3 ms·

It seems to me it's medicine to blame for people treating autistics as a group, since that is literally how they prescribe that they be treated. They used to h

It seems to me it's medicine to blame for people treating autistics as a group, since that is literally how they prescribe that they be treated. They used to have 3 divisions, PDD-NOS, Aspergers, and Autism and thought that they overlapped and overlap was supposedly bad. The root of the problem hardly seems to be pop culture, which to me has shown a pretty wide spectrum of autistic behaviour and generally portray it far more positively and heterogeneous than medicine does, which treats somebody having a diagnosis of Autism in the same light of them having a diagnosis of cancer. It's pop culture which has eased the stigma, it's high culture which truly looks down upon autistics as poor lambs to be saved. When I was a kid, doctors were in love with emphasising how I would probabilistically never succeed. Meanwhile, Hollywood put out a bruce willis film about how autistic children are smarter than NSA cryptographers. I listened to Hollywood, and ignored the doctors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Rising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Rising

manmal 3y ago
I do agree with your sentiment that pop culture has been mostly „nice“ to autists. But I‘d argue that it has focused mainly on savants and very high functioning, very intelligent autists. That‘s IMO positive ableism. Most autists are neither exceptionally intelligent, nor are they savants.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  If a conceptual framework we're using, that a large heterogenous set of people are "autistics", results in any portrayal or generalisation of that group of people feeling inaccurate, maybe the conceptual framework itself is what's wrong? I would love for people to move past talking about "Autism" and start talking more about anxiety, Social difficulties, digestive issues, obsessions, compulsions, and so on. If treating autistic people as homogenous is wrong to begin with, why is giving them all the same label a good idea? That's a rhetorical question - the answer is that "Autism" became insurable, so ever since then there has been this pressure to describe increasingly diverse groups of people using the same label, and for people to NEVER lose this label. I had a psychiatrist re-diagnose me on the grounds that "Autism" had more funding than "Asperger's" at the time. I think pop cultures autistic savant obsession is just a reflection of this, and the root cause of nonsense portrayals and generalisations is money.
  - manmal 3y ago
    I personally think the term is useful for research purposes. The upshot is that there‘s interventions you can do today to improve symptoms, and they can be found by searching for the term. Maybe the confusion comes from „no two autists are alike in their symptom signature“ (which seems to be true), vs „most autism cases can be treated by X“ (which seems to be true at least sometimes). While it’s a highly individual syndrome, the metabolic and other causes could be more general. If that’s not the case - then we might actually need sub-syndromes, and I think this is actually WIP. Eg there‘s now pathological demand avoidance (PDA) which could, if it occurs outside of autism, become its own disorder.
    - faeriechangling 3y ago
      On the contrary, my experience with autism is interventions which simply treated me as if I had a mental age which was maybe 5+ years behind my actual age. Since about age 7, I was actively resisting my autism treatment, and by age 9 I started to do so in a more deliberate way where I tried to appeal to the bureaucracy, to no avail since the school had no legal right to deny me the treatment that I nominally needed. It was scaled back only by age 11, and never totally stopped until adulthood. "Autism" as a diagnosis sort of prescribes people be treated in standardised discriminatory ways from early childhood for their nominal best interests, rather than simply giving you a set of advice you can pick and mix from. This is likely to result in homogenous and harmful treatment in practice. I'm also DEEPLY sceptical of autism I.E. clinically significant differences in social behaviour all being caused by some unified biological cause, given the decades long failure to find this smoking gun, my conclusion is that DSM-V categorisations are a social construction which don't map 1:1 with what is going on biologically. The more I learn about the sheer variance autistics really have in symptoms, and how we see clusters of symptoms like insomnia or digestive issues which don't even appear on the DSM-V at all, the more convinced I get that autism is really more than 1 thing. We even know about things like fragile X syndrome, which most autistics don't have, but which reliably causes a high incidence of autism. The project which seems to have the most momentum in overhauling DSM-V taxonomy is the RDOC framework. I honestly think that autism is multiple overlapping conditions is downright obvious, and I think the main reason it isn't taken more seriously is that Autism has become a useful brand.

manmal 3y ago

I do agree with your sentiment that pop culture has been mostly „nice“ to autists. But I‘d argue that it has focused mainly on savants and very high functioning, very intelligent autists. That‘s IMO positive ableism. Most autists are neither exceptionally intelligent, nor are they savants.

faeriechangling 3y ago
If a conceptual framework we're using, that a large heterogenous set of people are "autistics", results in any portrayal or generalisation of that group of people feeling inaccurate, maybe the conceptual framework itself is what's wrong? I would love for people to move past talking about "Autism" and start talking more about anxiety, Social difficulties, digestive issues, obsessions, compulsions, and so on. If treating autistic people as homogenous is wrong to begin with, why is giving them all the same label a good idea? That's a rhetorical question - the answer is that "Autism" became insurable, so ever since then there has been this pressure to describe increasingly diverse groups of people using the same label, and for people to NEVER lose this label. I had a psychiatrist re-diagnose me on the grounds that "Autism" had more funding than "Asperger's" at the time. I think pop cultures autistic savant obsession is just a reflection of this, and the root cause of nonsense portrayals and generalisations is money.
- manmal 3y ago
  I personally think the term is useful for research purposes. The upshot is that there‘s interventions you can do today to improve symptoms, and they can be found by searching for the term. Maybe the confusion comes from „no two autists are alike in their symptom signature“ (which seems to be true), vs „most autism cases can be treated by X“ (which seems to be true at least sometimes). While it’s a highly individual syndrome, the metabolic and other causes could be more general. If that’s not the case - then we might actually need sub-syndromes, and I think this is actually WIP. Eg there‘s now pathological demand avoidance (PDA) which could, if it occurs outside of autism, become its own disorder.
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    On the contrary, my experience with autism is interventions which simply treated me as if I had a mental age which was maybe 5+ years behind my actual age. Since about age 7, I was actively resisting my autism treatment, and by age 9 I started to do so in a more deliberate way where I tried to appeal to the bureaucracy, to no avail since the school had no legal right to deny me the treatment that I nominally needed. It was scaled back only by age 11, and never totally stopped until adulthood. "Autism" as a diagnosis sort of prescribes people be treated in standardised discriminatory ways from early childhood for their nominal best interests, rather than simply giving you a set of advice you can pick and mix from. This is likely to result in homogenous and harmful treatment in practice. I'm also DEEPLY sceptical of autism I.E. clinically significant differences in social behaviour all being caused by some unified biological cause, given the decades long failure to find this smoking gun, my conclusion is that DSM-V categorisations are a social construction which don't map 1:1 with what is going on biologically. The more I learn about the sheer variance autistics really have in symptoms, and how we see clusters of symptoms like insomnia or digestive issues which don't even appear on the DSM-V at all, the more convinced I get that autism is really more than 1 thing. We even know about things like fragile X syndrome, which most autistics don't have, but which reliably causes a high incidence of autism. The project which seems to have the most momentum in overhauling DSM-V taxonomy is the RDOC framework. I honestly think that autism is multiple overlapping conditions is downright obvious, and I think the main reason it isn't taken more seriously is that Autism has become a useful brand.