5 ms·

This is one of those things where I think autism has become a tag for the shared experiences of things like awkwardness, feeling out of place, or running out of

This is one of those things where I think autism has become a tag for the shared experiences of things like awkwardness, feeling out of place, or running out of the desire to socialize. Everyone wants an answer for why they have unpleasant experiences that aren't, "That's just life". There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect. These labels are useful insofar as grouping experiences together that tend to co-occur makes it easy to talk about certain categories of aggregate experiences or strategies for navigating life, but I think too many people relegate too much importance to these arbitrary labels, like "autism", derive too much of their identity from them, and too often use them as excuses to not deal with life's challenges and complexities head on.

JohnMakin 1y ago
Then there's actually people who live their entire existence and every waking moment on the spectrum, and compensating for it - which is what the topic of discussion is. You minimizing it or thinking it isn't real isn't entirely helpful to discussion and frankly is pretty insulting.
- spicyusername 1y ago
  Every waking moment on the spectrum If it's a spectrum, everyone is on it somewhere. thinking it isn't real isn't entirely helpful I neither said the category of shared experiences we typically call "autism" wasn't real nor said it wasn't helpful to use labels like autism.
  - JohnMakin 1y ago
    No, you're just heavily implying it and minimizing it. I'm telling you it's extremely insulting. You can take that for what it is or don't, I don't really care.
    - bippihippi1 1y ago
      he's saying that the label Autism includes different traits that various people have or don't have. He's falsely using that semantic manipulation to imply that people use it as an excuse not to deal with the conplexities of life. saying "that's insulting" doesn't impact his assertion. you have to meet their logic where it is to disagree. lucky this case was so easy.
      - whatevertrevor 1y ago
        Not disagreeing with the content of what you said. However, sometimes telling people they sound insulting (unintentionally) has its own value, outside of the logical debate-making about the content of what was said.
      - spicyusername 1y ago
        No, I'm not using any tricks (or implications) to argue that people often use psychological diagnosis (self or otherwise) as an excuse not to deal with the complexities of life. I'm arguing that directly and asserting that web sites like the one posted are exactly the kind of things that make it easy for people to do that because they are relatable to basically everybody.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  - KPGv2 1y ago
    > If it's a spectrum, everyone is on it somewhere. No, because the endpoints of the spectrum are not defined as 0% autistic and 100% autistic. The spectrum definitionally only includes people diagnosed with autism. Your approach is like saying "there is a 'how bad is the cancer' spectrum" where 0 is "no cancer" as opposed to something like "cancer but easily curable." No reasonable definition of "cancer suffering spectrum" would include "doesn't even have cancer."
  - munificent 1y ago
    Autism is called a spectrum disorder not because it ranges on a smooth continuum from "no autism" to "lots of autism". It's because there a handful of associated symptoms for autism and different people have a different mixture of them. You don't need an equally large amount of all symptoms in order to be autistic. Think of it more like a light spectrum where there are different mixtures of hues for the symptoms, but autism still implies some amount of significant overall intensity. In short, it's a spectrum, not a continuum. If you experience some or all of the symptoms associated with autism but at a level that doesn't significantly impair your overall functioning, then that's not a diagnosis of autism. Just like everyone who gets sad isn't depressed and everyone who worries doesn't have generalized anxiety. That's just normal human variability and life challenges.
    - waterhouse 1y ago
      I have encountered this definition of "spectrum", as a vector of numbers that go 0 to 100, rather than a single number that goes from 0 to 100 (which you call "continuum" IIUC). But... I mean, if you asked 100 people what they think a spectrum means in this context, how many of them would think it meant "vector" rather than "real number"? I would guess fewer than 10. I consider myself a fairly well-informed nerd, but I think I had encountered many usages of "spectrum" describing a single trait for many years, and I think this is the second time I've ever encountered someone using the "vector" definition (the first one was also using it to describe autism). Has this linguistic battle already been lost? Does it improve clarity to call it a "spectrum" and insist on using the "vector" definition? (I've personally been using the phrase "collection of imperfectly correlated traits")
