Not about ADHD, nice. I probably have both. So many new MH illness to discover. We're charting new territory..woooo...fuck me
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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Sailling the ND seas...
Is it psychiatrists who talk about an "autism epidemic", or certain journalists and activists?
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.
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Uranus is still there even if no one can see it.
It's them upgrading the graphics card to our simulation.
I figured it out.
Autism causes Nvidia/AMD which causes exoplanets.
I love this post.
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"
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).
So you are trying to say there is a bad-failth-actor-idemic. Got it.
Unlike planets, people with autism have indeed been born in the last few decades and were not always in existence like some shadow beings
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