for me. I tend to get quite quiet (shutdown?) and dissociate a bit, but I don't present as being _distressed_. And all I notice, is that after being in those environments, I am tired out, and need some recovery time in my own environment. Now I'm taking ADHD meds, those places are a _lot_ easier to handle and I require less recovery time after. It's especially difficult for kids to describe their internal experiences which I think is partly the reason why diagnostic criteria is so focused on behaviours - and those behaviours are the most evident when they come from distress, which results in our neurodivergence being pathologised so much. But I really really hope that the focus - especially in schools - can shift, and that people can help kids think and describe how they perceive the world more. What we have now is "kid is not developing at same rate as their peers" and "kid has 'odd' behaviours".
  - jamincan 5y ago
- licensetoill 5y ago
  > to include mainly traits of distressed autistics When you understand that mental illness is meeting the criteria such that they cause serious issue in in your life, this makes perfect sense. We're all sad sometimes, maybe even fall into "a funk" but that might not well meet the level of clinical depression. Someone might be able to casually smoke some meth, while another goes off the rails into substance abuse disorder. We diagnose based on the impact, if you're the former and not the latter you do not have the diagnosis even if you have the same basal elements as the latter.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    I think the point is that specifically in the case of autism, it would be really useful to provide preventative support before it gets to the point of complete dysfunction.
  - banannaise 5y ago
    Except that's not really it. The focus isn't on what causes serious issues for us, it's all about the things that cause distress for the people around us. Autism is largely understood, diagnosed, and "treated" as You're Making Us Uncomfortable Disease
subroutine 5y ago
> while others, including parents of children with severe autism, complained that he trivialized the real problems of a real disability. As a former autism researcher I empathize with these parents. The cohort I worked with, considered mild Autism 20 years ago (now probably considered "severe") had unmistakable psychological impairments. They were not just quirky, or socially awkward, and certainly not giving highly articulate TED talks, or campaigning on twitter for NIH 'normies' to cancel genetic research on Autism. I don't question there exists a spectrum of asocial phenotypes, with some neurocorrelate. But it's been a great disservice to individuals with Autism 'proper' to be grouped (even if just by name) in a spectrum with folks with such mild issues.
- camtarn 5y ago
  These things are not mutually exclusive. There are people who can speak articulately and campaign on Twitter some days, and have disabling meltdowns and total inability to manage life on other days. Like many things, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle: I have no doubt that there are also a lot of people who have taken one dubious questionnaire and self-diagnosed as autistic, and I also empathize with the parents of autistic children who seem light-years apart from autistic folk who can at least live mostly independently. I don't know what the future of autism research and funding needs to look like, but it feels like there still needs to be further change.
  - subroutine 5y ago
    > These things are not mutually exclusive. There are people who can speak articulately and campaign on Twitter some days, and have disabling meltdowns and total inability to manage life on other days. That describes 90% of the population. The group of kids I worked with I'm sure have never used twitter. My main qualm is with the anti-research advocacy. Those that are advocating against basic research seem worried about losing their autism 'affiliation'. More research means scientists working towards defining physiological underpinnings, which would lead to more scientific diagnosis criteria (e.g. genomic markers, fMRI/DRI markers, etc.). And if they are found to not have those characteristics, well, what does that mean for them? Does it mean their issues aren't real? Of course not. But it certainly doesn't make sense to call them Autistic. Their disorder should be coined a different name.
globular-toast 5y ago
I've always considered myself "slightly autistic". Like many in this community I'm highly technical, geeky etc. I always considered it an advantage. It got me great academic results and a great job. But I'm really bad at relationships. I've been unable to maintain one for more than a few years. Looking back I can see what the problems were. Not listening properly to my partner because I'm too busy with something else. Not understanding her feelings and not thinking about how my actions might make her feel. Being completely content with routine for months on end and being inflexible when it comes to new ideas. At the end of the relationship I basically went into a mild shutdown. Unable to process what was happening until many months later. This is now causing me great distress as I long to have a family. I'm confident these problems can be overcome with some up front understanding of what I need to do to combat my weaknesses. I just wish someone had told me earlier to expect these kinds of problems and that relationships won't be as easy as programming is for me.
- AndrewDucker 5y ago
  Being warned early would definitely help, and I'm glad that people are now getting these warnings sometimes, because it's picked up sooner. I hope you can find the right things to help you learn. (I recommend making platonic friends with people, and talking to them about it.)
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  I think relationships are just hard for everyone, and those outcomes may not be because of geekiness but maybe just incompatibility. Being super outgoing or social is no guarantee of relationship success either, although yeah it does make getting the dates in the first place easier. I reckon the fact you are self reflecting like this puts you in the top 5% in terms of “good at relationships” and future ones will be better. In otherwords; be kind to yourself!
  - Kaibeezy 5y ago
    Concur. Persist and reap ongoing improvement. I identify with globular-toast's self-description and experiences, but often erred in relationships (both personal and professional) in the opposite way as well, that is, by over-accommodating and failing to see the end had long passed. Finding the balance of im/patience, but not too much, with both others and myself, has been a permanent project, with many and increasing successes.
HPsquared 5y ago