      - sctb 1y ago
        I think the word "spectrum" is reasonable, as it implies a broad range. Or it's analogous to the rainbow with a variety of colours. But what people consistently misunderstand is that there is a fundamental dichotomy at the diagnostic level. Speaking from the perspective of the DSM, which I prefer because it's at least concrete and has medical relevance in North America, you meet the criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder ("on the spectrum") or you do not ("not on the spectrum"). In other words, the diagnostic criteria themselves do not constitute a spectrum, especially not a linear one. Maybe people are confusing this with the DSM's three levels of support needs.
  - footy 1y ago
    > If it's a spectrum, everyone is on it somewhere. This is faulty logic. Just because it's a spectrum doesn't mean every single human is on the spectrum.
McGlockenshire 1y ago
[flagged]
- spicyusername 1y ago
  We are commenting on a post where someone created a game that presents normal challenges everyone faces as if it was an "Autism Simulator". It is exactly this kind of generalization that I'm referring to in my comment - "I think autism has become a tag for the shared experiences of things" If anything, we are both equally frustrated by the fact that everyone who has experiences they consider "autistic" will happily jump on the bandwagon, despite the fact that it is a relatively small percentage of the population who has experiences that are sufficiently severe or unusual to warrant any kind of label at all. Nobody likes high pitched noises, everyone is distracted and disorganized, everyone has trouble concentrating or feels overwhelmed when lots of things happen at once, taking lots of medication is hard on the body for everyone, socializing in unfamiliar settings or for long periods feels uncomfortable, interacting with coworkers is weird, many people get lost in the details of things, many people like to spend long periods focused on their interests, some people have really good memories for certain things, etc, etc, etc. That doesn't make labeling yourself as autistic useful unless your experiences are preventing you from living the life you want to live, and even then, its only useful as a tool to find strategies of getting through that life, the label has no value in-itself.
  - CityOfThrowaway 1y ago
    Completely agree. On the autism spectrum, I'm almost certainly very low. But going through the simulator felt like... yeah this all sucks but is very much in the realm of things that I experience and feel on any given day. It didn't feel enlightening, it felt deeply familiar. It's definitely the case that some people have a much larger magnitude of experience or persistence of experience. And for some, it's at levels that do make functioning in society quite difficult or impossible. And yet, I think the point you are quite rightly making is that many people who are decidedly low on the spectrum are now adopting the identity of autism as a way to explain why life is hard. I don't know why people feel inclined to adopt the label. I don't care that they do, they can call themselves whatever they want. But I do wonder if there are more productive ways of perceiving yourself, if you are indeed very much capable of functioning in society.
growingkittens 1y ago
I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum. Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder. Psychiatry is in its infancy. To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  It's tradition to warn first-year psychiatry students about over-diagnosing themselves and everyone around them. There is a well known phenomenon where as soon as students start reading about conditions and symptoms they start seeing it in everyone at rates far too high to be accurate. Fortunately for them, their professors are there to warn them about this effect. They also realize how foolish it was to diagnose everyone with everything based on generic symptoms when they get into practice and see what these conditions look like in real patients. Unfortunately, these psychiatry terms have spilled over into social media without the same warnings. This leads to extreme over-diagnosis by people who learn basic symptoms and start spotting them in everyone. > I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum. Unless you are only meeting people in an environment that is extraordinarily biased toward Autism Spectrum Disorder and you’re avoiding mingling with the general population, this simply isn’t possible. > Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder. You are grossly over-diagnosing. When you see a characteristic in half of all people it’s no longer in the realm of something considered a disorder. You are literally just describing the median point in human behaviors.
