8 ms·
I'm always a bit uncomfortable with articles that uncritically use the disease model for all of autism.
by wpietri 4y ago
I'm always a bit uncomfortable with articles that uncritically use the disease model for all of autism.
- nailer 4y agoExactly. Elon is open about ASD (he uses the word Asperger's because he’s older), Anthony Hopkins is open about autism too (he can memorise a 7 page script), I suspect Tarantino may have it, and half of the people who built the internet. Anyone that tries to ‘rectify’ me can fuck off. Edit: as a user of HN since it was Startup News, and as someone who is very much aware of the HN guidelines, 'fuck off' was chosen very carefully towards anyone who would erase my existence. Hopefully HN has a modicum of empathy for other people and can understand others not wanting to be destroyed.
- foolswisdom 4y agoSometimes I think I'd be quite happy to be "rectified" of ASD... Whether it is correct or not to see it _entirely_ in a disease model (which it's not clear to me, how should the study have been done with a hybrid model?), I have to disagree with the suggestion it shouldn't be seen as an issue.
- DoctorOW 4y agoBut what would "rectified" look like? Autism isn't entirely separable from the things that I think make me the person I am.
- foolswisdom 4y agoI agree it isn't entirely separable. I assume that personality / self develops differently due to the "issue" identified in the study, and if it were "rectified", then it would no longer be a factor. That doesn't mean that you'd wake up the next day as a completely different person. Everyone changes over time, and the prior "self" is still there and you can still choose how to integrate the new "changes". Of course, this is just my imagination, it may not actually be anything like that. But I will double down on the thrust of my original comment, which is that although autism is not simply a "disease" because the self has developed differently, doesn't necessarily mean that we want it to stay.
- goda90 4y agoDon't forget that the S in ASD is for "spectrum". There are parts of this spectrum with people for who ASD is debilitating to their happiness and participation in society. "Rectified" might not mean complete change, but enough to give someone the tools to handle things better.
- nailer 4y agoBut also removes the tools of autism. Neurotypical peopple often lie about things for social convenience, overly value fitting in, have trouble exploring the depths of their interests, and have a poor sense of smell and taste.
- marcellus23 4y agoFor people who are high-functioning, it may be that the benefits of autism you mentioned are worth the downsides. But I think most medium and low-functioning people would not agree with that.
- nailer 4y agoI’m technically level 2, which means there are periods where I cannot communicate. I have at least one level 3 friend that I’m sure would feel the same, I’ll ask her and find out for sure though.
- chasd00 4y agoI would be 100% ok with being cured of ADHD and off spectrum. If I don’t take my meds everything goes haywire for me and everyone around me. I don’t think people realize how “one hand tied behind your back” these things really are.
- cat_plus_plus 4y agoSo be a constant slave to judgement of strangers on how I talk, act and dress rather than tuning out all that useless noise and focusing on the few people and things I truly care about? That would be a hard pass for me. Maybe "ASD" umbrella is part of the problem, I don't have a "sensory integration disorder", I have emotions that tend to go from 0 to 65 with little in between and some other issues like poor facial memory (that would be nice to cure) and tendency to daydream. Maybe that's consistent with Aspergers as originally understood, maybe not. But just for starters, can we stop inventing nonsensical umbrella terms like "ASD" and "AAPI" that serve no purpose except shared victimhood and shaming everyone else for supposed microaggressions? Hawaii is not the same as India, and I don't need a service dog to tell me there is a fire alarm in my building. Maybe then it would be easier for me to work on my unique needs. Like you know how one in a several hundred people finds your responses 100% natural and preferable to superficial norms without necessarily sharing the same personality themselves? Would be great to be able to find them efficiently to maintain a decent social circle rather than stumbling upon one randomly every ten years.
- majikaja 4y agoI have a bit of difficulty trying to understand what ASD means for such individuals as adults. If one is highly intelligent one can just spend time studying people to determine how they respond to situations. I don't really grasp why understanding people is any different from analyzing any other kind of system. I wonder how many ASD diagnoses are made just because someone never learnt social skills properly due to circumstances or lack of effort/interest.
- 112233 4y agoHuh, have you experienced, or have been with a close person experiencing shutdown because environment is too loud, smelly, or there is someone acting in a provoking, humiliating manner? How analythical knowledge of social skills can be of help in that situation? Suppose three armed persons draw a weapon and give you contradicting orders while threatening you. How will deep understanding of those individual orders help you reconcile them and decide how to act?