Most things in medicine are like this. There's a normal range of some trait, and then there are the extremes which have known pathologies. Take blood pressure for example, you can be "on the higher end of normal" without having "high blood pressure". Personality traits are of course harder to define and measure, but it seems to be the same principle. It's partly statistics ("this person is an outlier") and partly effects ("this condition is causing problems for the patient, such that the benefits of medical intervention xyz would outweigh the costs/risks").
louwrentius 5y ago
FWIW this article is from 2014
matt321 5y ago
> I cant be successful I have autism!! then goes back to playing video games and working as a grocery bagger at age 35. "Mild" autism is just an excuse.
- smeej 5y ago
  I think a better way to approach it is, "I may need to find a different path to success than the neurotypical examples I've seen because I'm autistic." It's a level of work NTs don't have to put in. They can follow the examples of other NTs and reasonably expect it to work. Autistic people have to step back, evaluate why the method isn't working for them, iterate, and try again. But you're right--it doesn't have to be insurmountable. I figure if my challenge weren't this, it would just have been something else. No sense wishing to trade struggles. I have the one I have. So it's up to me to make a strategy to handle it.
  - smeej 5y ago
    Follow-on comment: I think the helpful thing about labels is that they help people find other people who are also trying to make strategies around similar struggles and learn from them.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Mild autism can mean different things. It shouldn't be an absolute prevention of success, but I'm sure it could make it harder (life is already hard). I haven't been diagnosed, but a lot of the articles on this resonate (I scored a 6/10 on the screening and I don't even know how I can answer one of the remaining questions). I absolutely hate my job. I used to like it when I didn't have to worry about politics, policies, etc. Now it's absolute torture to go into work because I know I have to play politics, other people don't see things the way I do, I'm being told I have to change my opinions/insights/personality to match others, and the company violates their policies or says they don't mean what they literally say. If I have mild autism, then it's absolutely exhausting with no reward or end in sight. But maybe that's how it is for everyone?
lesgobrandon 5y ago
chillingeffect 5y ago
10 question test mentioned in article: https://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/tests/AQ10.pdf https://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/tests/AQ10.pdf
- giantg2 5y ago
  I scored a 6 and I'm unable to answer number 2...
- chubot 5y ago
  Cool... well I've never been considered autistic and I scored a 5, so there's some confirmation. I have been wondering about this because my current work has attracted many mentally divergent people, probably due to its intense detail. Though this is generally a good thing right now.
- JonChesterfield 5y ago
  Disproportionately annoyed that 'slightly' and 'definitely' have their own columns but equal weight.
FrozenVoid 5y ago
Society medicalizes outliers, the common 'nerd' in 1980's would be labeled as 'aspie' or autistic today. The cultural status has changed drastically, since technological skill became a valued commodity but judgement of nerds as 'abnormal' remains. "Autistic traits" ascribed to people without serious mental deviations are Western culture rationalizations of intellectual withdrawal and critical vision of social circles coming from intellectuals: the social values that drive this distinction are relics of primitive societies that focused on biological performance and let intellect be merely a tool to achieve some concrete task. This obviously changed with time, but socially the ranks of 'apes in modern clothing' prevail in numbers over the intellectual minority, deciding their 'mental traits' as some troublesome deviation that has to be normalized and streamlined to 'fit in mainstream society'. It does not occur to them that society itself is pathological amalgamation of incompatible and competing cliques/interest groups that does't have any 'inherent human values' like a corporation doesn't value much from profit and market share. The idea of social skills and (enforced) social integration assumes this is the 'default' state and not culturally-bound complex of psychologically divergent behaviors that cannot be "normal" as 'asocial' behavior is right below the surface of most societies and requires arcane control mechanisms to suppress and redirect(law, armies,police, education,etc) - the 'normality' of this social structure is never questioned and people treat this "enculturation" process as some mandatory part of civilization, that their identity is based on - they cannot see their individual worth without social approval and social circles of support, the manufactured narratives and media feeds dictating what to think today. All of which are disgusting and exploitative controls that keep these 'apes in modern clothing' in line, as bread and circuses continue. Medicalizing me would not change society or improve it overall, it would just enforce another layer of cultural control - training people to treat intelligence itself as symptoms of some manufactured "spectrum" or "complex"( formally approved by Science™ as 'Broader Autism Spectrum')..as if Idiocracy was slowly seeping into real world.
callesgg 5y ago
Autism or at least high functioning autism is characterised by poor theory of mind. ie. you have defective/poor/inaccurate models for understanding how emotions effect thoughts/behaviour and the other way around. More or less the same thing as poor emotional intelligence. If someone would tell me that they have a little bit of autism I would interpret that as them having poor emotional intelligence.
- q-big 5y ago
  > Autism or at least high functioning autism is characterised by poor theory of mind. Neurotypical people have (with few exceptions) a similarly poor theory of mind of what goes on inside autistic/Asperger people. But because the latter are a minority, it is those who get stigmatized.
  - callesgg 5y ago
    It is true that many people who are not diagnosed with autism have quite terible theory of mind to. But it seams like you are missing a part of what poor theory of mind means here. It means that you don’t understand yourself and your own minds tendencies just as much as you don’t understand other peoples perspectives.
    - puffoflogic 5y ago
      Imagine thinking that you know gp commenter's internal mental faculties better than gp. Remind me again which one of you is supposed to have the faulty theory of mind?!
      - callesgg 5y ago
        I read a ridiculous text, and I then I tried to figure out what made the author write that ridiculous text. After which I responded with the hypotesis that was the result of my pondering. The pondering is not intended as a truth about the authors mental state, it is simply my intuition of an idea that a mind that would write such a statement might be blind to. But who knows... here I am on the internet trying out my ideas.

