Errm ... about that headline. "The researchers found a difference in how sensory signals are processed in [pyramidal neurons of cortical layer 5]" in a mouse model of Fragile X Syndrome. That's it.
The abstract of the paper ends with "These results challenge the traditional view that FXS and other ASD are characterized by sensory hypersensitivity, proposing instead a hyposensitivity of sensory inputs and hypersensitivity of predictive inputs onto cortical neurons."
And that is under the assumption that any of these hypotheses are true(ish). While an interesting finding, it doesn't prove that it is a significantly contributing factor in (human) autism.
IMO the reclassification of Asperger’s Syndrome as a general Autism Spectrum disorder was massively unhelpful to all, and it only served to muddy conversations like this. Different ends of the spectrum affect people in wildly different ways. Different extremes need very different types of support.
As a person with Asperger’s, I really wish it remained a distinct condition in terms of its classification.
My wife is a BCBA and she spends all her time teaching kids on the "low" end of the spectrum critical life and safety skill (potty training, using a fork, how to ask for help)... While there's a growing group of people on the other end who say what she does is cruel and evil (many of them did receive bad/unnecessary therapy unfortunately)
BCBAs are paid by parents and schools. ABA is considered “Autism therapy” although there’s no particular reason it could be. The techniques used in such therapy bear a striking resemblance to conversion therapy, especially when the goal is to make the child behave normatively in some way, let’s say by not fidgeting. Much of the most cited evidence for ABA being effective like it raising IQ was gathered in the 80s, when autism I was diagnosed over a hundred times less often, with it becoming insurable in the 90s.
There are also some hilariously dark moments in ABA’s history and even it’s present. The judge rotenberg center, still open, being the most infamous where they strap down kids and shock them with electric vests (aversives in ABA speak, a rare practice) while strapped down. People prominent in ABA’s history like Ile Ovar Lovaas were pioneers in transgender conversion therapy and they used the EXACT same techniques they used on the autistics. He also published an article about slapping children.
They overwhelmingly work with autistics (mostly because of insurance) who were instrumental in conversion therapy in the past. From my experiences reading their communities, forcing autistics to act more normal is still a common goal. They work largely for companies who hire a few BCBAs and they’re structurally under pressure to produce results as measured by parents or children. Even today it’s common for ABAs to be assigned to torture autisitc children by subjecting them too heavily unpleasant experiences over not maintaining eye contract or stimming which are pretty transparently against their interests and only suit the aesthetic preferences of the adults around them.
The former patients in my experience give a mixed reaction to ABA (from “it let me fit in and live a normal life” to “I liked them they weee fun and funny” to “meh” to “fuckers tortured me” to “why did they have such a fucking problem with me flapping my hands?”) but their opinions broadly speaking don’t matter in any real way because they don’t sign the checks. Mind you, people with autism are overrepresented among BCBAs. Since autism diagnosis doubles every few years and is diagnosed in more and more marginal cases amongst people who are more and more lucid and articulate, who much more arguably never needed by therapy at all, the political correctness of what is in practice benevolent brainwashing of autistics is declining sharply. Were ABA only practiced on 80s autistics (autistics with high support needs, low functioning autistics) nobody would care so to be honest BCBAs reputation got screwed over by the broadening conceptualization of what autism means.
Had this exact conversation with my 18-year-old daugther yesterday. She's fairly recently diagnosed and was happy with being described as Asperger's, but now it's much less clear when she's described as Autistic.
Just calmly explain that weaponized autism makes the world go around. She is on the superpowers end of the spectrum and the normals are right to be afraid of their superiors.
I wish that was the case. Both daughters have diagnoses, and both have had very difficult adolescent years. Next-level stuff that I think people don't believe me about most of the time. They have great difficulty with socialising, and that has been extremely difficult for them. Both of them rather resent the 'rain man' view of autism that they have some special talent as a payoff for their difficulties, although one is incredible in terms of research and planning. But she doesn't see that as being anything to do with autism!
> But she doesn't see that as being anything to do with autism!
Don't forget that she is also a teenager. Growing up is hard, socializing and fitting in can feel incredibly important -- but there's always an alternative cost: less time mucking about with mean girl types, more time to study the sword.
This is a blessing in disguise. The payoff will come, for that reason alone, and so will the true friends down the line. She probably wouldn't choose this now, but later on she absolutely would.
Do you think they might be inspired by the Temple Grandin lens of autism? She's accomplished so much in a field that basically didn't exist before her and against a massive amount of adversity. She's a time-worn example of how the different perspectives that autism can give you can be leveraged into a calling that is both lucrative and improves lives.
Glad to mentioned "Weaponized autism" because the original justification for Hans asperger not being forced to murder the aspie kids was their potential for those kids to develop military technology for the Reich.
Remember aspies, the world believes you are only valuable due to your ability to produce, and specifically, to produce novel things.
Ultimately, for this reason, I'd love to see a "cure" for autism as it is a debilitating disease for many of those who suffer with it
I mean, I absolutely understand not wanting to use that, but what do I say instead? Autism is a spectrum, and some folks are less able to function than others on that spectrum.
I legitimately want to know, because I don't know what to say here.
The problem one daughter of mine had with that was because she is high-functioning, she says that poeple think she consequently needs no support. She's demonstrated conclusively that isn't the case, and both of my diagnosed step-daughters need a lot of support, much in areas where many people don't.
The reality is that Autism as a whole IS NOT one single spectrum. It's a lot of different symptoms, needs, quirks, and crossover with a bunch of other mental illnesses as well, like social anxiety. Describing it as a singular variable "Spectrum" produces entirely wrong conclusions.