  - mjburgess 1y ago
    You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population. People connect with similar people, form relationships in similar envioronemnts, so your social group is vastly more specialised than it might seem. Autism compounds this greatly because of the double empathy problem, so one should expect an autistic person to have mostly autistic friends and to be in environments where the rate of autism is far higher
    - 1y ago
deaux 1y ago
The audio stuff, the concentration stuff, the always coming late and so aren't difficult to categorize in terms of "normal" and "not normal", when they're basically constant and have been since a very young age. It's simply being in the long tail of the frequency distribution or not, wherever you set that line. > There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect. A lot of people are in the short head of the distributions when it comes to nearly all of these markers. Some people are in the long tails for a large number of them. Those are the ones we label. Being in the short head doesn't mean one is never awkward or never late or annoyed by certain noises, it means that they're so at a frequency that's common.
nwah1 1y ago
Look into the history of autism research and you'll find a history of fraud. People like Bruno Bettelheim simply lied their way to prominence and now we are on a road of ever-expanding diagnostic criteria and an ever-growing autism industry to the point where it is now trendy to self-diagnose on social media. Recall that psychology has had a gigantic replication crisis, and that the founders of the field like Freud and Jung were charlatans, and that there is no agreed-upon mechanistic explanation for autism, and that a primary diagnostic tool is a literal questionnaire, and that psychology and psychiatry have been abused for political reasons by every totalitarian government of the 20th century. Given all this, we should have some humility about this topic. Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life. And maybe we can normalize the idea that employees have special emotional needs that can be accounted for on an individual basis without medical permission slips or any need for wielding constructed identities.
- chamomeal 1y ago
  I still remember my psychology class in high school pretty well. It was memorable cause we’d spend a week learning about some theories Freud came up with, and then there would be a very short footnote of “turns out it was all totally made up and never scientifically verified in any way”. I was like what? So psychology isn’t science?? Recently a friend explained to me that Freud really wasn’t a scientist, but he was so influential in getting western cultures to think about the mind in new ways that we still learn about him. Like nobody cared about psychology until he get famous
  - nwah1 1y ago
    The 19th century was a wild time. Everything was a science back then. That's why communists speak of the "immortal science of Marxist-Leninism." Marx literally said he was performing science, but that wasn't seen as an absurdity because that is how everyone spoke. It wasn't until the mid-20th century when people started to get more serious about defining science. Philosophers started critiquing it in the early 20th century like the Vienna Circle and Popper, and eventually the definition of what constitutes science was narrowed down to one that was defined as a particular sort of empiricism. That, too, has its own problems.
Ancapistani 1y ago
Objectively, I understand what you're saying here, and agree that it's almost certainly happening. Subjectively... I see people around me casually doing things that I simply cannot do. I'm 41 years old, and not once do I recall performing any action without actively forcing myself to do it. That includes things as small and trivial as getting up from my desk to use the restroom. I can't relate at all to the concept of a "habit". Combing my hair requires an explicit decision to do so. I usually have to find my brush, since there's no consistent place I put it. When I'm done, I'll forget that I wanted to put it back where it belongs while actively being frustrated with myself for not doing so the previous day. It's glaringly obvious to me that other people don't struggle with the things I struggle with; at the very least, they don't struggle to the same degree. It's exhausting. Oh, and I've never even been diagnosed with autism. I have ADHD. What I described above is classic "executive dysfunction".

