🗑️ 🧵 lets get real about autism
skeptic at Sat, 4 May 2024 01:29:33 UTC No. 16158426
I knew a guy with autism growing up. He moaned, couldn't understand language and needed someone to feed him. He's 50 now and his mum still probably wipes his ass.
Sensory differences in autistic people were unheard of until Temple Grandin spoke about her experiences.
Autism used to mean people who had severe intellectual difficulties.
Nowadays, people who would have previously just been considered weird, get the label autism as a social pass and a disability check
Many people with supposed autism are literally advocates. Professionals at communication and social skill. If they were really bad at it, they wouldn't be effective at politics and wouldn't be able to mask
as recently as 1998, autism was still being taught to medical students as being a form of "mental retardation." (Quoting the terminology actually deemed acceptable at the time.)
"Autism," at the time I'm describing, was the term used to describe what we now label as "Kanner Syndrome," an autism form that trends strongly toward the lower-functioning end of the autism spectrum.
Anonymous at Sat, 4 May 2024 12:34:47 UTC No. 16158883
>>16158426
Autism is a category of behavioral traits. Issues with socializing and communicating can range from a state of non-verbalness to not "getting jokes". It's arbitrary, a definition.
For example, we could define a category in such a way that any object, as long as it is oval and at least somewhere red belongs to the category. Such a category would include the heads of red-haired people, red balls, and depending on your notion of oval even dartboards or red buttons. Two people would have a reasonably high probability of agreeing with each other on which objects belong to the category and which don't. In other words, the category is fairly stable and inter-rater reliability can be assumed to be high.
Now, does such a category make sense? No, it doesn't. It's the same with autism.
Anonymous at Sat, 4 May 2024 12:42:03 UTC No. 16158891
>>16158883
But, unlike our category of red, ovalish objects, autism isn't just a definition, it's politics. It's biopolitics, in other words, an attempt by the government or any other organisation to regulate people. Much of this goes down to cost-volume-profit analyses, some of which also goes back to our own notion of what is socially appropriate.
Since the behavioral traits subsumed under the autism label are deemed undesirable, because they impede an individual from contributing to society, our response to autism is an attempt to destroy it by normalizing the individuals exhibiting such behavior. We call it "treating" or "curing" (depending on whether or not we are successful in normalizing it). Now, treating something is a service you offer. A service that needs money in order to function because people won't work without cash. Now, with autism services popping up, you get nice incentivesto diagnose it in more and more people. That means more clients and means more cash. You can expand the market and extract more money.
Now, of course. If you're somewhat intelligent, you will realize that solving a problem is ultimately not profitable, so you just keep on treating it. That makes autism a life-long issue. Bonus points for when you start slapping the label on people who show signs of brain damage. Makes people stop question where that brain damage comes from because it's now classified as autism which, as we're told, is genetic. Based on twin studies that are rarely separated before the age of two at which time, as we're told, autism should begin to show up.
Anonymous at Sat, 4 May 2024 12:49:02 UTC No. 16158901
In 2013 the DSM (funded by pharmacuetical companies) moved aspergers into the Autism spectrum. Also in 2013 the GAF scale, used to determine if abuse was the cause of a child symptoms, was also removed. Both of these were removed to make "treating" children a lot easier.