6 ms·

I remember a time when autistic meant that a person was unable to interact with others outside of a tightly controlled and consistent environment. Now autistic

I remember a time when autistic meant that a person was unable to interact with others outside of a tightly controlled and consistent environment. Now autistic is being used to label people that just need to 'veg out' at the end of the day.

cultofmetatron 4y ago
no kidding... I'm starting to wonder if I'm autistic after reading that
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sublinear 4y ago
> Burnout can erode independence. So can self diagnosis and over diagnosis.
- silverwasthere 4y ago
  Healthy autistic coping strategies are not going to hurt anyone. Take what you can use and leave the rest.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gizmo686 4y ago
That time was pre-2013. In 2013, a new revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders l, DSM-5, was released. This revision greatly expanded the scope of the 'autism' diagnosis (and eliminated the aspergers one). The theory is that it is all the same underlying thing, just with different severity and presentation.
- gowld 4y ago
  > The theory is that it is all the same underlying thing, No, there is no underlying thing in the DSM-classification. There are the "same" symptoms. The most obvious evidence for this is that "pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS)" and "childhood disintegrative disorder" both merged into "autism". Autism now means "anything with this symptom basket that is not covered by s more specific diagnosis". > with different severity and presentation. This part is true.
  - fsociety 4y ago
    Yes, there are theories that these things are all fundamentally monotropism. Then the criticism of the DSM is that it takes monotropic minds in the worst (read negative) environments, and buckets those into disorders like autism and ADHD. DSM classification is not fact, it is a diagnostic tool to assist with treatment. The theory of monotropism is an interesting area of research which potentially explains the underlying mechanism.
armchairhacker 4y ago
Autism is an extremely broad classification: honestly, probably too broad. Two people can be diagnosed with "autism" from wildly different symptoms. There are autistic people who present completely normal and those that can't speak and have extreme obsessions or extreme reactions to stimuli others would consider mild. Although it is still real. The people who present completely normal are still autistic, because behind the scenes they have some unusual way of thinking or strong obsession or strong reaction to the mild stimuli, they just don't show it.
- 0xffff2 4y ago
  >Autism is an extremely broad classification: honestly, probably too broad Hard agree with this. As someone who was diagnosed with Asperger's back when that was still a thing, it was a lot easier for me to say "I have mild Asperger's" on the rare occasion that I felt a need to explain than it is to quantify where I am on the huge swath of area now occupied by the term "autistic".
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    Inquiry: why did autism broaden to include aspergers in the first place? Why did the field deliberately make the move to broaden as oppose to narrow a diagnostic criteria? Not asking just you but anyone fairly educated on the subject. [Caveat: I'm super uninterested in hearing about big pharma conspiracies or whatever, please don't send me this.]
    - mwigdahl 4y ago
      Because there were (and are) a lot of disability accommodations available for people diagnosed with autism. Expanding the definitions made those accommodations and resources available to more people, and fit easily into the trend of medicalizing life (in particular, school performance). Win-win! Well, except for the severely disabled who can't advocate for themselves because they can't speak or communicate online, and now find themselves crowded out for the very benefits that were created to support them in the first place. But they're not the ones that vote or sound off on social media, so they're easier to ignore.
moffkalast 4y ago
People these days are like "if you can't concentrate for 30 hours straight you totally have ADHD".
- BizarreByte 4y ago
  Too bad the demand is that people do that very thing. It’s no surprise adderall is abused as work stress and requirements increase for many.
- dekhn 4y ago
  why I don't get is that I can't concentrate on any one thing for more than about 30 seconds but I've been working towards long-game goals for decades.
rocqua 4y ago
The scope of the labelhas definitely expanded. But the article here isn't saying that 'people who need to veg out have autistic burnout'. Instead its saying 'people who were already labeled autistic seem to respond in this peculiar cluster of begaviors when stressed in burn-out like ways'. If the article is correct, and the behaviors are quite unique to people labeled autistic, it actually supports autism as a diagnosis rather than just a label. Labels with predictive power regarding psychological behavior have some semblance of a diagnosis.
genderwhy 4y ago
Science has improved, yes. We've discovered there are many people who are able to produce a set of coping strategies that effectively mask their autism. This is what science does -- we continuously challenge what we know and change our definitions when we learn. The people who are experiencing diagnosis with autism and ADHD today will seem totally different than the diagnoses 50 years from now. You cannot hold on to one, old definition for something like autism (or any other non-neurotypical behavior) and expect it to remain the definition, unchanging.
- gowld 4y ago
  > You cannot hold on to one, old definition for something [...] and expect it to remain the definition, unchanging. If I'm autistic I absolutely will.
  - silverwasthere 4y ago
    Then you'll just have to include a date of diagnosis and we'll all be good. No worries. We still support you. (This is not meant with sarcasm, only a slight nod at programming language version numbers)