- aleph_minus_one 4y ago> I have a bit of difficulty trying to understand what ASD means for such individuals as adults. If one is highly intelligent one can just spend time studying people to determine how they respond to situations. I don't really grasp why understanding people is any different from analyzing any other kind of system. I personally see three points: - People often expect that one reacts "intuitively" instead of analyzing the whole situation first - Humans don't behave in an "easy" way like physical systems. So extracting the "hidden laws" is in my opinion nigh impossible. - Even if one tries to find possible hypotheses, one has to run a huge amount of "experiments" to extract rules. What does "running experiments" here mean? Behaving in very weird ways all the time just to obtain data on the behavior of the people. And the required data volume is insane, so it means behaving consciously weirdly rather for decades.
- majikaja 4y agoI genuinely spend a lot of time studying people offline and online. I think someone who can't do this from first principles is probably going to struggle if they try living in a very foreign country or amongst a different subculture of their own nation. Most people can't cope outside their comfort zone.
- cma 4y agoHe said he was never diagnosed so take with a grain of salt.
- dsego 4y agoElon is probably as much ASD as he is an inventor. Going by his behavior (parts that are reported on in public), I can as a lay-person recognize him to have more narcissistic traits, so a personality disorder like NPD or ASPD is more descriptive of him in my mind. There is a good video on yt debunking his claims regarding his diagnosis. https://youtu.be/UCS0SuPsDH4 https://youtu.be/UCS0SuPsDH4
- nailer 4y ago> debunking his claims regarding his diagnosis. https://youtu.be/UCS0SuPsDH4 https://youtu.be/UCS0SuPsDH4 This video has logic like (all from the first 3 minutes): - "Elon wasn't public with his condition before SNL, nor did his mother reveal this deeply personal information, maybe he has it buy maybe he's a sociopath?". - Some people in our YouTube comments section have diagnoses and don't believe Elon. Here are their comments!
- andai 4y agoSo he's just plain weird then? ;)
- dsego 4y agoWhen you have money it's known as "eccentric", ie eccentric billionaire (similarly you have mad scientist, absent-minded professor, wise old man, etc).
- vjust 4y agoWhat did Elon invent? - just curious
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- krageon 4y agoCan you explain why? "Disease" doesn't mean that it is bad in all cases, it doesn't even mean that it needs to be cured. All it means it that it's not an optimal state in the eyes of most other people (i.e. it is normative). f.e. I don't think anyone has a problem with saying sickle cell is a disease, even though it has a large upside as well.
- wpietri 4y agoTrying to suggest that "disease" is a positive or even neural term is a giant stretch. And yes, my exact problem with it is that it is normative. Just because neurotypicals are in the majority does not make them better. Imagine if it were reversed, for example. In my view, the neurotypical fondness for drama is incredibly harmful. Ditto the way neurotypicals not only believe in all sorts of nonsense (UFOs, angels, gods, devils, etc.) but use that as justification for all sorts of dominance-driven behavior, up to and including genocide. And in practice the normative nature combined with the disease model leads to "medicalization of deviance". E.g., queer people's deviance was medicalized, seen as illness. ANd since they were sick, treatment was necessary, sometimes violently enforced treatment.
- hnbad 4y agoMany autistic people would disagree that being autistic is "not an optimal state". It's a different state. There are even some autistic people (on the extreme end: "aspie supremacists") who argue that being allistic (i.e. non-autistic) is actually more of an impairment. However most would at least say that autistic brains are not more or less "optimal", just different, and that normativity is more harmful than helpful. There are aspects of the kitchen sink that is Autistic Spectrum Disorder that can reasonably be argued to be an impairment (e.g. sensory overloads, situational mutism, etc) but autism is not in any way objectively suboptimal in itself, other than when it comes to interacting with allistics (but that goes both ways).
- causi 4y agobut autism is not in any way objectively suboptimal in itself For this to be true, autists would have to communicate and/or work with other autists as competently as neurotypicals mesh with each other. Strictly speaking, we should be able to work with other autists more easily than we work with neurotypicals who have a basic familiarity with autism, since we also have that advantage. In my experience we are not. Replacing your left hand with a sword also has measurable advantages but that doesn't make it not an overall impairment. Personally I find this cultural trend where "your deviation is your identity" to be illogical and offensive.
- scotty79 4y agoIsn't it a bit uncomfortable that term that described condition of non-verbal kids got so diluted that now there are adult people who self diagnose common human quirks with this term?
- senda 4y agoIt's a temporary catch all term that needs to go away once science illuminates this dark corner. We don't know why cockroaches turn left or right, psychologists need to be humbled.
- faeriechangling 4y agoIndeed, “spectrum” does mean “catch all” and autistics, where they do have medical issues (and they often do), don’t all have the same ones.
- beardedwizard 4y agoSelf diagnosis seems extremely popular in the last 2 years. Unrelated to autism, we also seem to be having an adhd epidemic based on the number of peole self diagnosing it.