It's more like a 10 dimensional space, at least, with each dimension being a symptom or needs category. For example, I don't think anyone would diagnose me with autism, or even old asbergers, but I have a lot of sensory issues and struggle to parse speech and faces.
If you are aware of someone having some form of autism, and you want to know more about "where on the spectrum" they are, simply talk to them, ask what they struggle with, ask about their needs. If you didn't have to talk to a family member or nurse before talking to them, they probably don't need huge affordances.
Giving people who have a syndrome which causes poor social skills and frequently leaves it's victims bullied the name "assburgers" syndrome was about as unfortunate as it got for these people. As someone who had a diagnosis for Asperger's, I'm extremely happy to see the name changed.
Also, the theory of taking autism as a single-variate "how functioning are you" spectrum and labeling the low side of that spectrum "Asbergers" was unscientific nonsense anyway, not backed up by research into autism.
There are a multitude of spectrums of symptoms, support needs, issues, and attributes that are all lumped together. The idea of taking that huge parameter space and mapping it to only two classes was nonsense. There is an important shift in psychology to move beyond really dumb and old classifications into actual evidence based treatment.
The diagnostic distinction between Asperger’s and HFA was arbitrary and depending on the diagnosis one received as a child would lead to vastly different outcomes (i.e. it meant the difference between staying in a normal school, with academic support, and hopefully getting to go to university versus losing academic options due to being railroaded into a special-school with less course options and so never getting into HE at all - all on the basis of a single childhood assessment).
If the worse that comes out of the DSM-V’s reconceptualisation of autism is just muddied conversations then I’ll gladly take that over the old system where highly-capable people were being denied opportunities like going to uni.
Also, Asperger was a child-killing Nazi (yes, literally). I’m glad we don’t use his name anymore.
It isn't arbitrary. Asperger's and HFA are not the same. One is language impaired and one isn't, as the bare minimum clinical difference.
That being said, I don't doubt that the history of differential diagnosis is marked with widespread incompetence. And I obviously agree that being denied opportunity based on either diagnosis is a social crime.
But what you mention is not the worst outcome of the DSM-V reclassification. What they are now moving toward / doing is still classifying HFA people as Type 1 autistic. But for (former) asperger's patients they are tending to do is diagnose a social skills disorder instead.
Essentially removing anyone without a language impairment, at minimum, from the autism funded-services pool. Ignoring the arguable utility of services for HFA or Asperger's clients for one second, beyond the psychological and developmental benefits of simple social interaction.
What this also does is remove a population from the autism category that, to all but the patient and clinical professionals themselves, are often only detectable as different due to factors centered on how (often more capable) intelligence is cognitively distributed and manifests. Ignoring comorbidities.
Aside from affecting the important identity issue for the patient: essentially what they did was to remove any intelligence difference from being able to be a primary clinical marker for autism. Or sometimes the only obvious marker, depending on the individual's masking skill and ability to handle fatigue from it.
Almost every person I have met who whines about Asperger’s no longer being a valid diagnosis seem to be but hurt because, for awhile, Asperger’s = “omg super genius” in the popular mind.
Get over it. He was literally a nazi. It wasn’t even a great descriptor for a wide range of traits.
I would normally have been diagnosed with it. Now I’m just “Autistic” with ADHD and low support needs.
Clinging to the verbiage is like all the dipshits in my home state listing MLK day as “MLK Day/Genera Lee’s Birthday”. It serves no purpose and just makes people roll their eyes and tune you out.
> Clinging to the verbiage is like all the dipshits in my home state listing MLK day as “MLK Day/Genera Lee’s Birthday”. It serves no purpose and just makes people roll their eyes and tune you out.
You must be from VA, or another southern state...
It absolutely serves a purpose, and it's sending a signal to a very specific (maybe 2 very specific) groups of people.
So, since Hitler promoted women's sports, we should just stop that? Identity of researchers is irrelevant, the question is whether end result is useful. Obviously only applies to past research, present day we should follow best practices of modern medical ethics. Nevertheless it's clear that even if Aspergers is strictly "low end of autism", those affected are often highly productive in society without any special accomodation and may on the other hand need support in emotional and social adjustment which would be beyond reach with severe autism. For example, Elon Musk needs some help with emotional intelligence, not vocational training.
I have also seen no evidence that Asperger's and Autism are in fact forms of the same condition. Forgetfulness is not dementia, chubbiness is not obesity. Don't leap to conclusions just because you don't like the guy.
Isn't it a bit uncomfortable that term that described condition of non-verbal kids got so diluted that now there are adult people who self diagnose common human quirks with this term?
Self diagnosis seems extremely popular in the last 2 years. Unrelated to autism, we also seem to be having an adhd epidemic based on the number of peole self diagnosing it.
I do think things like tiktok have caused it to explode. I remember my last year of teaching we had a PD session on what to do if teens start self diagnosing themselves with various behaviours. It causes issues cause then they often do start exhibiting other behaviours they didn't have and it leads to a lot of problems. Tiktok has also done massive damage to things like DID where people claim it and that they can just 'switch' to their 'alters' at will. I knew some people who actually had DID and they hated this and how it basically made light of all the serious issues they have.
So I do think the self-diagnosis trend is increasing thanks to social media networks. And in some ways it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
OTOH, DSM, govt pages etc focus only on small choldren, do not mention things like shutdown/meltdown at all etc. If one has grown up in a country, where upper end of the spectrum did not officially exist (eg USSR) those tiktoks are, like, only way to learn about these concepts.
Self diagnosis is valid because the formal process is bullshit lol. The diagnostic process utterly lacks reliability in practice, there has been no two years in the last half a century where autism has been diagnosed at the same rate from year to year. Diagnosis has instead multiplied many times over.
