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This exoplanet pandemic is getting out of hand. We’re seeing them everywhere now!
I heard there’s also a galaxy outbreak happening as we speak
Jesus christ, this is so getting out of hand! We need to bother some politicians about this. What will happen to our children!?
It’s probably a reading error that will go away if we ignore it.
Have we tried slapping them out of existence? Or just telling them to think harder and maybe that’ll make them stop existing?
I will argue that the mild part of the autism spectrum, what we call functional autism, is not a mental illness, not a disorder.
It’s like being left handed, not the most common thing, it can cause troubles in a world made for right handed people, specially if being left handed is not accepted. But by itself is just another way of being just as “healthy” and “normal” as being right handed.
I think this is an open debate. Some folks prefer it being considered an illness because they want diagnosis and treatment. Others, like me, just love to be this way, and there’s nothing I think is wrong with me. The only problem is that the world is not accommodated for people like me, just like it wasn’t accommodated for left-handed people not so long ago. But as soon as it’s 100% accepted as something normal I don’t see it causing any trouble, so if there’s no harm there’s no illness we can talk about.
The tldr for this is Neurodiversity
Almost all disabilities exist only within the context of a culture. They are a human applied label.
I recon most disabled people can do more advanced complex tasks than any animal/pet. Yet we do don’t think of our pets as disabled.
We are all born with a useless appendix, which can potentially burst and kill us. If someone was born without. Would we all have a disability compared to them.
Someone with only one arm is considered disabled, extra fingers? If its not the default it’s considered disabled.
Now imagine a humanoid alien race with only 1 arm and a hand with 6 fingers. And imagine what their keyboards may look like. A normal human in their society would be considered disabled. Not because you cant use the keyboard but because you would struggle using a tool not designed for you.
Now the reason why you still want a diagnosis even when you agree with the above is simple. Society has not evolved this perspective. We can accommodate almost all disabilities but they key to getting that help is by first bureaucratically “registering” yourself as disabled by a medical professional.
If its not the default it’s considered disabled.
Vision is the outlier on this. More people wear glasses than not. This of course goes both ways and in various degrees, but I think the average is slightly nearsighted. It’s easily correctable, so nothing is done to make anything more easily accessible for vision impaired people.
However, neurodiversity is not easily correctable, so perhaps we ought to accept that with the rise in diagnosises that perhaps it’s actually rather normal and adjust our expectations for what people can actually do, instead of calling a majority of people “sick”.
I mean, look at attention disorders like ADHD. They’re perfectly healthy and can do all kinds of stuff. They just can’t do it for 8 hours straight between 9-17… its the expectations that need to change. It’s sick.
We din’t need a register of left handed people to start making left handed scissors.
I think society can accommodate without the need for medicalize it. That’s the difference I wanted to make, an illness need to be medicalized. A different way of being does not.
For instance, my lighter skin complexion makes so I have to wear more sunscreen that people with darker complexions. But no one would think of it as something to be medicalized. It’s just “oh, I usually get burned by the sun, I better buy some sunscreen” or “oh, I’m left handed I better put my mouse in left handed mode”, or “oh, I’m gay, I’d better go find someone of my same gender to love”. Something like that. Simple, easy and widely accepted.
Forgive me for asking but are you actually left handed though?
Everywhere i go the default scissors are molded for right hand. On my job (which is very accommodating in a general sense) if you ask they have an additional shitty type which is still right handed in terms of the blades but at least the handle more symmetrical.
For computer mice, those aren’t usually very symmetrical anymore either. Especially if those extra side buttons seem useful there is exactly one on the entire market that i know. This is why the vast majority of lefties use their mouse right handed.
There have been very real situations at my job where could not accomplish a task alone because left handed tools where not available and i was just going to hurt myself. Same thing at home because left handed tools are rarely affordable but are just have to bite the bullet and hurt myself to get the job done.
Don’t even get me started on walking in class room and seeing this:
And then they complain about lefties handwritten being bad.
