8 ms·

I'm sure everyone involved means well, but we are really starting to embrace a culture of defining "normal" down to some arbitrary amount that seems to have no

• suzzer99 1y ago
  High school is truly fun for maybe 15% of the students, is an utter nightmare for 15%, and has its moments but still generally sucks for everyone else.
  • fsckboy 1y ago
    maybe it's being 15 that sucks for 85%, and has nothing to do with high school at all.
    • suzzer99 1y ago
      15 is definitely a rough age.
    • starluz 1y ago
      [dead]
    • shafyy 1y ago
      Maybe it's also being 15 in today's modern society that sucks.
      • sokoloff 1y ago
        Being 15 four decades ago wasn’t a live-action Disney movie either.
        • shafyy 1y ago
          I think being 15 a couple of generations ago was better than being 15 today. If only for the lack of social media.
    • close04 1y ago
      It's probably both because you're 15ish in a herd of many other 15ish year olds. Maybe the fun factor is amplified, but so is the suck factor. Even a few traumas can leave a lifetime of scarring.
  • andreykocevski 1y ago
    High school is pretty fun in europe, especially where I am from. First year of high school is when you start drinking alcohol, smoking, going out, parties, girls, really all the cool stuff. Its the period when you step into the world of adolescence. But of course american high school experience is nothing like this and its rather depressing, considering I lived in the US and have known few high schoolers that were family friends of mine. They all were just drowned in homework, stayed at home, and played video games nonstop.
    • suzzer99 1y ago
      Euro teens seem a lot more comfortable in their own skin than American teens.
  • drewcoo 1y ago
    What percent of students learn to pull stats out of thin air? Everyone I knew then, even the "cool kids," thought high school was some bleak hell punctuated with moments of extraordinary joy. I have no idea whether that's due to hormones or school or what.
    • suzzer99 1y ago
      I know a few people who had the time of their lives in high school. Maybe 15% is high, I was just proxying the popular kids. I'm sure some of them were miserable. But some non-popular kids probably had a decent time.
  • tonyedgecombe 1y ago
    It’s probably the same ratios when working in a large corporation.
• ghushn3 1y ago
  I tend to agree, as an autistic person. And a lot of autistic people hold the belief that, "My autism is not a problem, your expectations that I behave like you do are the problem." If I need to move a little differently, or not hold eye contact when I speak, the fact that I get made fun of is the problem. If we just accepted, "hey, some people are like that" more, I think we'd have a lot fewer problems.
  • devmor 1y ago
    Well said. I am not autistic personally but working in tech and being into field-associated hobbies, I have a much more autism-dense social circle than the average person. This was awkward for me at first because it felt like I was either constantly irritated or being irritating to others by following my standard learned social conventions. Once I changed my expectations to clarify and verify intent instead of derive and assume intent from others, this immediately stopped. Applying the same changes in social interaction with people who are not on the spectrum has actually felt like it leads to less misunderstandings and hurt feelings as well. I’m left wondering if the parts of human interaction that created these standards that autistic people find so frustrating might not even exist anymore and the rest of us have been upholding conventions that ultimately make life harder for us, just because we were taught to do so.
    • starluz 1y ago
      [dead]
    • cookiengineer 1y ago
      I'm organizing a self help group for autistic/AuDHD/ADHD people and over the years I've realized that a lot of things that bother our members are based on interpretations of social contracts. "Normal" people (whatever that means) tend to forget things quite quickly, and for us it's really hard when states change and contracts change. Meaning that if e.g. in a discussion 3 months ago we casually agreed upon "I do task X and you do task Y" then this will be the assumed state for autistic people until the end of time, because that's what we agreed upon. When other people at work communicate their feelings, have a bad day and don't want to do those things, or are just lazy about it... Then this is a breach of a social contract. And dealing with those breaches of social contracts without getting very defensive about it is a huge problem for a lot of autistic people I've spoken with. We tend to spiral quickly into a defensive argument that won't help either involved parties and it tends to escalate into a "mudfight" instead of a rational debate. I just wish that a lot of therapy would help prepare you for these situations of misunderstood (or misagreed upon) situations more. You can compensate for them to a small degree, but they put a lot of stress and burden on us because it's quite a big deal if the state of assumptions changes without having a discussional part in it. Additionally, talking in conversations about the assumed outcome first before you get into detail helps a lot. Do you need emotional support? Do you want to feel that we are together in this? Do you need a practical solution? Do you need a change in what we agreed upon? This way we can prepare much easier for what's about to come in the following discussion, and we realize it's not about critique and rather about finding a mutual compromise that both parties are happy with. Also don't use sayings like "you always do X" or "you never do X" in those conversations when it is not always, because autistic people tend to interpret these as accusations very quickly because to us they sound excessive and are huge trigger points, because they are essentially lies. If you say instead something like "I feel like you do never X" or even better "I feel like I am alone doing X, can you help me more with it in the future?" we can realize that it's more about the perception and how to improve our contributions, because we can keep the discussion about the actual topic underneath which is "How to balance each party's contributions to the task at hand".