68 points by Kaibeezy 5y ago

tgv 5y ago

Making something genetic without even being able to define what it is. It's self-report surveys and grouping by association all the way down. Says something about the state of psychology.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I've only skimmed the article, there was a lot of... ehhh in there. That said, ASD is a spectrum (as the S indicates), and it's not a "yes or no" spectrum, but more like a row of sliders that will be different for everybody, and THEN you have to make the distinction between sliders that people have, sliders that people show, and sliders that adjust over a lifetime of things like coping mechanisms, experiences, masking-turned-into-a-personality, etc. I'm pretty confident that a lot of sliders are shared with ADHD; it seems like more and more research shows (citation needed) that the two have a lot in common / overlap / etc. I'm not convinced it's environmental at all though. Genetic, I can see that; the one thing to note there though is that our parents and grandparents' environments dealt with ASD and ADHD differently from today, think of different education systems, different work, access to information, punishment for maladjusted behaviours, and diagnosis. In hindsight, people with ADHD and ASD, especially if only diagnosed as an adult, will see similar traits in their parents.

nicoburns 5y ago

Many people within the Autism community have pointed out that the diagnostic criteria for Autism tends to include mainly traits of distressed autistics: things like meltdowns, shutdowns, and poor social skills. Whereas there seem to be a much larger group of people who have similar traits and experiences but who are coping with it much better (although not necessarily entirely well) who get completely missed.