- faeriechangling 4y agoSelf diagnosis is valid because the formal process is bullshit lol. The diagnostic process utterly lacks reliability in practice, there has been no two years in the last half a century where autism has been diagnosed at the same rate from year to year. Diagnosis has instead multiplied many times over. The biggest problem I have with self-diagnosis is the idea that self-diagnosis (along with formal diagnosis) is actually capable of diagnosing a neurodevelopment disorder. It just ain’t so and autism is a social construct that LARPs as a medical one.
- fluoridation 4y agoSelf-diagnosing was being mocked on the Internet at least as far back as 2006. It's definitely not just the last 2 years.
- jckahn 4y agoIMO the reclassification of Asperger’s Syndrome as a general Autism Spectrum disorder was massively unhelpful to all, and it only served to muddy conversations like this. Different ends of the spectrum affect people in wildly different ways. Different extremes need very different types of support. As a person with Asperger’s, I really wish it remained a distinct condition in terms of its classification.
- djaychela 4y agoHad this exact conversation with my 18-year-old daugther yesterday. She's fairly recently diagnosed and was happy with being described as Asperger's, but now it's much less clear when she's described as Autistic.
- adolph 4y agoHey, at least there is the pat on the head phrase of “high functioning” right?
- Loughla 4y agoI mean, I absolutely understand not wanting to use that, but what do I say instead? Autism is a spectrum, and some folks are less able to function than others on that spectrum. I legitimately want to know, because I don't know what to say here.
- mrguyorama 4y agoThe reality is that Autism as a whole IS NOT one single spectrum. It's a lot of different symptoms, needs, quirks, and crossover with a bunch of other mental illnesses as well, like social anxiety. Describing it as a singular variable "Spectrum" produces entirely wrong conclusions. It's more like a 10 dimensional space, at least, with each dimension being a symptom or needs category. For example, I don't think anyone would diagnose me with autism, or even old asbergers, but I have a lot of sensory issues and struggle to parse speech and faces. If you are aware of someone having some form of autism, and you want to know more about "where on the spectrum" they are, simply talk to them, ask what they struggle with, ask about their needs. If you didn't have to talk to a family member or nurse before talking to them, they probably don't need huge affordances.
- mikebonnell 4y agoAutism as a general topic should not be called a disease. As said so well in this article: https://novaramedia.com/2021/11/25/autism-is-not-a-disease/ https://novaramedia.com/2021/11/25/autism-is-not-a-disease/ "Treating autism as a ‘disease’, rather than a neurotype that exists as a result of natural biological variation, paves the way for a level of discrimination and stigmatisation that would not be acceptable if it were applied to other minority groups. At worst, it raises serious fears of eugenics. But the traditional understanding of autism as a deficit also plays a huge role in day-to-day discrimination against autistic people..." edit: removed a poorly worded section.
- jklinger410 4y ago> It is a disorder in that our norms of society are not aligned around Neurodiverse brains Reminder as always that over-simplifying autism to lean into the most high functioning description completely erases the existence of all of the severely autistic people out there who are barely able to function with their disorder. Given the context of how I understand autism, and my personal experience with it, as a severe inhibitor in a normal life for the people who suffer from it, I find the whole quote you shared as despicable. Further evidence that the autism you are talking about dismisses and denies the existence of many autistic individuals who are not as privileged to have such a high functioning variant. Your empathy for autistic people stops at a certain level of capability, because you refuse to even recognize that they exist within your argument. It makes my stomach churn.
- faeriechangling 4y agoI frankly don’t care if you feel the need to call me/a huge swathe or people disordered and have something medically wrong with them because you lack sufficient creativity to imagine how we could treat people with severe mental health issues if we failed to do this. Severely disabled autistic people don’t give two craps about autistic erasure, I knew some over a period of time, they never talked about ideas how “Asperger’s” was fundamentally problematic or any such hot takes, frankly they couldn’t hold a conversation and mostly wanted people to take care of them and be nice to them and for them to be more independent. This is about you, not them. All I hear is somebody calling me two insults, “disordered” and “privileged” who feels a sense of moral superiority for doing so. I never chose this label for myself, it was imposed upon me, I can’t choose to shed it, and I reject to being martyred for the sake of the severely disabled. I reject being labelled as having a neurological disorder without anybody looking at my Brain, taking my blood, doing any sort of objective testing, because some psychologist arbitrary deemed how I behave “deficits” through observation, an utterly subjective judgement. it’s some sort of moral obligation to believe I’m mentally disordered otherwise I’m hurting the severely disabled! You know maybe we could help the severely disabled by volunteering or donating to charity instead of this nonsense??