The biggest problem I have with self-diagnosis is the idea that self-diagnosis (along with formal diagnosis) is actually capable of diagnosing a neurodevelopment disorder. It just ain’t so and autism is a social construct that LARPs as a medical one.
It doesn't help that professional diagnosis services are both hard to access and that they often seem to have a poor understanding of the conditions they are trying to diagnose.
I'm not convinced that self-diagnosis is any less accurate than professional diagnosis for conditions like autism or ADHD.
I'm sure it's less accurate. Look how many people say they "have OCD" when they like a clean room. How many of those people understand that they don't actually have OCD?
However, current psychology is realizing the previous ways of lumping people with vastly disparate needs into finite categories is bad and dumb and doesn't really help anyone. Turns out, making someone's mental illness easy for nobodies to talk about isn't that useful for treatment, while extreme nuance and personalization IS really good for treatment.
I wouldn’t use the word “accurate” but professional diagnosis is so wildly unreliable that it’s hard for self-diagnosis to do worse. People give a lot of unwarranted credibility to professional autism diagnosis.
It's a temporary catch all term that needs to go away once science illuminates this dark corner. We don't know why cockroaches turn left or right, psychologists need to be humbled.
"Treating autism as a ‘disease’, rather than a neurotype that exists as a result of natural biological variation, paves the way for a level of discrimination and stigmatisation that would not be acceptable if it were applied to other minority groups. At worst, it raises serious fears of eugenics. But the traditional understanding of autism as a deficit also plays a huge role in day-to-day discrimination against autistic people..."
> It is a disorder in that our norms of society are not aligned around Neurodiverse brains
Reminder as always that over-simplifying autism to lean into the most high functioning description completely erases the existence of all of the severely autistic people out there who are barely able to function with their disorder.
Given the context of how I understand autism, and my personal experience with it, as a severe inhibitor in a normal life for the people who suffer from it, I find the whole quote you shared as despicable.
Further evidence that the autism you are talking about dismisses and denies the existence of many autistic individuals who are not as privileged to have such a high functioning variant.
Your empathy for autistic people stops at a certain level of capability, because you refuse to even recognize that they exist within your argument. It makes my stomach churn.
You're over-reacting and trying to use your emotion as a bludgeon, in order to stand in for absent logic.
You're also falling into a semantic illusion that everything currently or formerly classified as autism is actually all on the same spectrum. In reality "the spectrum" is a modern theory and literally no other range for any disorder stretches nearly as far. Which is a red flag. See the fact that many people that would have been formerly diagnosed as Asperger's will now not be diagnosed with autism at all, but instead with a social skills disorder.
The existence of Asperger's, or the inclusion or not of formerly Asperger's patients into the general Autism spectrum category does not threaten the identities of other people with Autism.
Neither professionals nor patients should seek to use other people with impairments as their political pawn or psychological security blanket. It is morally wrong to demand the direction of their classification because you or they believe that it helps you. Get a life.
I'm sorry, but I'm not following how I'm leaning into autism with the highest functioning description of it. ASD has multiple stages with varying needs of assistance, I am trying to encourage society to help of all stages.
I truly want to understand more how that quote is despicable. As someone directly responsible for an individual with autism, I very much acknowledge that autistic people exist at several different levels of capabilities.
Your quote precisely claims that it is not "a deficit," which directly denies the reality of people on the lower end of functionality on the spectrum. Period.
There is a vocal minority, of which your source is a part of, who are trying to "normalize" Autism. In order for it to be "natural neuro-divergence" or "a super power" you have to intentionally omit the negative aspects of the medium-functioning, and completely deny the existence of the low-functioning.
Using woke language to try and assuage the insecurities of high functioning autistic people might make people feel like big strong social justice warriors, but I will die on the hill that they are actually doing grave harm to many disabled people. To use the parlance, they are being problematic. And they should be ashamed of themselves for it.
You're approaching this from a scientific perspective. The other approach is political/sociological. Neither of you are wrong.
I get that it can be demoralizing, but I'd suggest it serves your cause better to be able to point to high-functioning cases as success stories to mitigate the stigma, lest the rest of the spectrum be dismissed as retarded beyond redemption (hence, eugenics).
I'm sure we can all agree that there should be different definitions of autism. That low functioning, non-verbal people should not be sharing the same disorder as slightly awkward people.
Since we can agree on that I think we should all work together to change the definitions.
I frankly don’t care if you feel the need to call me/a huge swathe or people disordered and have something medically wrong with them because you lack sufficient creativity to imagine how we could treat people with severe mental health issues if we failed to do this. Severely disabled autistic people don’t give two craps about autistic erasure, I knew some over a period of time, they never talked about ideas how “Asperger’s” was fundamentally problematic or any such hot takes, frankly they couldn’t hold a conversation and mostly wanted people to take care of them and be nice to them and for them to be more independent. This is about you, not them.
All I hear is somebody calling me two insults, “disordered” and “privileged” who feels a sense of moral superiority for doing so. I never chose this label for myself, it was imposed upon me, I can’t choose to shed it, and I reject to being martyred for the sake of the severely disabled. I reject being labelled as having a neurological disorder without anybody looking at my Brain, taking my blood, doing any sort of objective testing, because some psychologist arbitrary deemed how I behave “deficits” through observation, an utterly subjective judgement. it’s some sort of moral obligation to believe I’m mentally disordered otherwise I’m hurting the severely disabled!
You know maybe we could help the severely disabled by volunteering or donating to charity instead of this nonsense??
Exactly. Elon is open about ASD (he uses the word Asperger's because he’s older), Anthony Hopkins is open about autism too (he can memorise a 7 page script), I suspect Tarantino may have it, and half of the people who built the internet.