moomin 5y ago
Very much this. I’ve spoken to a lot of parents of autistic kids and a whole bunch of symptoms commonly associated with autism are actually stress reactions and nothing to do with autism at all. If you found that people behaved in weird and confusing ways every day you might get withdrawn too.
- banannaise 5y ago
  Plus, instead of accepting autistic behaviors as quirks, we often try to psychologically beat it out of them (ABA therapy). This of course tends to make things worse rather than better, and you end up with a lot of autistic people who have two modes: pretending their best to be "normal", and complete meltdown when that fails.
h0l0cube 5y ago
Having a hint of autism, from personal experience, puts you in this uncanny valley, where you act in ways that confound other people, and you have a hell of a time fitting in, but not enough to make it click for them. If you mask almost well enough and fall a little short, people categorize you as eccentric, creepy, foolish, or all of the above. This is one context where I think identifying as autistic can be helpful, even though that can arouse some deeply held prejudices in some.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "people categorize you as eccentric, creepy, foolish, or all of the above." This was the first time I've heard the foolish part. This is definitely making me question some of my past and pushing me even closer to consider getting evaluated. The main thing stopping me is, how will a diagnosis help me? I feel what it wouldn't change anything in my personal life. I would like to make my job better, but I'm not sure what they would actually do since my biggest issues are when they lie or otherwise don't honor their word. Then I have managers telling me things don't work the way the policies say they should and that I'm foolish for taking the approach that relies on those policies/systems.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Honestly, a diagnosis probably won’t help very much. There just aren’t very many support systems available for autistic adults. What I have had good success with is asking for accommodations with a business justification. Why do I need X? Because I’m more productive that way and otherwise I’m prone to burn out. That might be because I’m autistic, but in some ways that's not actually relevant.
erinaceousjones 5y ago
This reminds me of how diagnostic criteria for autism all tends to focus on _presented behaviours_ rather than _internal experiences_. People who have different sensory perceptions of the world get overlooked when they're not getting overloaded by it, because there's less reason for them to try to describe their experiences if they're not distressed. You ask those people how they think/feel/perceive out of _curiosity_, though, and a whole bunch can be revealed! I relate to that a lot, having a recent ADHD diagnosis as an adult - there's definitely some overlap between autism/ADHD traits; in conversation with my autistic friends and ADHD friends there's definitely some stuff we share when it comes to sensory stuff, and it's even _more_ overlooked when it comes to ADHD d/x. Like, _why_ is that kid throwing a massive meltdown? Has anyone helped them to work out their triggers? Is it something as simple as: overhead fluorescent lighting, or the area is too busy with sounds? It really bugged me when I got my ADHD d/x that my psychiatrist, as lovely as he was, described me as "a mild case". Because psychiatry is all about quantifying "health risk" of "disorder". In his mind, because I had "no trouble holding a job down" and "had never been to prison", I was doing great. (Way to feed into my impostor syndrome, doc!) But after diagnosis, after access to the stimulant meds, and making much more sense of how my brain ticks - all the day to day stuff I was _silently_ struggling with _without even noticing that I was struggling_, I can handle better! Concrete example: Large, busy supermarkets and shopping malls. Those places don't make me melt down: I don't get angry or upset. But visually, audibly and olfactor-ily, those places can be really overwhelming for me. I tend to get quite quiet (shutdown?) and dissociate a bit, but I don't present as being _distressed_. And all I notice, is that after being in those environments, I am tired out, and need some recovery time in my own environment. Now I'm taking ADHD meds, those places are a _lot_ easier to handle and I require less recovery time after. It's especially difficult for kids to describe their internal experiences which I think is partly the reason why diagnostic criteria is so focused on behaviours - and those behaviours are the most evident when they come from distress, which results in our neurodivergence being pathologised so much. But I really really hope that the focus - especially in schools - can shift, and that people can help kids think and describe how they perceive the world more. What we have now is "kid is not developing at same rate as their peers" and "kid has 'odd' behaviours".
- jamincan 5y ago
licensetoill 5y ago
> to include mainly traits of distressed autistics When you understand that mental illness is meeting the criteria such that they cause serious issue in in your life, this makes perfect sense. We're all sad sometimes, maybe even fall into "a funk" but that might not well meet the level of clinical depression. Someone might be able to casually smoke some meth, while another goes off the rails into substance abuse disorder. We diagnose based on the impact, if you're the former and not the latter you do not have the diagnosis even if you have the same basal elements as the latter.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  I think the point is that specifically in the case of autism, it would be really useful to provide preventative support before it gets to the point of complete dysfunction.
- banannaise 5y ago
  Except that's not really it. The focus isn't on what causes serious issues for us, it's all about the things that cause distress for the people around us. Autism is largely understood, diagnosed, and "treated" as You're Making Us Uncomfortable Disease

subroutine 5y ago

> while others, including parents of children with severe autism, complained that he trivialized the real problems of a real disability. As a former autism researcher I empathize with these parents. The cohort I worked with, considered mild Autism 20 years ago (now probably considered "severe") had unmistakable psychological impairments. They were not just quirky, or socially awkward, and certainly not giving highly articulate TED talks, or campaigning on twitter for NIH 'normies' to cancel genetic research on Autism. I don't question there exists a spectrum of asocial phenotypes, with some neurocorrelate. But it's been a great disservice to individuals with Autism 'proper' to be grouped (even if just by name) in a spectrum with folks with such mild issues.