We are tolerated and accommodation exists but these are still fairly new. My grandpa literally got beaten the left handness out of him. We still face daily disadvantages.
About your sunscreen, i am pretty sure if you would ask a doctor they could point you to the most appropriate sunscreen. My point was not to medicalize everything but to break the illusion of the medical perspective. People have different needs and they need those needs accommodated without unnecessary hoops to jump trough.
Of course neither left handed or fair skinned is of a similar complexity as neurodivergence or autism. Many accommodation i need for my autism are outside my price range, they will only give them to me if i first proof they are required. I disagree with the system but the system is all i got to work with.
Good scissors actually work either way. Blade-wise, that is, not when it comes to moulded handles: With proper blade geometry you do not need lateral pressure from the fingers for them to cut instead of passing each other, and even the exact “wrong” type of lateral pressure works fine. Scissor blades should only ever be loose when the scissors are opened impractically far to cut with. Don’t need to be expensive, only need to be not cheap.
Those chairs should be outlawed for a whole lot of reasons, not just that they’re ignoring lefties.
Note on handwriting, btw: Ball points are a bad habit if you want to develop proper technique, it’s very easy to use too much force, cramp up, etc, even without noticing. Over here kids write with pencils until they have the dexterity to move on to fountain pens: Breaking a pencil tip and having to resharpen is just the right amount of annoying to develop good habits.
The problem with “symmetrical” standard scissors is that you can’t see where you are making the cut properly.
Many lefties who are like me and got used to symmetrical scissors may not even be aware properly pointing blades make it easier of an angle to see what you’re doing.
A note in left-handedness:
In primary school, I first learned to write with a pencil and then with a fountainpen, as you describe (I grew up in Europe). This has made no difference to my experience with writing whatsoever, because our <insert strong swear word> language/cursive/alphabet is designed for right-handed people. I could talk for hours on the subject, but it would involve much swearing — I will spare you the pain. Just know that we should be writing top-to-bottom instead of left to write, and should re-design our alphabet, cursive, fountain pen nibs, and how we teach lefties to write.
I disagree on the last paragraph. Not so long ago helping disabled people was an obvious thing to do in our societies. I’m not saying it was easy for them or that it always worked. But in the last 70 years our societies changed to remove any help that wasn’t justified. The reason was simply to save money.
Now you must justify that you are different and this difference warrant a different treatment. Because the society became intolerant to difference.
Might be a different comment in the chain where i mentioned i don’t agree with this either but if i want the accommodation today then thats my reality.
I am a firm supporter of moving to a needs first society, not because i have a plan to make things sustainable but because the current system where we sell human survival to corporate greed isn’t doing us many favors.
100% the individual conditions make us different but the challenges and obstacles to everyday life that some different people may face originate on the social environment they exist in, not on the individual. If the society and environment change to accommodate for greater diversity then the person can more easily overcome the disability.
There is no “but” that is what i said in different words.
The but wasn’t referring to your comment. I agree with you. Was just expanding on the concept that disability lies in society, not the person.
Real quick the appendix might have an evolutionary function. When you have a gut infection and your intestine flushes out everything (good and bad bacteria), the appendix might be a cache for good bacteria that avoids both the infection and flushing. The good bacteria then repopulate your gut from your appendix.
Wholeheartedly agree with this! IMO our societies have a big problem with people being different.
That’s my opinion, but I attribute this liberalism: when the society’s philosophy is to attribute 5he responsibility of anyone’s success on each self person, it means the responsability to fit in is on the person itself and not on the society. This removes the burden of inclusion from the society, the group, and make it a burden of adaptation on the person. It is a toxic societal environment.
As an argument to this point of view: making it an illness provide a justification for the person to be different, and a responsability for the society to accommodate disabled people. But the need to go to this extreme instead of simply being tolerant and accommodating any difference is both stupid (because it is a burden for both the victims and the society to hold discussions about basic needs) and a inhuman way of treating people.
Another argument to my thesis is that the “epidemic” is coincidental with societal individualism (pushed by liberalism and that rose since the end of ww2) and the decline of social structures like church and government help (because liberalism was about fighting government involvement in people’s lives).
