8 ms·

I duno on some of that. Until I was about 39 I was a "weird nerd" and then my wife (Dr of special education) finally convinced me to talk to a Dr and get get te

• sneed_chucker 2y ago
  Well, to me your comment also speaks to the increasing degree to which we medicalize personality traits. I'm sure your diagnosis is legitimate, but also I'm inferring from your comment that you are married and gainfully employed; so it sounds like you're able to build and maintain relationships, as well hold conversations with strangers or non-close acquaintances when necessary. In years past would any professional have bothered to test someone like you for a disorder?
  • faeriechangling 2y ago
    I don't really accept the validity of people who are generally more functional and conventionally successful than average being called "disordered" in the first place. It seems like a weird arbitrary insistence of the medical system to simply pathologize anybody who fits into a certain box.
    • tomrod 2y ago
      I'm glad you aren't a, diagnostician with that bias!
    • WereAllMadHere 2y ago
      What about someone who needs a wheelchair but is conveniently successful?
      • coffeebeqn 2y ago
        If they seemingly successfully have walked around their entire lives - sure. But this seems like a off analogy
      • faeriechangling 2y ago
        Being in a wheelchair is rarely going to be caused by a disorder, also autism is different insofar that the negatives and positives seem to be linked to eachother and are not merely a matter of random circumstance. But practically, the disorder definition above basically would lump the above poster in with somebody who was struggling to hold down a part time job or any social relationships as having the same level of disability. All therapies, treatments, accomidations, etc will end up calibrated for the more profoundly disabled person while being offered to the above poster. Generally, peoples first impression of the person will understandably be based on that of the average person with autism spectrum disorder if they're told they're autistic which will cause them to be pretty profoundly misunderstood. That's just my take on this.
        • lazyasciiart 2y ago
          Your lack of knowledge about the range of treatment options and support available for autism/asperges does not make it true that all therapies, treatments, etc are the same. Your "take" seems to be very strongly held based on what appears to be a very limited set of anecdotal data points.
    • detourdog 2y ago
      The disorder is how they affect their social surroundings. Everyone is on the spectrum and the disordered are having social problems.
      • faeriechangling 2y ago
        Yeah but we don't call people disordered for lacking the talents of these gainfully employed autistics, so it seems sort of arbitrary to me.
        • detourdog 2y ago
          I think the behavior is called disordered not the person exhibiting them. Many of the disordered behaviors can be transient.
        • majormajor 2y ago
          But would it be worse for the world if we could actually understand and identify things - and find treatments for - executive function failures like extreme laziness or trouble with timekeeping? Or are the people who fail to hold down a job really just morally bad and of low character? Was it better for people to just be "weird" or "creepy" or "freaks" instead of somewhere on the autism-spectrum? The judgement of the behavior predated the diagnostic labels.
          • faeriechangling 2y ago
            >Was it better for people to just be "weird" or "creepy" or "freaks" instead of somewhere on the autism-spectrum? How has autism diagnosis stopped any of this from happening? People are absolutely unapologetic about calling autistic men creepy in particular.
            • majormajor 2y ago
              > How has autism diagnosis stopped any of this from happening? People are absolutely unapologetic about calling autistic men creepy in particular. It hasn't stopped it completely but now you've got a LOT more resources available to use to do something about it. And there are many more who will say something like "hey, you should look into this stuff" instead of just simply shunning and shaming than there were 40 years ago. Especially when spotted in early childhood. There are no magic bullets. The solution to not being called creepy is, in the end, not acting creepy, same as it ever was. But the diagnostic/psych world can help people find a path to get there. Many of us have been following it for a while now. Do I wish my parents and teachers had known what we know today? Abso-fucking-lutely. Could've started to learn to manage a lot earlier. Recall the context here of the comparison to those "lacking the talents of these gainfully employed autistics". No shortage of bad names to call them either. Many fewer structured and well-studied support systems.
  • sctb 2y ago
    Being married and gainfully employed and able to build and maintain relationships as well as hold conversations with strangers when necessary can come at an exceptionally high cost for neurodivergent people in the form of masking (like a kind of mental tech debt). Instead of overt social difficulty, this might present itself as anxiety, depression, and suicidality—those conditions are worthy of medicalization IMO.
    • sneed_chucker 2y ago
      I agree with what you're saying, but also - everyone has problems. Is anyone truly normal or neurotypical? Why do some people's problems get the validation of the medical system and others don't? (These are non-rhetorical questions, I'm really not sure about the answers to them myself)
      • sctb 2y ago
        > [...] everyone has problems They certainly do. And I don't think we can make meaningful comparisons between individuals in terms of their problems, how they struggle or suffer, etc. For me personally, I don't assume to have it any worse than anyone else, and I always assume that others have deep challenges that I won't ever know about. > Is anyone truly normal or neurotypical? Again, these concepts become strained when applied to individuals. It's like the family who has 1.5 children: they don't exist. These are ever-changing labels that we make use of within an extremely nebulous social process. I try to apply them only in well-defined contexts and then throw up my hands in the general case. > Why do some people's problems get the validation of the medical system and others don't? I have no idea; in my mind this question is trying to peer closely into the nebula.