JohnMakin 1y ago

Then there's actually people who live their entire existence and every waking moment on the spectrum, and compensating for it - which is what the topic of discussion is. You minimizing it or thinking it isn't real isn't entirely helpful to discussion and frankly is pretty insulting.

spicyusername 1y ago
Every waking moment on the spectrum If it's a spectrum, everyone is on it somewhere. thinking it isn't real isn't entirely helpful I neither said the category of shared experiences we typically call "autism" wasn't real nor said it wasn't helpful to use labels like autism.
- JohnMakin 1y ago
  No, you're just heavily implying it and minimizing it. I'm telling you it's extremely insulting. You can take that for what it is or don't, I don't really care.
  - bippihippi1 1y ago
    he's saying that the label Autism includes different traits that various people have or don't have. He's falsely using that semantic manipulation to imply that people use it as an excuse not to deal with the conplexities of life. saying "that's insulting" doesn't impact his assertion. you have to meet their logic where it is to disagree. lucky this case was so easy.
    - whatevertrevor 1y ago
      Not disagreeing with the content of what you said. However, sometimes telling people they sound insulting (unintentionally) has its own value, outside of the logical debate-making about the content of what was said.
    - spicyusername 1y ago
      No, I'm not using any tricks (or implications) to argue that people often use psychological diagnosis (self or otherwise) as an excuse not to deal with the complexities of life. I'm arguing that directly and asserting that web sites like the one posted are exactly the kind of things that make it easy for people to do that because they are relatable to basically everybody.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
- KPGv2 1y ago
  > If it's a spectrum, everyone is on it somewhere. No, because the endpoints of the spectrum are not defined as 0% autistic and 100% autistic. The spectrum definitionally only includes people diagnosed with autism. Your approach is like saying "there is a 'how bad is the cancer' spectrum" where 0 is "no cancer" as opposed to something like "cancer but easily curable." No reasonable definition of "cancer suffering spectrum" would include "doesn't even have cancer."
- munificent 1y ago
  Autism is called a spectrum disorder not because it ranges on a smooth continuum from "no autism" to "lots of autism". It's because there a handful of associated symptoms for autism and different people have a different mixture of them. You don't need an equally large amount of all symptoms in order to be autistic. Think of it more like a light spectrum where there are different mixtures of hues for the symptoms, but autism still implies some amount of significant overall intensity. In short, it's a spectrum, not a continuum. If you experience some or all of the symptoms associated with autism but at a level that doesn't significantly impair your overall functioning, then that's not a diagnosis of autism. Just like everyone who gets sad isn't depressed and everyone who worries doesn't have generalized anxiety. That's just normal human variability and life challenges.
  - waterhouse 1y ago
    I have encountered this definition of "spectrum", as a vector of numbers that go 0 to 100, rather than a single number that goes from 0 to 100 (which you call "continuum" IIUC). But... I mean, if you asked 100 people what they think a spectrum means in this context, how many of them would think it meant "vector" rather than "real number"? I would guess fewer than 10. I consider myself a fairly well-informed nerd, but I think I had encountered many usages of "spectrum" describing a single trait for many years, and I think this is the second time I've ever encountered someone using the "vector" definition (the first one was also using it to describe autism). Has this linguistic battle already been lost? Does it improve clarity to call it a "spectrum" and insist on using the "vector" definition? (I've personally been using the phrase "collection of imperfectly correlated traits")
    - sctb 1y ago
      I think the word "spectrum" is reasonable, as it implies a broad range. Or it's analogous to the rainbow with a variety of colours. But what people consistently misunderstand is that there is a fundamental dichotomy at the diagnostic level. Speaking from the perspective of the DSM, which I prefer because it's at least concrete and has medical relevance in North America, you meet the criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder ("on the spectrum") or you do not ("not on the spectrum"). In other words, the diagnostic criteria themselves do not constitute a spectrum, especially not a linear one. Maybe people are confusing this with the DSM's three levels of support needs.
- footy 1y ago
  > If it's a spectrum, everyone is on it somewhere. This is faulty logic. Just because it's a spectrum doesn't mean every single human is on the spectrum.

McGlockenshire 1y ago

[flagged]

spicyusername 1y ago
We are commenting on a post where someone created a game that presents normal challenges everyone faces as if it was an "Autism Simulator". It is exactly this kind of generalization that I'm referring to in my comment - "I think autism has become a tag for the shared experiences of things" If anything, we are both equally frustrated by the fact that everyone who has experiences they consider "autistic" will happily jump on the bandwagon, despite the fact that it is a relatively small percentage of the population who has experiences that are sufficiently severe or unusual to warrant any kind of label at all. Nobody likes high pitched noises, everyone is distracted and disorganized, everyone has trouble concentrating or feels overwhelmed when lots of things happen at once, taking lots of medication is hard on the body for everyone, socializing in unfamiliar settings or for long periods feels uncomfortable, interacting with coworkers is weird, many people get lost in the details of things, many people like to spend long periods focused on their interests, some people have really good memories for certain things, etc, etc, etc. That doesn't make labeling yourself as autistic useful unless your experiences are preventing you from living the life you want to live, and even then, its only useful as a tool to find strategies of getting through that life, the label has no value in-itself.
- CityOfThrowaway 1y ago
  Completely agree. On the autism spectrum, I'm almost certainly very low. But going through the simulator felt like... yeah this all sucks but is very much in the realm of things that I experience and feel on any given day. It didn't feel enlightening, it felt deeply familiar. It's definitely the case that some people have a much larger magnitude of experience or persistence of experience. And for some, it's at levels that do make functioning in society quite difficult or impossible. And yet, I think the point you are quite rightly making is that many people who are decidedly low on the spectrum are now adopting the identity of autism as a way to explain why life is hard. I don't know why people feel inclined to adopt the label. I don't care that they do, they can call themselves whatever they want. But I do wonder if there are more productive ways of perceiving yourself, if you are indeed very much capable of functioning in society.

growingkittens 1y ago

I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum. Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder. Psychiatry is in its infancy. To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.