Absolutely! In fact, I’d argue that this is true for many conditions that we treat as disabilities, like dyslexia (which is rarely disabling) and the aforementioned autism. Both of these conditions have disadvantages and advantages. The situation is not black and white; simply because society was designed one way, does not mean that everyone who does not perfectly fit in is disabled or has a illness.
What’s an advantage of dyslexia?
Too much to cover in a comment! Here’s a good book on the subject: https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/
Edit: wait, that may be the wrong link. Here’s the book I meant: https://www.amazon.com/Dyslexic-Advantage-Unlocking-Hidden-Potential/dp/0452297923 (sorry for using an Amazon link)
You could give one or two examples before the ad.
I was short on time but wanted to recommend a book that drastically changed my life and improved my mental health. I have no moral issues recommending it; one can always look up a summary, or easily read it free of cost using shadow libraries (not that I recommend that).
However, I will humor you, and include a short summary here:
- better memory for stories
- better ability to think three dimensionally
- better ability to think dynamically (changing or uncertain variables)
- and some others I can’t remember off the top of my head.
Hope this helps.
Hell, I’d even go so far as to say it might not be worth a specific categorization, that everyone is a bit different and we don’t need to pigeonhole every state of reasonably normal into little categories. Ever since Asperger’s was popularized, we had a big chunk of people that are not especially far from normal latching onto this.
If it doesn’t need particularly special treatment/accommodation, then it’s not really worth a category. If someone feels like not dealing with people, needing a bit of a break from it, then that shouldn’t need to be correlated to a condition. By the same token, it can’t be an excuse for being unreasonable to others when you are perfectly capable of being reasonable, you just don’t like doing so. If you misread someone’s non-verbal cues, whether or not you have a “condition”, people should understand that’s just a possibility of everyday life.
Is psychiatrists who talk about an “autism epidemic”, or certain journalists and activists?
it’s always a variety of different actors in any social process like this. it’s not any one singular body. but if you want to speak broadly, no the “epidemic” thinking is not widely accepted in psychiatry anymore.
however the idea of modernity bringing new causes that increase the prevalence of certain mental disorders (which seems contrary to OP’s claim) is still being explored. either way, whether it’s more prevalent now or not, there’s no question that autism predates its label. well, beyond the ontological question of “is it really there if it doesn’t have a name”, which is an admittedly important question.
I would argue that psychiatry and psychology does not make this claim. if anything modern psychiatry and psychology along with autism foundations led the push to educate early childhood development associated caretakers, eg pediatricians, elementary and preschool teachers, etc for signs to look for and led to development and revision of specific screening tools throughout the 1990s that started to greatly increase the number of cases that diagnosed early on when they would’ve otherwise would’ve been considered “socially awkward” and ostracized for much of their lives without any support offered at all
Granted there are certainly professionals that reject this now. The field is diverse and you certainly have varying opinions on things. And one weird phenomenon no one saw coming is that in this day and age staunchly conservative viewpoints would be disproportionately platformed. So sometimes those dumb shitheads get a huge platform because when they soapbox on social media saying “too many kids are getting diagnosed with autism” there are forces behind that realize they can be a useful idiot to legitimize awful views, like limiting health care spending (more people diagnosed with autism means insurance companies spend more) or anti vaccination nonsense (autism always attracts the loonies). And a bit of fame will often easily go to their heads, especially if it means they can now make a decent clip of money from speaking engagements and selling books.
But remember those people don’t define the field. They are a sore on the field. The Jordan Petersons and Lisa Littmans are scum that are propped up by a propaganda network and powerful forces. They are outnumbered. That’s why their research keeps getting retracted (or in petersons case why he simply sticks to podcasts and hasn’t authored a paper since 2007), because there are more people with ethics and integrity that will call them out. At least for now, until our institutions surrounding social science are fully dismantled
It’s important to note that neither Peterson or Littman are psychiatrists.