camtarn 5y ago
These things are not mutually exclusive. There are people who can speak articulately and campaign on Twitter some days, and have disabling meltdowns and total inability to manage life on other days. Like many things, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle: I have no doubt that there are also a lot of people who have taken one dubious questionnaire and self-diagnosed as autistic, and I also empathize with the parents of autistic children who seem light-years apart from autistic folk who can at least live mostly independently. I don't know what the future of autism research and funding needs to look like, but it feels like there still needs to be further change.
- subroutine 5y ago
  > These things are not mutually exclusive. There are people who can speak articulately and campaign on Twitter some days, and have disabling meltdowns and total inability to manage life on other days. That describes 90% of the population. The group of kids I worked with I'm sure have never used twitter. My main qualm is with the anti-research advocacy. Those that are advocating against basic research seem worried about losing their autism 'affiliation'. More research means scientists working towards defining physiological underpinnings, which would lead to more scientific diagnosis criteria (e.g. genomic markers, fMRI/DRI markers, etc.). And if they are found to not have those characteristics, well, what does that mean for them? Does it mean their issues aren't real? Of course not. But it certainly doesn't make sense to call them Autistic. Their disorder should be coined a different name.

globular-toast 5y ago

I've always considered myself "slightly autistic". Like many in this community I'm highly technical, geeky etc. I always considered it an advantage. It got me great academic results and a great job. But I'm really bad at relationships. I've been unable to maintain one for more than a few years. Looking back I can see what the problems were. Not listening properly to my partner because I'm too busy with something else. Not understanding her feelings and not thinking about how my actions might make her feel. Being completely content with routine for months on end and being inflexible when it comes to new ideas. At the end of the relationship I basically went into a mild shutdown. Unable to process what was happening until many months later. This is now causing me great distress as I long to have a family. I'm confident these problems can be overcome with some up front understanding of what I need to do to combat my weaknesses. I just wish someone had told me earlier to expect these kinds of problems and that relationships won't be as easy as programming is for me.

AndrewDucker 5y ago
Being warned early would definitely help, and I'm glad that people are now getting these warnings sometimes, because it's picked up sooner. I hope you can find the right things to help you learn. (I recommend making platonic friends with people, and talking to them about it.)
quickthrower2 5y ago
I think relationships are just hard for everyone, and those outcomes may not be because of geekiness but maybe just incompatibility. Being super outgoing or social is no guarantee of relationship success either, although yeah it does make getting the dates in the first place easier. I reckon the fact you are self reflecting like this puts you in the top 5% in terms of “good at relationships” and future ones will be better. In otherwords; be kind to yourself!
- Kaibeezy 5y ago
  Concur. Persist and reap ongoing improvement. I identify with globular-toast's self-description and experiences, but often erred in relationships (both personal and professional) in the opposite way as well, that is, by over-accommodating and failing to see the end had long passed. Finding the balance of im/patience, but not too much, with both others and myself, has been a permanent project, with many and increasing successes.

HPsquared 5y ago

Most things in medicine are like this. There's a normal range of some trait, and then there are the extremes which have known pathologies. Take blood pressure for example, you can be "on the higher end of normal" without having "high blood pressure". Personality traits are of course harder to define and measure, but it seems to be the same principle. It's partly statistics ("this person is an outlier") and partly effects ("this condition is causing problems for the patient, such that the benefits of medical intervention xyz would outweigh the costs/risks").

louwrentius 5y ago

FWIW this article is from 2014

matt321 5y ago

> I cant be successful I have autism!! then goes back to playing video games and working as a grocery bagger at age 35. "Mild" autism is just an excuse.

smeej 5y ago
I think a better way to approach it is, "I may need to find a different path to success than the neurotypical examples I've seen because I'm autistic." It's a level of work NTs don't have to put in. They can follow the examples of other NTs and reasonably expect it to work. Autistic people have to step back, evaluate why the method isn't working for them, iterate, and try again. But you're right--it doesn't have to be insurmountable. I figure if my challenge weren't this, it would just have been something else. No sense wishing to trade struggles. I have the one I have. So it's up to me to make a strategy to handle it.
- smeej 5y ago
  Follow-on comment: I think the helpful thing about labels is that they help people find other people who are also trying to make strategies around similar struggles and learn from them.
giantg2 5y ago
Mild autism can mean different things. It shouldn't be an absolute prevention of success, but I'm sure it could make it harder (life is already hard). I haven't been diagnosed, but a lot of the articles on this resonate (I scored a 6/10 on the screening and I don't even know how I can answer one of the remaining questions). I absolutely hate my job. I used to like it when I didn't have to worry about politics, policies, etc. Now it's absolute torture to go into work because I know I have to play politics, other people don't see things the way I do, I'm being told I have to change my opinions/insights/personality to match others, and the company violates their policies or says they don't mean what they literally say. If I have mild autism, then it's absolutely exhausting with no reward or end in sight. But maybe that's how it is for everyone?

