4 ms·

Curious why you feel autism is the most legit here when it's the one that's been expanded on the most due to the DSM. They all make statistical sense to me give

by gochi 3y ago

Curious why you feel autism is the most legit here when it's the one that's been expanded on the most due to the DSM. They all make statistical sense to me given the rising acceptance of mental health being a real thing in the first place, no longer dismissed as "just work harder".

EGreg 3y ago
I could be wrong. There has been an uptick in all of them, but I thought autism had less of an uptick, and there have been new biological environmental factors that may make autism something from birth, whether heritable or not. Whereas something like, say, gender dysphoria has positively exploded in diagnoses. It’s a worrying disorder, which (eg unlike autism) studies show leads 30-50% to attempt suicide. So any increase in its prevalence to 5% of the emerging US population is worrying. If this was, say, a coronavirus with that kind of risk to life, we’d all be worried. I want to be clear - I am not saying that the symptoms aren’t real and that “this is all in their head”, or that we need “conversion therapy” or something. I an saying the major systemic problems are upstream and by changing THE SYSTEM we will reduce the incidence instead of only focusing on medical interventions downstream as bandaids. As an analogy — if we addressed antibiotic overuse on factory farms and sugar and high fructose corn syrup and pink slime, fast foods etc. we could address the epidemics of obesity and diabetes, including in children. But instead we focus on inventing new ways to medicate them! And when the coronavirus comes around, instead of recognizing that these very same factors (obesity and diabtetes) are highly correlated with morbidity and mortality with that virus, we once again look for vaccines against the virus and once it subsides we continue to IGNORE all the systemic upstream factors in the underlying chronic epidemics in USA. Autism could very well be yet another one, maybe it is like autoimmune diseases that are related to microplastics, maybe they affect hormones like aestrogen and testosterone. We need to LOOK UPSTREAM.

by gochi 3y ago

EGreg 3y ago

I could be wrong. There has been an uptick in all of them, but I thought autism had less of an uptick, and there have been new biological environmental factors that may make autism something from birth, whether heritable or not. Whereas something like, say, gender dysphoria has positively exploded in diagnoses. It’s a worrying disorder, which (eg unlike autism) studies show leads 30-50% to attempt suicide. So any increase in its prevalence to 5% of the emerging US population is worrying. If this was, say, a coronavirus with that kind of risk to life, we’d all be worried. I want to be clear - I am not saying that the symptoms aren’t real and that “this is all in their head”, or that we need “conversion therapy” or something. I an saying the major systemic problems are upstream and by changing THE SYSTEM we will reduce the incidence instead of only focusing on medical interventions downstream as bandaids. As an analogy — if we addressed antibiotic overuse on factory farms and sugar and high fructose corn syrup and pink slime, fast foods etc. we could address the epidemics of obesity and diabetes, including in children. But instead we focus on inventing new ways to medicate them! And when the coronavirus comes around, instead of recognizing that these very same factors (obesity and diabtetes) are highly correlated with morbidity and mortality with that virus, we once again look for vaccines against the virus and once it subsides we continue to IGNORE all the systemic upstream factors in the underlying chronic epidemics in USA. Autism could very well be yet another one, maybe it is like autoimmune diseases that are related to microplastics, maybe they affect hormones like aestrogen and testosterone. We need to LOOK UPSTREAM.