  - genderwhy 4y ago
    I assume this is a joke about autistic folks disliking change?
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  If somebody has coping strategies that effectively mask their autism (in the early childhood/developmental stage specifically), they DO NOT HAVE autism, because autism is defined by others perceptions of you particularly as a child. You're going to have to change how autism is diagnosed if you don't want this to be true, which would be a great idea, the DSM approach to diagnosis is fundamentally flawed. How SPECIFICALLY are these additional people getting diagnosed? Is there special training diagnosticians get to unveil the secret masked signs of autism? What are these scientific advances I've heard vaguely cited for the rise in autism diagnosis over the years? Why is it even possible for a diagnostic criteria that hasn't changed to result in dramatically different diagnostic rates over time, doesn't that prove the diagnostic process is fundamentally unreliable and thus fundamentally scientifically invalid? The fundamental cause of the rise of Autism is that both schools and parents both financially benefit from a child being labelled as "Autistic" and because the diagnostic criteria is so vague to begin with you can interpret it as it suits you. The driver isn't "science", there aren't scientists and doctors marching into schools outraged at improper diagnostic practices and making changes happen. It's driven by parents and schools looking for money, money is the dynamo driving this, autistics are rainmakers. Then schools will often restrict some of their resources to those with special needs or whatever, which only drives up the need for other parents to play the same game. I've seen how the sausage is made too, with parents and teachers and doctors outright committing fraud to ensure a child looked appropriately disabled on paper, downplaying their ability as much as possible, which further jades me regarding how "scientific" this all is. I've also seen no analysis on if this practice actually helps kids, which you really think there should be because all these kids we labelled as disordered all reported being suicidal later in life.
bitwize 4y ago
That time was probably before Lorna Wing's groundbreaking research on Asperger's syndrome was widely known. Before then, yes, autism was only recognized when it was severe. Those who had better coping abilities just got wedgies and swirlies at school. It's kind of like infection with a coronavirus: could be a mild cold, could be long COVID, depending on the type of coronavirus and the susceptibility of the patient. The spectrum for autism is similarly wide.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  >Before then, yes, autism was only recognized when it was severe. Those who had better coping abilities just got wedgies and swirlies at school. It just resulted in the teachers calling them disordered and sending extra staff to smother and socially stunt the students they deemed to have Aspergers, and then stopping this before puberty occurred, resulting in even more wedgies and swirlies. However, we started calling these students disordered, and let everybody know certain students who got bullied weren't victims of school neglect or other students or cultural norms, but of their disordered brains. So woke! We live in such enlightened times.
dekhn 4y ago
I like to put it as: to my parents generation (baby boomers), the definition of autism is Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and anybody who doesn't act exactly like that "doesn't have autism". I see many traits in me that are consistent with various forms of autism but I've always struggled to express them to others in a way that doesn't cause them to say "well can't you just not do that then?".
71a54xd 4y ago
With age, I've figured out I'm just flat out bad at socializing. Unless I'm around people I know, I basically act weird and socializing only goes well with a very narrow group of people. While I was living in New York I just kind of had to accept this and eventually left because I started to hate socializing. I'm now realizing this could've been a mistake, but it also might just be a crisis of realizing autism has basically nixed my ability to live a life that I enjoy.
- cwsx 4y ago
  Not sure if this relates to you, but I was recently diagnosed with ADHD (30~ y/o). My whole 20's I had trouble socialising outside of small groups of people I already knew, and wondered if it was autism related (my grandfather is undiagnosed but our family strongly suspects he's autistic). What changed everything for me, was finding the right stimulant medication. Turns out it wasn't the socialising, it was the big groups. I can't understand what people are saying, get distracted by background noises, lose my train of thought and then get anxious about how I'm acting (and how the person I'm talking to thinks of it). With medication it's just... normal. I still lose my train of thought or get distracted by background noises, but I'm able to return to the conversation much easier. More importantly, I'm not getting anxious in social environments anymore. Even the understanding that its ADHD related has helped my mental health a lot. I understand this doesn't quite relate to autism, but if you aren't diagnosed and only suspect it, I'd recommend investigating ADHD (as well as AUT+ADHD, which is its own thing entirely).
  - 71a54xd 4y ago
    Thanks, I also had a "late" diagnosis at 22. I've been on generic adderall for a while but I'm curious if you adjusted dosage or the kind of stimulant? I can assert as well that my social / auditory circuits work about 3x as well while I'm on stimulants (even a very small does of 5mg). Fortunately, I haven't had any dependency issues either. For me, my social problems are usually just not caring enough about being interesting to the other person or misreading facial expressions and thinking they're annoyed I'm talking to them.