Anyone that tries to ‘rectify’ me can fuck off.
Edit: as a user of HN since it was Startup News, and as someone who is very much aware of the HN guidelines, 'fuck off' was chosen very carefully towards anyone who would erase my existence.
Hopefully HN has a modicum of empathy for other people and can understand others not wanting to be destroyed.
Elon is probably as much ASD as he is an inventor. Going by his behavior (parts that are reported on in public), I can as a lay-person recognize him to have more narcissistic traits, so a personality disorder like NPD or ASPD is more descriptive of him in my mind.
When you have money it's known as "eccentric", ie eccentric billionaire (similarly you have mad scientist, absent-minded professor, wise old man, etc).
This video has logic like (all from the first 3 minutes):
- "Elon wasn't public with his condition before SNL, nor did his mother reveal this deeply personal information, maybe he has it buy maybe he's a sociopath?".
- Some people in our YouTube comments section have diagnoses and don't believe Elon. Here are their comments!
Sometimes I think I'd be quite happy to be "rectified" of ASD...
Whether it is correct or not to see it _entirely_ in a disease model (which it's not clear to me, how should the study have been done with a hybrid model?), I have to disagree with the suggestion it shouldn't be seen as an issue.
Don't forget that the S in ASD is for "spectrum". There are parts of this spectrum with people for who ASD is debilitating to their happiness and participation in society. "Rectified" might not mean complete change, but enough to give someone the tools to handle things better.
Neurotypical peopple often lie about things for social convenience, overly value fitting in, have trouble exploring the depths of their interests, and have a poor sense of smell and taste.
For people who are high-functioning, it may be that the benefits of autism you mentioned are worth the downsides. But I think most medium and low-functioning people would not agree with that.
I’m technically level 2, which means there are periods where I cannot communicate. I have at least one level 3 friend that I’m sure would feel the same, I’ll ask her and find out for sure though.
I agree it isn't entirely separable. I assume that personality / self develops differently due to the "issue" identified in the study, and if it were "rectified", then it would no longer be a factor. That doesn't mean that you'd wake up the next day as a completely different person. Everyone changes over time, and the prior "self" is still there and you can still choose how to integrate the new "changes".
Of course, this is just my imagination, it may not actually be anything like that. But I will double down on the thrust of my original comment, which is that although autism is not simply a "disease" because the self has developed differently, doesn't necessarily mean that we want it to stay.
I would be 100% ok with being cured of ADHD and off spectrum. If I don’t take my meds everything goes haywire for me and everyone around me. I don’t think people realize how “one hand tied behind your back” these things really are.
So be a constant slave to judgement of strangers on how I talk, act and dress rather than tuning out all that useless noise and focusing on the few people and things I truly care about? That would be a hard pass for me.
Maybe "ASD" umbrella is part of the problem, I don't have a "sensory integration disorder", I have emotions that tend to go from 0 to 65 with little in between and some other issues like poor facial memory (that would be nice to cure) and tendency to daydream.
Maybe that's consistent with Aspergers as originally understood, maybe not. But just for starters, can we stop inventing nonsensical umbrella terms like "ASD" and "AAPI" that serve no purpose except shared victimhood and shaming everyone else for supposed microaggressions? Hawaii is not the same as India, and I don't need a service dog to tell me there is a fire alarm in my building. Maybe then it would be easier for me to work on my unique needs. Like you know how one in a several hundred people finds your responses 100% natural and preferable to superficial norms without necessarily sharing the same personality themselves? Would be great to be able to find them efficiently to maintain a decent social circle rather than stumbling upon one randomly every ten years.
I have a bit of difficulty trying to understand what ASD means for such individuals as adults. If one is highly intelligent one can just spend time studying people to determine how they respond to situations. I don't really grasp why understanding people is any different from analyzing any other kind of system.
I wonder how many ASD diagnoses are made just because someone never learnt social skills properly due to circumstances or lack of effort/interest.
A person with balance disorder wont be able to walk straight and will trip a lot. You can't just study physics and fix your balance, those calculations are too hard to make quickly enough to be used in practice. Understanding physics might help a bit, but their walk will always feel clunky and unnatural.
ASD is the same kind of problem but with social situations. No matter what they do their social interactions wont feel as natural and smooth as what normal humans do. And interestingly enough many with ASD also have unnatural and clunky walking styles as if they had a problem with balance, it is a known red flag to check for a diagnosis.
I remember hearing of someone that had blown out their inner ear and had balance issues. The issue was solved with a gyroscopic plane that sat between their molars and covered the back of their tongue.
A person who got ahead even though their social skills are shit probably has a lot of other things going for them, not everyone judges a persons worth just based on their social skills.
You can actually use autism to have good social skills. It takes a lot of work but once you realise you will never fit in, and have the same issues speaking to a thousand people as you do speaking to one person, you can speak honestly to a thousand people. Very few NTs can do this.
Kinda like the peacock's tail being attractive because it is harmful to the individual. The bigger the tail, the better the peacock, if he made it this far without getting eaten!
If he is able to successfully maintain an audience on social media and date celebrities while juggling multiple CEO roles it sounds to me that this disorder is mostly cured.. unless you can prove there is a region of the brain that is responsible for being tactful.
He just needs to work on not firing or picking fights with random people when in a bad mood.
We call both social skills, but they are very different, just like how balance and theoretical physics are different things. Managing a company or a large crowd requires more intellectual understanding, he has that, managing direct social interactions requires more of the intuitive parts of your brain, he might have a disorder there and it would classify him as having autism.
And just to clarify, people with autism can have great theoretical understanding of people, doesn't mean that they perform well in direct social interactions.