      • alistairSH 2y ago
        Why do some people's problems get the validation of the medical system and others don't? Very roughly, because some people can't function without intervention (for loose definitions of "function"). And some treatment (therapy, drugs, whatever) can help them function. Autism 1/Aspergers is sometimes kind of borderline - some people can function with it, but it can exact a heavy tool on them as a sibling comment noted. Depress and suicide are relatively more common. Why go through life miserable if it's not necessary? People without autism or other diagnosable issues are generally more resilient. a bad week, one-off negative occurrence, etc won't send them into a tailspin. That's a very real concern with some neurodivergent individuals. And you do have to remember, it's all a spectrum. And as observers, we don't know what a person is feeling/thinking internally and not expressing.
  • tomrod 2y ago
    Are you aware that ASD isn't purely psychosocial?
    • sneed_chucker 2y ago
      Yes I'm aware that it's understood to be neurological condition. But it's diagnosed based on behavioral observations, it's not like people get diagnosed with ASD based on brain scans like you would for MS or parkinsons.
  • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Human brains are complicated. Many psychological disorders we have little hard science to understand them with. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and much more importantly, that a diagnosis is useful in improving someone’s situation.
    • faeriechangling 2y ago
      >That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and much more importantly, that a diagnosis is useful in improving someone’s situation. Show me the actual proof of this. For something so at the core of modern clinical practice, the utility of diagnosis itself is taken for granted rather than actually proven.
      • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        I don't think you actually understand modern clinical practice. We are surely better than where we were at in the middle ages with leaches and stuff, but there is still a lot of practice and experimentation to see what works and what doesn't, just evidence without hard proof. > the utility of diagnosis itself is taken for granted rather than actually proven. Given the topic of autism, I'm not sure if you are trying to be sarcastic or not.
        • faeriechangling 2y ago
          >We are surely better than where we were at in the middle ages with leaches and stuff, but there is still a lot of practice and experimentation to see what works and what doesn't, just evidence without hard proof. Here's a question for you. When is the last time mental health outcomes improved in a way which could not simply be the result of reporting differences? I would say the last time was around the year 2000, when suicide and drug addiction were at all time lows. Every single chance since then, on aggregate, has been useless and the entire field of mental health has completely failed to produce any evidence it has advance an inch this millennium which is absolutely fucking scandalous. I don't know how much oncology improved in the same period of time. Also if you include reported mental health data, people report WORSE mental health now than they did in the past. Given that, I see pretty much zero reason why the status quo today does a lick to improve people mental health better than the status quo back then. I am just dead stupidly sceptical of diagnosis (at least beyond 2000/DSM-IV levels) as being a source of mental health because not only is it not proven people don't even attempt to prove this. When the DSM-V was released, the director of the NIMH started the RDOC for research which was nominally supposed to do studies based less on categories like "autism" and more on underlying biological phenomenon, trashed the idea of symptom based diagnosis pointing out it has largely been depreciated elsewhere in medicine, and suggested we might have to get rid of the words schizophrenia and depression because they were confusing things. I think about such things occasionally and wonder if the entire diagnostic nosology we have is basically a fatally flawed system. So my essential objection is, why medicalise people's identities if there's no evidence it's improving people's outcomes?
  • Forgeties79 2y ago
    This reads kind of like “my parents hit me when I was younger and I turned out fine” though o highly doubt it’s your intention. Just because things seemingly turned out OK doesn’t mean the treatment was appropriate. In the same way, just because someone manages to “get by” doesn’t mean they don’t need to be diagnosed. It’s just making their life needlessly more difficult whereas they could yave more resources that reduce the burden they have to live with every day. Just knowing you have a diagnosis, regardless of whether or not you are treated, can be incredibly empowering and helpful. It isn’t a mystery why other people could sit down and study for three hours when I was in college and I couldn’t. I was diagnosed with ADHD, I knew where my blockers were and what they looked like (and continue to!) It gives me a lot more control and ability to manage myself day to day vs. assuming something is wrong with me. The latter feeling can be incredibly demoralizing and even lead to self-destructive tendencies such as a self-medicating with alcohol and drugs. After all: Why bother trying if you’re convinced you’re truly broken? It’s not something that has a name but that other people share this problem with you and manage is, again, incredibly empowering.
    • abracadaniel 2y ago
      The anti-diagnosis attitude is surprising on a site like this. Everyone could do better with a better understanding of their own mind, whether it meets the criteria of a disorder or not. And with any kind of better understanding we need more and better categorizations.