• flanked-evergl 1y ago
  Society is tolerant of diversity in people.
  • neurolesudiste 1y ago
    [dead]
  • djaychela 1y ago
    Is it? Certainly hasn't been the experience of my two autistic daughters who had years of difficulty and which led to real problems for a decade or so each during later later schooling and early work years. Both are now doing much better but it's been a long uphill battle for them. The same of my two sons but society is much more tolerant (but bit fully) off their symptoms as they tend to be viewed as 'male' tendencies, just severely amplified.
    • flanked-evergl 1y ago
      Not every problem faced by your children is the fault of society.
  • latentsea 1y ago
    Doesn't feel that as a foreigner in Japan during the current election cycle, I'll tell you that.
  • chneu 1y ago
    Serious question: what's your skin color and where do you live? Edit: looks like white guy from Norway which explains why you'd think that.
    • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      > Serious question: what's your skin color and where do you live? The obsession with skin color and race seems to be a very US-American thing.
      • 1y ago
• PeterStuer 1y ago
  [flagged]
• GoatInGrey 1y ago
  If you have autism and experience dysfunction at such a small level that you can put the blame on other people, then consider yourself extremely lucky. I volunteer at an autism center and many of those individuals struggle to maintain hygiene, feed themselves, and perform other basic aspects of living in ways that persist regardless of how tolerant their peers may or may not be. Of course, these individuals are not at all active on social media so you very rarely see them represented.
  • klipt 1y ago
    I guess the question is why did we start labeling slightly socially awkward people as the same category as the people you describe in the first place?
    • landl0rd 1y ago
      The labeling of every little thing as a pathology is part of a broader trend. Nobody can be down for a few weeks, it must be a "depressive episode". If you feel nervous before a big test or presentation, you have "anxiety". It's an overcorrection from the under-diagnosing of the past, and a phenomenon reflective of the intensely political environment around funding for research and services. You could say it may have to do with increasing billables, you could say it's because sub-clinical cases might still benefit from a few sessions of therapy that are covered by insurance only with an insurance code, but whatever. In the case of autism, "social awkwardness" used to fall under aspergers, a diagnosis that was removed over the protestations of many aspergers advocacy organizations in the DSM-V. See, the DSM-V was massively influenced by a lobbying effort or "intelligence" operation. They were hugely focused on things like eradicating any mention of "sub-clinical" autism or recovery criteria. The abolition of aspergers was a concerted effort to essentially force people with aspergers to fight the stigma suffered by "somebody who might have to wear adult diapers and maybe a head-restraining device." As the committee representatives claimed, "it was our belief that the best way to address stigma was to confront it across the spectrum. Why did we deserve protection that other autistic people did not receive?" "This was... reflective of our commitment to 'cross-spectrum solidarity'." To be clear, this was an effort towards imposed "solidarity", where people with one disorder that often presented mildly enough they could make an attempt at passing for normal were forced to identify as and engage in activism on behalf of said adult-diaper-wearers if they wanted recognition, destigmatization, or access to services. It was an effort I can see only as malign to re-stigmatize or explicitly block "normalization" for those who could enjoy it. Really, the consolidation of autism into one "spectrum" diagnosis involving a massively diverse constellation of systems was a political mistake not a scientific choice. It's one based fundamentally on presentation, not on etiology, despite dealing with a massively polygenic disease that appears to have many different potential causes. It only served to slow down efforts towards management and a cure (no surprise, given many "advocate" types continue to assert it is simply wrong that the world has norms in a tone similar to those deaf people who oppose cochlear implants.) You can see this intellectual thread carried forward to recent times. A piece from 2023 reflects very