But this discussions doesn't seem to go anywhere, you hate the guy and want to say he is evil rather than him having a disorder. There isn't much to argue about then.
I don’t think he does fire people when in a bad mood. As we’ve seen in the last week he fires people when they give ridiculous reasons for poor performance though.
So what you're saying is that it's possible to study human behaviors enough to be able to put up a good performance and convince people to give you money, analogously to how someone with an inner ear condition could study physics enough to become a gymnast? Aren't contradicting yourself?
The ASD person could write a paper explaining what he wants to do because he has studied English and people enough to understand what to say to make others understand, and when others read that paper they agree and give the ASD person money.
Similarly a person with balance disorder can write a paper explaining how balance works, and others can read that paper agree and fund the persons project for making self balancing robots.
Doesn't mean the ASD person can fluently navigate social situations, but luckily modern technology means he doesn't have to. When writing papers and proposals you can spend a lot of time thinking and preparing general statements, you can't put that sort of effort into more immediate interactions.
the vast majority of human beings can not "fluently" navigate social situations either...
the very small elite percentage of those who can are the 'social butterflies' that become actors, politicians, perfect 1950s social calendar wives, etc all depending on the culture they live in.
They are mesmerizing to watch, and rare like a lovely dancer or magician or elite athlete is rare. This is not normal, it's a special talent at the tail of the bell curve.
most ACTUAL normal social interactions involve simultaneous friction of many kinds under the surface-- as people have opposing motives (money, power, sex, pride etc) and limited face-saving default tools to navigate, dismiss, avoid, or paper over that friction.
(Maybe that's the difference, autistics suck at using or accepting the use of these shoddy tools as 'fake' and give resistance to all the sub-optimal goings on?? idk)
fake small talk and go-to phrases and lame jokes and polite chuckling and fake smiles and managed voice intonation ---these are the bread and butter of getting thru a interaction / dance while trying to still get what you want, balancing long term and short term incentives etc
Both people know it's fake and that's okay
-----
it's exhausting to normal people too, at the 'end of a long day' it's not the physical toll
it is not evolutionarily normal to meet so many goddamn strangers every day and try to smooth over endless bits of friction (esp from so many cultures fundamentally at odds in core values and goals, but that gets into politics, so)
'normal' people deal with others sub-optimally and then let off the steam/ bitch and moan / insults and slurs to get out how they really feel in the safe space at home/ their tribe
Places where this is always at max capacity, it bubbles over and you see the failures and stress marks, i.e. strangers screaming at each other in new york traffic, littering and destroying things, unspoken boundaries (turf) being tested, shamelessness in breaking norms and criminality, helplessness/numbness to the disturbing etc
Most of the time, 'normal people' don't know what or why they are feeling / acting out the way they are either, they just relieve their tensions any way that comes up, angry at X person but take it out on Y person instead.
There are infinite ways to be dysfunctional and very few ways to achieve 'good-vibes only' haha
TV shows have skewed the sense of how smooth-talking and self-aware and charming normal real people are...
> the vast majority of human beings can not "fluently" navigate social situations either...
Most humans have friends, at least as children. They’re certainly not hated so much to be thrown down a flight of stairs and beaten to the point of being hospitalised as young Elon was.
I'm not sure how that's directly related, but I venture bullying among boys seems to be about the weakest / smallest / poorest/ easiest to harm and get away with it, not necessarily social skills or autistic stuff.
Violence must be met with violence, enough said there... A weak person needs support for that, and that's the issue.
Elon's biggest problem in life seems to have been his garbage narc creep of a father, who I recall even managed to blame that incident on little Elon! saying 'oh well the boy who did that said Elon made remark on a family member's sensitive passing or something, so you have to understand it was a matter of honor see', blah blah....
Masking behaviors are strongly correlated with worse well-being and increased mental health issues (generally depression, suicidial ideation and attempts).
> I have a bit of difficulty trying to understand what ASD means for such individuals as adults. If one is highly intelligent one can just spend time studying people to determine how they respond to situations. I don't really grasp why understanding people is any different from analyzing any other kind of system.
I personally see three points:
- People often expect that one reacts "intuitively" instead of analyzing the whole situation first
- Humans don't behave in an "easy" way like physical systems. So extracting the "hidden laws" is in my opinion nigh impossible.
- Even if one tries to find possible hypotheses, one has to run a huge amount of "experiments" to extract rules. What does "running experiments" here mean? Behaving in very weird ways all the time just to obtain data on the behavior of the people. And the required data volume is insane, so it means behaving consciously weirdly rather for decades.
> I don't really grasp why understanding people is any different from analyzing any other kind of system.
It's not, but people tend to be able to spot the difference between studied and natural behaviour if you know them long enough. Studied behaviour is called 'masking' and has a tremendous mental toll. Over time, someone will eventually see you tired, and therefore unmasked.
As a seven year old I studied Peter Curry (the most popular boy in school) and Michaelangelo (the most well liked ninja turtle) because it seemed everyone else had been given a set of social instructions and I had not, and that by adopting their behaviour I would be less isolated.
It was still a nine year wait until I had a friend.
I genuinely spend a lot of time studying people offline and online.
I think someone who can't do this from first principles is probably going to struggle if they try living in a very foreign country or amongst a different subculture of their own nation. Most people can't cope outside their comfort zone.
It does mean that tactful social interactions require conscious mental effort for a person with ASD. If you’re busy using your mind for something else, tact might get lost along the way. Or so I understand.
Huh, have you experienced, or have been with a close person experiencing shutdown because environment is too loud, smelly, or there is someone acting in a provoking, humiliating manner? How analythical knowledge of social skills can be of help in that situation?