      • ModernMech 2y ago
        A lot of people who post here meet the diagnostic criteria, and maybe they aren't ready to confront something new and scary about themselves. That's fine, it's something one needs to do when ready. Easier to say "That doesn't apply to me" if you're not ready to do the work; confronting an ASD diagnosis late in life is not an easy task.
        • normie3000 2y ago
          What is "the work"?
  • manmal 2y ago
    > you're able to build and maintain relationships, as well hold conversations with strangers or non-close acquaintances when necessary The traits you are describing here and autism don’t exclude each other. Many autists live well. Some Fortune 500 founders and/or CEOs are autistic. I’m tempted to conclude you are projecting a stereotype, but I might be reading too much into your post.
  • thfuran 2y ago
    This is like saying that you can't have a physical ailment unless you're bedridden.
• antisthenes 2y ago
  > my wife (Dr of special education) finally convinced me to talk to a Dr and get get tested for autism. Turns out I'm ASD 1, would have been Asperger's in the past. Can I ask candidly, what did you gain from knowing this? Presumably this didn't have much effect on you, since you seem to be fairly successful - finding a partner and getting married and presumably also having a decent job. Seems kind of like a vanity validation for your wife rather than a benefit to you.
  • hnbad 2y ago
    It can help reframe personal experiences and past struggles for one, but it can also help gain access to support that isn't available if you're just a "weird nerd". It can also serve to legitimize your struggles to people who think you just need to "stop being so lazy" at whatever you genuinely struggle with by being able to point at a diagnosis. Yeah, the benefits are a mixed bag and subjective but that's why we should normalize self-dx rather than insisting people have to get a medical opinion to be "validated".
    • naruhodo 2y ago
      As of recently[1], in Australia, an ASD diagnosis is a reportable condition that may affect your driving ability and therefore comes with an AU$9000 fine if you don't disclose it to the authorities. Though I suspect I might be ASD 1, there is now no way I would seek a diagnosis. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-26/national-fitness-to-drive-standards-humiliating-autistic-drivers/103147928 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-26/national-fitness-to-d...
      • hnbad 2y ago
        That is fair and personally I would argue that you should not comply with an unjust law like that (how's that for a "strong sense of justice" in autistic people?) but of course it's safer to avoid the legal risk of non-compliance by simply avoiding the diagnosis if it doesn't benefit you. Frankly, the law doesn't make sense given that ASD is not a "medical condition" in the sense of being temporary or avoidable and the act of passing driver's ed and attaining a driver's license demonstrates your driving ability. If you were undiagnosed prior to attaining a driver's license, it clearly did not impact your ability. If you were diagnosed and attained a driver's license without disclosing your "condition" it clearly did not impact you either. It feels more like ASD is being used as a proxy for some other condition (learning disability?) that is not usually diagnosed directly. IMO anyone fined for non-disclosure should try to take the case to whatever the Australian equivalent of the Supreme Court is. Surely some NGO must be willing to foot the bill.
• ben_w 2y ago
  I'm very weird, but whatever I am is rare (or harmless) enough to not be commonly discussed or have a well known group identity the way autism does — I've done online tests for a bunch of psychological conditions, including autism, and all of them rate me as absolutely normal. But I draw my ingroup/outgroup boundary broadly enough to include all non-sociopathic humans and several other species; I have zero motivation towards spectator sport; music only holds my interest for a few plays and then bores me; I can "visualise" my sense of balance strongly enough to completely override my actual sense of which way is down; my body self-image is almost entirely under conscious control (as in: I can't be body-dysmorphic because I don't have a consistent morph to dis).
• mattm 2y ago
  Somewhat off topic - I'm curious if the diagnosis has helped in any way. I'm early 40s and have gone so far as taking an online test for autism where I scored very high. I've thought of being tested by a doctor but always think "What's the point? How is it going to help knowing?" so I'm curious as someone also well into adulthood if you've had any impact from knowing. I'm also married and am able to keep a job and function relatively well even though I'm not the most sociable person.
  • paulpauper 2y ago
    I was never under any presupposition the problem was mine. Even when I act as normal as possible I still get rejection. It was always others. Fortunately I occupy a financial situation where that does not matter anymore. Embracing the weird nerd is better than trying to conform and not succeeding or being inauthentic.
• 015a 2y ago
  The article literally reads: > I recently argued that many Weird Nerds (I called them autistics, but people really hated that) These are the same thing. The author recognizes that. Everyone recognizes that.
  • dghf 2y ago
    They are not the same thing. Not all weird nerds have autism, and not all people with autism are weird nerds.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• qq66 2y ago
  Do you think that receiving this diagnosis increased or decreased your happiness?