Littman is a physician, but last I remember, she studied behavioral health and psychotherapy. Which is interesting because most doctors who have a significant interest in a field like she claims to have would have shut up a long time ago and pursued it through significant research after a couple of Ph D.s worth of work. But that doesn’t make you wealthy, it just means that the one tiny thing you researched is right. She clearly would rather have money.
Peterson is just a grifting asshole with a psychology degree. Marketing is one of the most common employers of psychologists and he just does it for his own stuff.
People of the land https://youtu.be/hYTQ7__NNDI
Got to say, I don’t really understand. But words ending with the -demic morpheme aren’t used lightly where I’m from and still mean what they do. I assume that’s what’s going on in this comment.
There are bad-faith actors trying to convince people that autism is “caused” by vaccines and similar garbage. They see the growing autistic population as a “woke epidemic”
So you are trying to say there is a bad-failth-actor-idemic. Got it.
Not even that necessarily, they just like to act as if a lot of autism diagnoses are made up or at least severely exaggerated.
shit like “bah you’re not autistic, you’re just an introvert, you just need to try harder!”
I’ve faced this myself from my mom’s SO, he was just fucking incapable of entertaining the idea that i’m autistic before i got my diagnosis, despite working with other neurodivergent people and accepting them! It’s maddening.People still think of autism in like… Rain Man-terms.
As much as people like to think popular depictions (The Big Bang Theory, Abed in Community, etc) of autistic behavioral patterns are somehow furthering “the cause” (whatever that is) - ultimately, they amount to little more than vaudeville and can be incredibly damaging to people who don’t “seem autistic”.
It’s very tiring to assure people that yes, you are indeed autistic, when all they know is Sheldon Cooper and Raymond Babbitt.
Especially annoying if they think you’re some sort of genius, when the average autistic’s intelligence generally is lower than average.
Especially now that so many fucking lunatic autistics are committing atrocities.
If you’re obviously greatly disabled autistic=not threatening High functioning autistic=liability
I was diagnosed 20 years ago, and even I had a very hard time recognizing and accepting that my own partner is also autistic (now diagnosed as an adult).
But then again, it seems to manifest dramatically different in men v.s. women, as well as there not really being any depictions of autistic women in media for the longest time.
And a gigantic part of autistic women no doubt went undiagnosed for a long time (and still are).
i’m curious where you get the part of autistic people on average having lower intelligence, afaik the opposite is true. Better pattern recognition and stuff like that, with the tradeoff of generally struggling more with social stuff.
There are a couple of studies on this, and the findings are admittedly kind of scattered, but here are some key points.
One study suggests as much as 50% of people on the spectrum have at least four (or more) comorbid conditions (a vast variety of things, e.g. ADD, intellectual disabilities etc).
Another study found that 95% of children with ASD had comorbidities. Again, the rain man trope is rather strongly rooted in our sociocultural reality tunnel.
I’ve met a lot of people on the spectrum in my life (about 1% of the population are diagnosed, after all), and almost all of them have also had either ADD, intellectual disabilities, medical disabilities like Crohn’s disease, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, PCOS, hormonal or chromosomal disorders and/or other psychological conditions like schizophrenia or other schizotypal disorders BPD, bipolar disorder etc.
The fact is that a Sheldon Cooper is kind of a unicorn among autistics.
But truthfully, my observation that most autistics are below average intelligence is almost entirely anecdotal (yet with a rather sizeable sample pool), because admittedly I’m struggling to find any hard data on it.
Some figures I’ve seen say 32% have below 70, 25% have 70-84, 40% have 85-115, with only about 3% being above 115.
But here’s at least one study finding that 55% of autistic kids have an intellectual disability (below 70 IQ).
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The same can be said for many neurodivergent “disorders” like ADHD and OCD and Depression. Though I would point out that many of these disorders could easily be recategorized as traits and everyone has some number of traits regardless of if you are seen as neurotypical or not. I would argue that “treatment” is a modification of traits such that we fit a mold in modern society and not necessarily to make us better for our own sake but for the sake of those around us that don’t understand how our brains work.