Suppose three armed persons draw a weapon and give you contradicting orders while threatening you. How will deep understanding of those individual orders help you reconcile them and decide how to act?
Can you explain why? "Disease" doesn't mean that it is bad in all cases, it doesn't even mean that it needs to be cured. All it means it that it's not an optimal state in the eyes of most other people (i.e. it is normative).
f.e. I don't think anyone has a problem with saying sickle cell is a disease, even though it has a large upside as well.
Many autistic people would disagree that being autistic is "not an optimal state". It's a different state. There are even some autistic people (on the extreme end: "aspie supremacists") who argue that being allistic (i.e. non-autistic) is actually more of an impairment. However most would at least say that autistic brains are not more or less "optimal", just different, and that normativity is more harmful than helpful.
There are aspects of the kitchen sink that is Autistic Spectrum Disorder that can reasonably be argued to be an impairment (e.g. sensory overloads, situational mutism, etc) but autism is not in any way objectively suboptimal in itself, other than when it comes to interacting with allistics (but that goes both ways).
but autism is not in any way objectively suboptimal in itself
For this to be true, autists would have to communicate and/or work with other autists as competently as neurotypicals mesh with each other. Strictly speaking, we should be able to work with other autists more easily than we work with neurotypicals who have a basic familiarity with autism, since we also have that advantage. In my experience we are not. Replacing your left hand with a sword also has measurable advantages but that doesn't make it not an overall impairment. Personally I find this cultural trend where "your deviation is your identity" to be illogical and offensive.
> would have to communicate and/or work with other autists as competently as neurotypicals mesh with each other
Not at all. You're judging by the standards of neurotypicals.
Suppose we discover a genotype that correlates with extremely high social competence, people who are just naturally much better at communicating and working with others. (This isn't much of a stretch; we know there are people like that; we just don't know if it's genetic.) If we document this new, higher level of social functioning, does that mean that neurotypicals are now also defective, diseased?
Arguably autistics are far better at communicating and/or working with other autistics AND allistics than allistics are at doing the same with any autistics because of the double empathy problem.
> but autism is not in any way objectively suboptimal in itself
The entire community you are here representing with your comment is intellectually dishonest, at the least, and at the most, actively harming our understanding of autism.
I remind you, like others have in this thread, that there are non-verbal people who share the designation of autistic. There are people in jail, permanent homes, and who do not have power of attorney over themselves who share the designation of autistic. There are children who spend their days wanting to bash their head into the nearest wall, and who cry and cry due to sensory issues, that share the designation of autistic. I COULD GO ON.
By sharing the thoughts you just did you are directly denying that those things exist. The community who promotes those opinions operates as if those things do not exist. It is bad.
Like the others, you apparently failed to read my full comment before deciding what I must have said.
There are traits that can arguably be considered "suboptimal" that can be part of an ASD diagnosis. But they are neither necessary nor sufficient for someone to be autistic. That's why I said "autism is not [..] suboptimal in itself" (emphasis added).
Also, can we please stop pointing at children when talking about autism? Somehow everybody who does so stops caring about them as soon as they're old enough to speak for themselves. Autism isn't defined by autistic trauma, we just don't care enough about autistic people to acknowledge them for anything other than their trauma responses.
Aperger's is both a different state, and in many contexts, a sub optimal state. In some limited contexts, it is a superior state.
Its undeniable that a dominant part of both the human experience and survival depends on social interaction success. In this context, its undeniable that autism is sub-optimal.
It doesn't go both ways, for the vast majority of interactions, because the vast majority of the population is not autistic. And they can easier cooperate with one another against you than you can gain any cooperation. Therefore, the playing field is not equal and your impairment is much more of a disadvantage than their impairment in communicating with you.
"Aspie supremacists" who think that their state is undeniably superior are ironically failing in logic. Insofar as they are actually aspie.
No adult true aspie (with inevitable comorbidities) with a lifetime of experience would want to repeat it. They'd opt out at the first opportunity. Rare exceptions aside, like for individuals with an engineer for a father who tracked them into the Ivy's and beyond.
My theory is that Asperger's individuals are perhaps a human genetic mechanism for slowly integrating genes for certain types of intelligence. With immense deselection pressure on those genes that assures that growing intelligence doesn't spread like wildfire in the population, perhaps to bad outcomes for other portions of what it means to be human (like reproduction speed, perhaps).
So I get the views of the aspies who want to recenter what it means o be normal on themselves. It just isn't the case. That's fine. There are worse lots.
Some people feel it is more similar to casting left-handedness, homosexuality, or red hair as a disease, where the definition of “disease” is just “trait that only a minority of people have”.
I agree with the OP's point about not painting the whole spectrum with the same brush - but personally I don't have an issue calling extreme autism a disease - people who have that usually can't speak and often can't feed themselves - that doesn't really have an equivalent in your analogies.
> but personally I don't have an issue calling extreme autism a disease - people who have that usually can't speak and often can't feed themselves - that doesn't really have an equivalent in your analogies.
People who take issue with autism being described as a disease would generally believe that most autistic people live close-to-normal lives and simply aren't recognised as being autistic. This comes back to the question of whether there ought to be a separate label for those who are severely disabled by their cognitive differences vs. those who are more able to function in general society despite similar cognitive differences. But it does seem to be the case that there is a large subgroup of society that thinks qualitatively differently to the general population (but similarly to each other), has to work hard to compensate for that in order to fit in, and often has social and mental health difficulties both due to the effort of maintaining that facade and because of the backlash they get when they fail to consistently do so.