cultofmetatron 4y ago

no kidding... I'm starting to wonder if I'm autistic after reading that

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sublinear 4y ago

> Burnout can erode independence. So can self diagnosis and over diagnosis.

silverwasthere 4y ago
Healthy autistic coping strategies are not going to hurt anyone. Take what you can use and leave the rest.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gizmo686 4y ago

That time was pre-2013. In 2013, a new revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders l, DSM-5, was released. This revision greatly expanded the scope of the 'autism' diagnosis (and eliminated the aspergers one). The theory is that it is all the same underlying thing, just with different severity and presentation.

gowld 4y ago
> The theory is that it is all the same underlying thing, No, there is no underlying thing in the DSM-classification. There are the "same" symptoms. The most obvious evidence for this is that "pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS)" and "childhood disintegrative disorder" both merged into "autism". Autism now means "anything with this symptom basket that is not covered by s more specific diagnosis". > with different severity and presentation. This part is true.
- fsociety 4y ago
  Yes, there are theories that these things are all fundamentally monotropism. Then the criticism of the DSM is that it takes monotropic minds in the worst (read negative) environments, and buckets those into disorders like autism and ADHD. DSM classification is not fact, it is a diagnostic tool to assist with treatment. The theory of monotropism is an interesting area of research which potentially explains the underlying mechanism.

armchairhacker 4y ago

Autism is an extremely broad classification: honestly, probably too broad. Two people can be diagnosed with "autism" from wildly different symptoms. There are autistic people who present completely normal and those that can't speak and have extreme obsessions or extreme reactions to stimuli others would consider mild. Although it is still real. The people who present completely normal are still autistic, because behind the scenes they have some unusual way of thinking or strong obsession or strong reaction to the mild stimuli, they just don't show it.

0xffff2 4y ago
>Autism is an extremely broad classification: honestly, probably too broad Hard agree with this. As someone who was diagnosed with Asperger's back when that was still a thing, it was a lot easier for me to say "I have mild Asperger's" on the rare occasion that I felt a need to explain than it is to quantify where I am on the huge swath of area now occupied by the term "autistic".
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  Inquiry: why did autism broaden to include aspergers in the first place? Why did the field deliberately make the move to broaden as oppose to narrow a diagnostic criteria? Not asking just you but anyone fairly educated on the subject. [Caveat: I'm super uninterested in hearing about big pharma conspiracies or whatever, please don't send me this.]
  - mwigdahl 4y ago
    Because there were (and are) a lot of disability accommodations available for people diagnosed with autism. Expanding the definitions made those accommodations and resources available to more people, and fit easily into the trend of medicalizing life (in particular, school performance). Win-win! Well, except for the severely disabled who can't advocate for themselves because they can't speak or communicate online, and now find themselves crowded out for the very benefits that were created to support them in the first place. But they're not the ones that vote or sound off on social media, so they're easier to ignore.

moffkalast 4y ago

People these days are like "if you can't concentrate for 30 hours straight you totally have ADHD".

BizarreByte 4y ago
Too bad the demand is that people do that very thing. It’s no surprise adderall is abused as work stress and requirements increase for many.
dekhn 4y ago
why I don't get is that I can't concentrate on any one thing for more than about 30 seconds but I've been working towards long-game goals for decades.

rocqua 4y ago

The scope of the labelhas definitely expanded. But the article here isn't saying that 'people who need to veg out have autistic burnout'. Instead its saying 'people who were already labeled autistic seem to respond in this peculiar cluster of begaviors when stressed in burn-out like ways'. If the article is correct, and the behaviors are quite unique to people labeled autistic, it actually supports autism as a diagnosis rather than just a label. Labels with predictive power regarding psychological behavior have some semblance of a diagnosis.

genderwhy 4y ago

Science has improved, yes. We've discovered there are many people who are able to produce a set of coping strategies that effectively mask their autism. This is what science does -- we continuously challenge what we know and change our definitions when we learn. The people who are experiencing diagnosis with autism and ADHD today will seem totally different than the diagnoses 50 years from now. You cannot hold on to one, old definition for something like autism (or any other non-neurotypical behavior) and expect it to remain the definition, unchanging.