I medicate to make myself less of an inconvenience for you. Not necessarily to make my life better for me.
Not the case for all neurodivergents but I know a lot who share the sentiment.
Unlike planets, people with autism have indeed been born in the last few decades and were not always in existence like some shadow beings
Planets are also being created all the time. They didn’t just all form at once.
But there’s no way to measure if there’s an increase in autism, because in previous generations, it went undiagnosed.
I knew kids who for sure had it, and have a cousin who is severely autistic. That shit was rough back then, especially in a third world country, but I commend my aunt for raising him to live in the hard world he was born into, he’s 40 now and can hold down a job and has an apartment. It was hard for him but he made it. The other side of the coin is people in North America who have autistic kids, and stop pushing them intellectually and just go “he’s autistic, don’t push him or teach him to adjust and live, he’ll never get it ” mentality, or the “yay im autistic, how cool” mentality some young people have.
Autism isn’t Super power it sucks
Yeah, that’s the thing, I’ve seen the gamut (and people will say “of course it’s a spectrum”) and a non-trivial amount are people almost treating it as “trendy”, and self-diagnosing or shopping professionals seeking a diagnosis.
I remember at the time they were announcing removal of Asperger’s from the DSM that there was some thought that the high functioning “condition” did more harm than good. It seems the ship has sailed and anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable in social situations and also wants to use it as evidence of their intelligence will go for an Autistic diagnosis. I’ve dealt with a few people who got mad at their mental health professional for telling them they are within the realm of “normal” and everyone finds a challenge in dealing with other people to an extent.
Meanwhile, the people who would have been diagnosed as autistic whether today or 40 years ago suffer some dilution of accommodation, as it seems everyone asserts they are neourodivergent/spicy/autistic online and it ceases to mean much in the popular perception.
My son (8 years old, born and raised in the US) was diagnosed last week. I’m hesitating to let the school know because they’ll lower their expectations, when he’s so curious and clever. Not sure how I’ll navigate it yet, but I (born and raised in Jamaica) know I likely have some form of it too.
It’s the same about depression. I doubt people got “more depressed”, society have just ignored depression for almost the entirety of human history. My mother still tells me to “just be happy” like I can control brain chemicals. Literally nothing makes me happy. Petting my cat only slightly lessens my suffering. Ugh 😓
Marx’s Capital mentions at one point that the working class in Manchester were reliant on drugs like opium to cope with their insane working conditions and poor life/housing conditions.
It’s not a new thing at all.
If depression wasn’t common someone needs to explain how we have seen so much more of it as fewer people are drinking as much as they had in the past.
I don’t think I agree with this one. There’s so much about lives lived in first world countries, with all the signals and information they are bombarded with, that is almost anti-thetical to our biology. I’m certain we are more mentally unwell than people living simply, especially in the past.
I’d assume coal miners and starving peasants just had different psychological issues (mostly, I bet some got depressed anyway, especially as a secondary effect of the other issues). Like PTSD, anxiety and the like.
I wonder what the coal mines were like
Alcoholics, probably
While I’m sure most of it has always been here, I would be surprised if modern technology hasn’t contributed to a spike in depression. I have more content and information than I could ever need in the palm of my hands, and yet everything I read seems to make me hate people.
Yeah in 1940 you knew wealthier people had it better but you really never saw how much better.
Nor could you easily learn how people in other countries lived.
It was way easier to have this garbage Healthcare system we have in the US back when nobody knew that other countries had it for free (potentially, I don’t know what year it was implemented in most countries but you get my point).
… so what you’re saying is that exoplanets cause autism!
This is stupid and you know it. Exoplanets were discovered much later. It’s Pluto that caused the autism epidemic and autistic people caused the exoplanet epidemic. Keep the causation clear.
No. It’s obviously the space telescopes.
Are Smelloscopes ok?
You already asked that last year!
You have the causation wrong here.
Autistic people go into astronomy, and then find more exoplanets. Therefore autism causes exoplanets!
This is technically sort of a little correct.
Time to blown up Pluto.