> whether there ought to be a separate label for those who are severely disabled by their cognitive differences vs. those who are more able to function in general society despite similar cognitive differences
I think I did a poor job explaining. The key point is that, if “extreme autism” is a disease, that doesn’t mean all autism is a disease.
To improve my example, it’s like describing left-handedness as a disease because a small percentage of lefties experience extreme left-handedness where they can’t use their right hand at all.
It's similar with other traits. Being more aggressive than average might increase your success in life, but if you have too much you will get in trouble.
Another way to look at it is that some traits are harmful for the individual but beneficial for the group. Insomnia does a number on your health, but the tribe wants someone to jump at every cracking of a twig in the night, just in case it's something bad.
I mean, we also call extreme aggressive tendencies a mental illness or disorder.
In general, the standard in mental illnesses is that in order for a diagnosis to be made, the condition must interfere with leading a fulfilling life; a narcissist is only diagnosed with NPD if their narcissism prevents them from achieving their goals in life (hold down a job, maintain relationships, etc).
Trying to suggest that "disease" is a positive or even neural term is a giant stretch.
And yes, my exact problem with it is that it is normative. Just because neurotypicals are in the majority does not make them better. Imagine if it were reversed, for example. In my view, the neurotypical fondness for drama is incredibly harmful. Ditto the way neurotypicals not only believe in all sorts of nonsense (UFOs, angels, gods, devils, etc.) but use that as justification for all sorts of dominance-driven behavior, up to and including genocide.
And in practice the normative nature combined with the disease model leads to "medicalization of deviance". E.g., queer people's deviance was medicalized, seen as illness. ANd since they were sick, treatment was necessary, sometimes violently enforced treatment.
Fragile X is about 1.4 cases per 10,000 males. Autism is way more common than that, so I wouldn't say the Fragile X accounts for even a single percent of Autism cases. The article saying that it is the most common cause of Autism is definitely weasle-wording, and can only be claimed because most autism is not monogenic in nature. It's almost always a polygenic trait, and therefore doesn't have a single "identified" cause.
Not exactly, currently under the DSM there are a whole bunch of related behavioral phenotypes that are grouped under the ASD umbrella. This includes similar behavioral patterns and processing issues. Yes sometimes it can be polygenic but the reality is that there are a whole bunch of different things that can cause similar behaviors and sensory processing issues. The DSM (and psychology in general) is still pretty shitty in the way that it groups things based on phenotype rather than mechanism
I'm in a medical profession that delivers services to the autistic community. Never in our training did we learn that Fragile X is a cause of autism, let alone the primary cause.
I've never delivered services to a client that had a diagnosis of both fragile x and autism.
Most autism clients that I see are severely disabled and not fragile x. Every once in a while we get an HFA client. Again, no fragile x. The Asperger's individuals that I come across in the clinic will tend to be clinical professionals, not clients. They are never in for services. But they aren't common either.
But that seems odd. Wikipedia has two references for;
> Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is a genetic disorder characterized by mild-to-moderate intellectual disability. The average IQ in males with FXS is under 55.
I'm sure everyone is going to dismiss this type of research now that most people think any intelligent, slightly shy and technically competent person must have autism.
It is interesting to learn about progress in understanding molecular deficiencies behind autism. However it seems to me that the prime root of autism is medicalization of natural life process which is pregnancy. Frequent advices for mothers-to-be to lay calm deprive a developing fetus of environmental stimulation necessary for brain development in critical first 9 months of life. Pregnancy is not ilness to be treated in a way which interferes with child's brain development!
Honestly, the problem isn't autism. It's people not understanding that autism fundamentally changes how you view reality and then making people with autism have a harder time because of something they didn't ask for. It's like being able to see color and have everyone that only sees black and white get mad at you for it.
And here you are doing the exact same thing but with the people that don't have autism, they also didn't ask for their way if viewing reality, and that they communicate and interact with others based on a way that works most of the time so they stick to it.
The problem is that (in school and the workplace, at least) it's almost always the individual with autism that is told to conform to others and never the case that the others are taught how to work with the autistic (or other neurodivergent) person instead.
It would be better if the education about how others worked was two-way and included teaching others about autism as well.
And yes, some schools now do this, but he majority don't.
Even with low-functioning autistic people where "they're just different" isn't a good or respectful descriptor of their experiences, sometimes society makes dealing with those problems much more difficult than necessary.
Again, not saying that low-functioning autistic people don't have a problem that they wish would go away, but it's sort of like having wheelchair ramps. Most people who are in wheelchairs wish they weren't in wheelchairs, but they still like having ramps into and out of buildings. It's still problematic to go to those people and say, "okay I get that you're disabled, but you need to learn how to walk up the library stairs, it's not our job to have ramps everywhere."
There are a lot of autistic people who don't think of themselves as neurodivergent, they think of themselves as disabled. It is still often harmful to those people to force them to (on top of their other struggles) also figure out how to constantly conduct themselves so they don't inconvenience anyone else. Being more accommodating can mean allowing them to stim (if the stimming isn't self-destructive), it can mean giving them access to tools that help with sensory issues (headphones, for example), it can mean recognizing if they're panicking and responding to the situation, rather than just ignoring it until they completely break down. Mostly, it means teaching people to understand that person better and to try and set up systems in such a way that the individual can have a better life, rather than forcing the individual to conform -- especially in the case of people on extreme ends of the spectrum who very clearly can't conform.
There is an element of accommodation for people who label themselves as neurodivergent that does deal with acceptance and celebration, and that's valid for them to bring up. I really don't think that neurodivergence/disability needs to be a contest, and it's fine for them to talk about autism in terms of social prejudice. But outside of of the neurodivergent movement, overall accommodation doesn't really have anything to do with whether someone is high functioning or low functioning as much as it has to do with not making their life more difficult than it needs to be. Especially in the case of someone who is on the extreme ends of the spectrum and needs help to take care of themselves, it's extremely important for the people around them to make some effort to learn about what they're going through and to learn to work with them and to treat them like a human being.