lesgobrandon 5y ago

chillingeffect 5y ago

10 question test mentioned in article: https://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/tests/AQ10.pdf https://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/tests/AQ10.pdf

giantg2 5y ago
I scored a 6 and I'm unable to answer number 2...
chubot 5y ago
Cool... well I've never been considered autistic and I scored a 5, so there's some confirmation. I have been wondering about this because my current work has attracted many mentally divergent people, probably due to its intense detail. Though this is generally a good thing right now.
JonChesterfield 5y ago
Disproportionately annoyed that 'slightly' and 'definitely' have their own columns but equal weight.

FrozenVoid 5y ago

Society medicalizes outliers, the common 'nerd' in 1980's would be labeled as 'aspie' or autistic today. The cultural status has changed drastically, since technological skill became a valued commodity but judgement of nerds as 'abnormal' remains. "Autistic traits" ascribed to people without serious mental deviations are Western culture rationalizations of intellectual withdrawal and critical vision of social circles coming from intellectuals: the social values that drive this distinction are relics of primitive societies that focused on biological performance and let intellect be merely a tool to achieve some concrete task. This obviously changed with time, but socially the ranks of 'apes in modern clothing' prevail in numbers over the intellectual minority, deciding their 'mental traits' as some troublesome deviation that has to be normalized and streamlined to 'fit in mainstream society'. It does not occur to them that society itself is pathological amalgamation of incompatible and competing cliques/interest groups that does't have any 'inherent human values' like a corporation doesn't value much from profit and market share. The idea of social skills and (enforced) social integration assumes this is the 'default' state and not culturally-bound complex of psychologically divergent behaviors that cannot be "normal" as 'asocial' behavior is right below the surface of most societies and requires arcane control mechanisms to suppress and redirect(law, armies,police, education,etc) - the 'normality' of this social structure is never questioned and people treat this "enculturation" process as some mandatory part of civilization, that their identity is based on - they cannot see their individual worth without social approval and social circles of support, the manufactured narratives and media feeds dictating what to think today. All of which are disgusting and exploitative controls that keep these 'apes in modern clothing' in line, as bread and circuses continue. Medicalizing me would not change society or improve it overall, it would just enforce another layer of cultural control - training people to treat intelligence itself as symptoms of some manufactured "spectrum" or "complex"( formally approved by Science™ as 'Broader Autism Spectrum')..as if Idiocracy was slowly seeping into real world.

callesgg 5y ago

Autism or at least high functioning autism is characterised by poor theory of mind. ie. you have defective/poor/inaccurate models for understanding how emotions effect thoughts/behaviour and the other way around. More or less the same thing as poor emotional intelligence. If someone would tell me that they have a little bit of autism I would interpret that as them having poor emotional intelligence.

q-big 5y ago
> Autism or at least high functioning autism is characterised by poor theory of mind. Neurotypical people have (with few exceptions) a similarly poor theory of mind of what goes on inside autistic/Asperger people. But because the latter are a minority, it is those who get stigmatized.
- callesgg 5y ago
  It is true that many people who are not diagnosed with autism have quite terible theory of mind to. But it seams like you are missing a part of what poor theory of mind means here. It means that you don’t understand yourself and your own minds tendencies just as much as you don’t understand other peoples perspectives.
  - puffoflogic 5y ago
    Imagine thinking that you know gp commenter's internal mental faculties better than gp. Remind me again which one of you is supposed to have the faulty theory of mind?!
    - callesgg 5y ago
      I read a ridiculous text, and I then I tried to figure out what made the author write that ridiculous text. After which I responded with the hypotesis that was the result of my pondering. The pondering is not intended as a truth about the authors mental state, it is simply my intuition of an idea that a mind that would write such a statement might be blind to. But who knows... here I am on the internet trying out my ideas.