I’m out of the loop here. Could someone ad some context for me? What’s this about?
Autism
There is an incorrect belief that autism is on the rise and that it must be caused by something, but in reality we are just getting better at identifying it and diagnosing people correctly. So it’s not that there is an autism epidemic, we’re just discovering that it’s less rare of a condition than previously assumed.
So… someone went through a great deal of trouble to share this. Why? I’m confused. What is the message and the audience? Is there something I am supposed to do?
The message is correcting a misconception utilizing a concept most people would understand better. It isn’t a call to action, just informational.
One example is anti-vaxxers claiming vaccines are causing the increase in autism. When challenged, one possible response they parrot is “well then what is the cause?”. The message is that there isn’t a cause because there isn’t an increase in the first place
Between Trump, Palestine, Russia, Ukraine… I just ain’t got time for one other thing. Not this. If there’s nothing I can even imagine doing about this, why is it my business?
Why is what your business? What do you think anyone is asking of you?
You’re the one who asked for an explanation of the post.
Conversations evolve.
Not about ADHD, nice. I probably have both. So many new MH illness to discover. We’re charting new territory…woooo…fuck me
Sailling the ND seas…
When left-handedness became acceptable the number of left handed people was far higher than experts had predicted.
My grandmother told me stories about how she’d get whipped with a stick on the top of her hand if she tried using her left. Coercion never went away: conversion camps, behavioural therapy etc.
My mom told me similar stories. She adored Ned Flanders’s store and used to remind us constantly how easy right-handers have it (semi-jokingly). I think that was my first encounter with the concept of privilege.
That’s actually a great example of privilege that isn’t controversial or politicized
Edit: anymore anyway #goals
Before the 60s, in most Catholic societies, writing with your left hand was seen as a sign of the devil and unchristian. It was thus punished very often. I heard stories in Québec (Canada) where people would be beaten their left hand until there was blood with a wooden ruler. It’s frankly horrible and someone I know did show her scars from being beaten so often.
There’s a reason that the word “sinister” has negative connotations these days, despite it originating from the latin word for “left”.
I wasn’t even aware it came from latin, but that makes perfect sense. But it’s weird how it was considered bad up until this late in history, but it wasn’t until 1938 that someone patented the smudge-free ballpoint pen. I imagine that smudging with your left hand as you wrote must’ve been very irritating and wasteful for hundreds of years, and thus it became a sadistic ritual to “right wrongs”.
Here in Denmark we called that type of schooling “sorte skole” (black school, an expression from the mid 1500s, where schools were run by religious institutions, so perhaps it’s a reference to their clothing?), and it didn’t matter if you understood the subject or not, you just had to memorize it and do things correctly, even writing with ones right hand.Dictionary lookup on google translate
I agree that it took so long to make it seem « not bad ». I wonder how it was perceived by societies where they write from the right to the left like Hebrew or Arabic. This would be crazy, but I even wonder if right handed people could have been the ones that were attacked by the religion or it was only a catholic phenomenon.
My grandfather too
just waiting for the us government to criminalize left-handedness
I’m waiting for a left-handed month and parades…
Left-handed awareness month exists. Thats why you know about left-handed people.
The reason people are aware of pride month is because of pride month awareness month
Left-handed awareness month exists. Thats why you know about left-handed people.
A swing and a miss.
Pride Parades will go away when we stop needing them. Or turn into another drinking holiday like St Patrick’s Day or Cinco de Mayo.
They’re busy on darkskinedness and transgenderedness atm.
I just want to take the moment to say, nice to have you all around, especially if you are different. Thanks for enjoying the shit that I don’t. And thanks for sharing my love for something for a different reason. Thanks for showing me a different world.
Also If everyone was like me, my girlfriend wouldn’t be who she is, but ignoring that, I would have a lot of competition and it would be really boring for all of us. Wtf do you talk about if we all would be the same? I would hate you all, and consequently myself. Thanks for being different, seriously.
isn’t this also, like, a tweet about queer people?
Uranus is still there even if no one can see it.