gowld 4y ago
> You cannot hold on to one, old definition for something [...] and expect it to remain the definition, unchanging. If I'm autistic I absolutely will.
- silverwasthere 4y ago
  Then you'll just have to include a date of diagnosis and we'll all be good. No worries. We still support you. (This is not meant with sarcasm, only a slight nod at programming language version numbers)
- genderwhy 4y ago
  I assume this is a joke about autistic folks disliking change?
faeriechangling 4y ago
If somebody has coping strategies that effectively mask their autism (in the early childhood/developmental stage specifically), they DO NOT HAVE autism, because autism is defined by others perceptions of you particularly as a child. You're going to have to change how autism is diagnosed if you don't want this to be true, which would be a great idea, the DSM approach to diagnosis is fundamentally flawed. How SPECIFICALLY are these additional people getting diagnosed? Is there special training diagnosticians get to unveil the secret masked signs of autism? What are these scientific advances I've heard vaguely cited for the rise in autism diagnosis over the years? Why is it even possible for a diagnostic criteria that hasn't changed to result in dramatically different diagnostic rates over time, doesn't that prove the diagnostic process is fundamentally unreliable and thus fundamentally scientifically invalid? The fundamental cause of the rise of Autism is that both schools and parents both financially benefit from a child being labelled as "Autistic" and because the diagnostic criteria is so vague to begin with you can interpret it as it suits you. The driver isn't "science", there aren't scientists and doctors marching into schools outraged at improper diagnostic practices and making changes happen. It's driven by parents and schools looking for money, money is the dynamo driving this, autistics are rainmakers. Then schools will often restrict some of their resources to those with special needs or whatever, which only drives up the need for other parents to play the same game. I've seen how the sausage is made too, with parents and teachers and doctors outright committing fraud to ensure a child looked appropriately disabled on paper, downplaying their ability as much as possible, which further jades me regarding how "scientific" this all is. I've also seen no analysis on if this practice actually helps kids, which you really think there should be because all these kids we labelled as disordered all reported being suicidal later in life.

bitwize 4y ago

That time was probably before Lorna Wing's groundbreaking research on Asperger's syndrome was widely known. Before then, yes, autism was only recognized when it was severe. Those who had better coping abilities just got wedgies and swirlies at school. It's kind of like infection with a coronavirus: could be a mild cold, could be long COVID, depending on the type of coronavirus and the susceptibility of the patient. The spectrum for autism is similarly wide.

faeriechangling 4y ago
>Before then, yes, autism was only recognized when it was severe. Those who had better coping abilities just got wedgies and swirlies at school. It just resulted in the teachers calling them disordered and sending extra staff to smother and socially stunt the students they deemed to have Aspergers, and then stopping this before puberty occurred, resulting in even more wedgies and swirlies. However, we started calling these students disordered, and let everybody know certain students who got bullied weren't victims of school neglect or other students or cultural norms, but of their disordered brains. So woke! We live in such enlightened times.

dekhn 4y ago

I like to put it as: to my parents generation (baby boomers), the definition of autism is Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and anybody who doesn't act exactly like that "doesn't have autism". I see many traits in me that are consistent with various forms of autism but I've always struggled to express them to others in a way that doesn't cause them to say "well can't you just not do that then?".

71a54xd 4y ago

With age, I've figured out I'm just flat out bad at socializing. Unless I'm around people I know, I basically act weird and socializing only goes well with a very narrow group of people. While I was living in New York I just kind of had to accept this and eventually left because I started to hate socializing. I'm now realizing this could've been a mistake, but it also might just be a crisis of realizing autism has basically nixed my ability to live a life that I enjoy.

cwsx 4y ago
Not sure if this relates to you, but I was recently diagnosed with ADHD (30~ y/o). My whole 20's I had trouble socialising outside of small groups of people I already knew, and wondered if it was autism related (my grandfather is undiagnosed but our family strongly suspects he's autistic). What changed everything for me, was finding the right stimulant medication. Turns out it wasn't the socialising, it was the big groups. I can't understand what people are saying, get distracted by background noises, lose my train of thought and then get anxious about how I'm acting (and how the person I'm talking to thinks of it). With medication it's just... normal. I still lose my train of thought or get distracted by background noises, but I'm able to return to the conversation much easier. More importantly, I'm not getting anxious in social environments anymore. Even the understanding that its ADHD related has helped my mental health a lot. I understand this doesn't quite relate to autism, but if you aren't diagnosed and only suspect it, I'd recommend investigating ADHD (as well as AUT+ADHD, which is its own thing entirely).
- 71a54xd 4y ago
  Thanks, I also had a "late" diagnosis at 22. I've been on generic adderall for a while but I'm curious if you adjusted dosage or the kind of stimulant? I can assert as well that my social / auditory circuits work about 3x as well while I'm on stimulants (even a very small does of 5mg). Fortunately, I haven't had any dependency issues either. For me, my social problems are usually just not caring enough about being interesting to the other person or misreading facial expressions and thinking they're annoyed I'm talking to them.