I think that's the case for any mental disability (again, whether or not someone describes their own experiences with autism as a disability or as a difference is irrelevant to what I'm talking about). But if you want an extreme example from the "disability" side of things, you can't go to someone with alzheimers and get mad at them for not remembering what they ate yesterday. If you want to interact positively with someone in that position, you have to work with them. You have to be able to understand what's happening.
A lot of social institutions (especially schools) for a long time never put in that work for autistic kids. And a lot of care for autistic people (including people who are best described as disabled) is still focused on making that person more convenient for society, not on caring specifically for that individual. One piece of advice I give when talking about autism care is "find someone who cares more about the autistic kid than they care about the parents." And I think that holds true both for neurodivergent and differently-abled people and for nonverbal kids who are extremely disabled and will require help to function in society for their entire lives. It doesn't matter, caring for that person should still be primarily focused on caring for that person, not the people around them.
So it's okay because the vast majority of people aren't affected?
By that rationale, Black, Asian, and LGBT Americans should keep to themselves and stop fighting for rights or having a voice.
In both cases we are talking about people with immutable traits or characteristics society as a whole isn't fond of. (If society was fond, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion, nor people fighting for equal treatment in society.) All of these people have been the victims of the genocidal lunatics in the 20th century.
The only difference is society has not progressed to a point where it is socially acceptable to condemn people for hating the neurodivergent.
No one is talking about rights. Autistic people have the same rights as gay people and black people.
What we're talking about are norms. Norms tend to be based on the average person. If you aren't average, you're going to have to deal with that. I don't see any other solution.
If you had a time machine and went back to the 1950s, people would be making the same argument for why Black, Asian, and LGBT Americans are just going to have to deal with being minorities.
No, because the problems facing those groups were that people were treating them _differently_ because they belonged to a minority. The problem facing people with autism is that people expect to be able to interact with them like they interact with everyone else.
The distinctions are far too broad to be meaningful.
Every single reason put forth for why autism is different than the other minority groups mentioned is invariably parroting the majority view in the 1950s about minorities.
It hindsight, it's easy to see the problem. But how would you go about determining if it was a problem without the benefit of hindsight? Put differently, what makes you so certain you wouldn't be parroting the same thing about Black, Asian, or LGBT people if you lived in a different time? It's easy to say that now, it's not so easy to conceptualize that in the 1950s. The idea of gay marriage in the 1950s was scoffed at in a similar fashion and seen as bending over backwards too.
Just because something is acceptable now doesn't mean it will be in the future. And your inability to come up with a solution doesn't mean it should be ignored or left alone, either.
Neudivergent people also have to deal with being the other.
It's clear you don't want to have a discussion in good faith. You keep fixating on the word "rights"
in the phrase "fighting for rights or having a voice" in an attempt to reframe the discussion and to avoid having to meaningfully engage in the points mentioned.
You've refused to address my point, which is that normative culture necessarily favors "normal people" and there's nothing that can be done about that. Instead, you've decided to confuse the issue by talking about civil rights, which has nothing to do with the post I originally responded to.
Normative culture don't necessarily favor "normal people" and there are things that can be done about that.
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was created for that very purpose.
> (1) physical or mental disabilities in no way diminish a person’s right to fully participate in all aspects of society, yet many people with physical or mental disabilities have been precluded from doing so because of discrimination; others who have a record of a disability or are regarded as having a disability also have been subjected to discrimination;
> (2) historically, society has tended to isolate and segregate individuals with disabilities, and, despite some improvements, such forms of discrimination against individuals with disabilities continue to be a serious and pervasive social problem;
> (3) discrimination against individuals with disabilities persists in such critical areas as employment, housing, public accommodations, education, transportation, communication, recreation, institutionalization, health services, voting, and access to public services;
> (4) unlike individuals who have experienced discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, religion, or age, individuals who have experienced discrimination on the basis of disability have often had no legal recourse to redress such discrimination;
> (5) individuals with disabilities continually encounter various forms of discrimination, including outright intentional exclusion, the discriminatory effects of architectural, transportation, and communication barriers, overprotective rules and policies, failure to make modifications to existing facilities and practices, exclusionary qualification standards and criteria, segregation, and relegation to lesser services, programs, activities, benefits, jobs, or other opportunities;
oooof! Now, is this very biological imbalance the real source of this autism? Could be only the result of a real underlaying set of causes.
Now, how do we increase the neurons and synapses at those places? Intense, and maybe painful, mental training with brain imagery to check the right spots are being trained?
"A protein called FMRP that is absent in the brains of people with FXS modulates the activity of a type of potassium channel in the brain. According to the research group's work, it is the absence of this protein that alters the way sensory inputs are combined, causing them to be underrepresented by the signals coming out of the cortical pyramidal neurons in the brain."
Maybe adjusting the production of the protein they identified would be a reasonable thing to study before resorting to Clockwork Orange therapy.
If the neurons that are weak are the ones for processing external signals and having them override internal signals is the goal, maybe it’s as simple as a cold shower every day.
The abstract of the paper ends with "These results challenge the traditional view that FXS and other ASD are characterized by sensory hypersensitivity, proposing instead a hyposensitivity of sensory inputs and hypersensitivity of predictive inputs onto cortical neurons."
And that is under the assumption that any of these hypotheses are true(ish). While an interesting finding, it doesn't prove that it is a significantly contributing factor in (human) autism.