similar sentiments, essentially saying that the consolidation of diagnoses is good because it "[protects] the most vulnerable": https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/weaponized-heterogeneity-only-harms-the-most-vulnerable-autistic-people/ https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/weaponized-heterogen... Those who have a shot at a "normal" life passing as "normal" are, naturally, not considered. You can see this pretty easily in the basic framing of the issue as "access to services", services which Asperger's patients required and used much less. This was a transparent and explicit effort to lower chances of "normalcy" in an attempt to benefit those who didn't have a shot at it; the "solidarity" framing was, in that sense, completely honest. I see it as nothing less than ascientific and contemptible. (Much of this information is drawn from a paper the two men who liased with the DSM-V committee wrote some years later and which may be found here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337112539_Lobbying_Autism's_Diagnostic_Revision_in_the_DSM-5 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337112539_Lobbying_...)
• HexPhantom 1y ago
  There's a fine line between recognizing patterns that might need support, and pathologizing anything outside a narrow "norm."
• CalRobert 1y ago
  The redefinition of "autism" from "can't talk, stims constantly, maybe bangs head against the wall, serious danger to themselves" to "kinda awkward savant" seems like it has been profoundly harmful to people who want to find new therapies for those in the former group. Maybe normalizing it was a way for insurance companies and school districts to get out of funding appropriate measures for people who literally can not function in day to day life.
  • chneu 1y ago
    Autism wasn't redefined like that. Not by the medical community. Social media took hold and it became the new OCD. People think liking straight lines on their desk means they have OCD. Same with autism, people think not liking a loud noise is autism. I think a lot of people confuse neurodivergent with autistic as well. The whole field needs a reorganization anyway. I've talked to dozens of therapists about this and I've received wildly different answers on what autism even is.
    • watwut 1y ago
      Actually medical professional will diagnose people who are high functioning, because that is what the diagnosis is. Autism criteria were never "can't talk, stims constantly, maybe bangs head against the wall, serious danger to themselves". And conversely, autistic as a savant was a thing 25 years ago. Long before the social media.
    • mvieira38 1y ago
      "Neurodivergent" doesn't exist, it's just an umbrella term for any neurodevelopmental disorder (such as ADHD, autism, Tourette's, intellectual disability)
  • pjc50 1y ago
    I think there's a wider band of children than you think who can end up in either of those two camps depending on how they are treated, with traditional bullying pushing them to the former.
  • mvieira38 1y ago
• hresvelgr 1y ago
  In terms of treatment, I'm under the impression that "normal" is the minimum bar of commercial productivity and psychiatry/psychology is primarily used to curtail social deviancy to maintain this.
• aa-jv 1y ago
  >we are really starting to embrace a culture of defining "normal" down People forget that apsergers and autism as a subject were born from the eugenics movement. Asperger’s work on autism was shaped by the Nazi regime’s eugenics and race hygiene policies, which influenced his definitions and categorizations of autistic children. These classifications serve only to justify atrocities. There are folks out in the world today being repressed because they don't fit into some cultural ideal set in place by the totalitarian-authoritarian doctrine of eugenics, which has been used for nefarious purposes for over a century now.
• ndr 1y ago
  It's even worse when one uses "common" as proxy for "normal"/"healthy". EG see: https://x.com/hjluks/status/1943754923570520483 https://x.com/hjluks/status/1943754923570520483
  • Calavar 1y ago
    Seems like exactly the opposite. He is saying the common finding (75% of people) is abnormal. He also says "These weren’t overweight or sedentary individuals" which makes me think he didn't thoroughly read the abstract, which says the main finding is that sedentary people have decreased markers of mitochondrial respiration relative to moderately active people.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]