Aurornis 1y ago
It's tradition to warn first-year psychiatry students about over-diagnosing themselves and everyone around them. There is a well known phenomenon where as soon as students start reading about conditions and symptoms they start seeing it in everyone at rates far too high to be accurate. Fortunately for them, their professors are there to warn them about this effect. They also realize how foolish it was to diagnose everyone with everything based on generic symptoms when they get into practice and see what these conditions look like in real patients. Unfortunately, these psychiatry terms have spilled over into social media without the same warnings. This leads to extreme over-diagnosis by people who learn basic symptoms and start spotting them in everyone. > I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum. Unless you are only meeting people in an environment that is extraordinarily biased toward Autism Spectrum Disorder and you’re avoiding mingling with the general population, this simply isn’t possible. > Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder. You are grossly over-diagnosing. When you see a characteristic in half of all people it’s no longer in the realm of something considered a disorder. You are literally just describing the median point in human behaviors.
- mjburgess 1y ago
  You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population. People connect with similar people, form relationships in similar envioronemnts, so your social group is vastly more specialised than it might seem. Autism compounds this greatly because of the double empathy problem, so one should expect an autistic person to have mostly autistic friends and to be in environments where the rate of autism is far higher
  - 1y ago

deaux 1y ago

The audio stuff, the concentration stuff, the always coming late and so aren't difficult to categorize in terms of "normal" and "not normal", when they're basically constant and have been since a very young age. It's simply being in the long tail of the frequency distribution or not, wherever you set that line. > There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect. A lot of people are in the short head of the distributions when it comes to nearly all of these markers. Some people are in the long tails for a large number of them. Those are the ones we label. Being in the short head doesn't mean one is never awkward or never late or annoyed by certain noises, it means that they're so at a frequency that's common.

nwah1 1y ago

Look into the history of autism research and you'll find a history of fraud. People like Bruno Bettelheim simply lied their way to prominence and now we are on a road of ever-expanding diagnostic criteria and an ever-growing autism industry to the point where it is now trendy to self-diagnose on social media. Recall that psychology has had a gigantic replication crisis, and that the founders of the field like Freud and Jung were charlatans, and that there is no agreed-upon mechanistic explanation for autism, and that a primary diagnostic tool is a literal questionnaire, and that psychology and psychiatry have been abused for political reasons by every totalitarian government of the 20th century. Given all this, we should have some humility about this topic. Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life. And maybe we can normalize the idea that employees have special emotional needs that can be accounted for on an individual basis without medical permission slips or any need for wielding constructed identities.

chamomeal 1y ago
I still remember my psychology class in high school pretty well. It was memorable cause we’d spend a week learning about some theories Freud came up with, and then there would be a very short footnote of “turns out it was all totally made up and never scientifically verified in any way”. I was like what? So psychology isn’t science?? Recently a friend explained to me that Freud really wasn’t a scientist, but he was so influential in getting western cultures to think about the mind in new ways that we still learn about him. Like nobody cared about psychology until he get famous
- nwah1 1y ago
  The 19th century was a wild time. Everything was a science back then. That's why communists speak of the "immortal science of Marxist-Leninism." Marx literally said he was performing science, but that wasn't seen as an absurdity because that is how everyone spoke. It wasn't until the mid-20th century when people started to get more serious about defining science. Philosophers started critiquing it in the early 20th century like the Vienna Circle and Popper, and eventually the definition of what constitutes science was narrowed down to one that was defined as a particular sort of empiricism. That, too, has its own problems.

Ancapistani 1y ago

Objectively, I understand what you're saying here, and agree that it's almost certainly happening. Subjectively... I see people around me casually doing things that I simply cannot do. I'm 41 years old, and not once do I recall performing any action without actively forcing myself to do it. That includes things as small and trivial as getting up from my desk to use the restroom. I can't relate at all to the concept of a "habit". Combing my hair requires an explicit decision to do so. I usually have to find my brush, since there's no consistent place I put it. When I'm done, I'll forget that I wanted to put it back where it belongs while actively being frustrated with myself for not doing so the previous day. It's glaringly obvious to me that other people don't struggle with the things I struggle with; at the very least, they don't struggle to the same degree. It's exhausting. Oh, and I've never even been diagnosed with autism. I have ADHD. What I described above is classic "executive dysfunction".