Real title: major autism study uncovers biologically distinct subtypes
But if you read it, thats not what they did. They just re-taxonomized it as multiple different things. This is a good thing but it feels silly to call it a “discovery.”
Like dude, the guy who mastirbates in public and slams his head into walls when he’s frustrated doesnt have the same thing as the guy who started reading at 3 and really likes birding.
It should not have taken this long for the people who fund science to acknowledge this but I’m glad they finally did and…
Here’s the real discovery: those dudes have different genes! Thats right, the first one is non-heritable! Its not even the same thing biologically.
So if they have different presentations and different biologies, why are we calling them both autism??!
I know aspergers was a bad dude but I feel like having a different name for it communicated something important.
Here’s another implication: the people self diagnosing as autistic on TikTok were actually following the rules for autism that clinicians set out: there are no rules and its anything that makes you seem wrong to normies. The big sin of the TikTok self-diagnosees/rs was declaring that the emperor has no cloths!
I appreciate some people absolutely benefit from and want treatment, that’s fine. But I do continue to worry when articles like this claim autism is something that needs ‘diagnosis’ and consequent “treatment”. The implication in a lot of these wordings is that autistic people are universally the problem, not the societal structure they’re forced into.
Honestly, i fear that a lot of the recent developments signal a reactionary desire to at least move back to the days when autists were forced into masking as much as possible and to actively crush acceptance of neurodivergence. And honestly, it could herald developments that are a lot worse than that. Carcereal psychiatry with forced institutionalizations, electro shocks and lobotomies is very much a part of the era that reactionaries are nostalgic for.
Yeah, the article also treats “families” as the audience and not “autistic people” which should tell you a lot. Its not sensory overload thats the problem or difficulty passing vibe checks in that’s the problem, its autistic people that are the problem.
Like dude, the guy who mastirbates in public and slams his head into walls when he’s frustrated doesnt have the same thing as the guy who started reading at 3 and really likes birding.
Tagline!
The thing is: they just might. They might actually even be the same person. Almost as if it was a spectrum with a multitude of different axis of which you have several different expressions…
I have so many issues with this paper. If you read if you can see that their re-classification is very coincidental as well. They try multiple ways to group the data and then pick the one that fits to something “interpretable” by them: support need. But it turns out that the data they put in also classifies some things by support needs. So, they found a structure in their output data that reinforces the structure that they have already fed in? Congrats.
I know aspergers was a bad dude but I feel like having a different name for it communicated something important.
Oh, absolutely. there were countless instances of autistic activists stepping on each other’s toes because the interests of someone who really loves trains, and someone who will probably never be able to speak, read, or otherwise live unassisted are fundamentally different struggles.
broke: autism is a spectrum
woke: autism is a complex
I know aspergers was a bad dude but I feel like having a different name for it communicated something important.
Damn, yeah. This is so fucking difficult because I’ve met quite a few people who have aspergers (in fact I might be one of them but the only difference is that I feel like I am much more socially conscious), and I just know that they would have no problems getting along.
It truly all comes down to organization, doesn’t it? Like, organizing yourself (or putting yourself in a position) such that you don’t need to hide parts of yourself to blend in with the average person. I realize I’m talking about masking here or whatever, but I’ve always played the role of seeing how fake other people are being but also seeing those with aspergers being used by said fake people and not noticing whatsoever. Going away from tribes was a mistake.
more and more each day I’m convinced that we went so long without crossing paths with certain types of people for a reason
