Not GP, but I assume autistic people see the goal of a universal cure for autism (or even an accurate screening method for pregnancies) is the same as wiping out the existence of people like them.
Would the same view apply to every disability? For example, screening for Down Syndrome largely results in abortion. Is that also eugenics? Or is it not the same since Autism isn't a genetic disorder?
Some downs people/family also think the same about downs. Also deaf and others...
Personally as an autist I wouldn't want to cure it for myself as it would be a large change in personality that I don't think I could integrate - but if I was to have kids, I'd rather they were "cured" of autism when young.
The difference I see is whether the suffering they cause is avoidable.
To my understanding, the argument made by autistic rights advocates is that people with the condition could usually live like anyone else, if society open-mindedly accommodated for them. This is already the norm for disabilities requiring e.g. braille or a wheelchair. Attempts to "cure autism" feel eugenics-ish because they're lazy intellectual shortcuts; avoid our shared responsibility of accommodating for differences, by erasing the differences.
In contrast, the case for abortion of Down syndrome fetuses is that the condition necessarily comes with many "built in" physiological complications that current medicine can't fully manage, effectively guaranteeing some amount of suffering that ends in early death, no matter how well we accommodate for them. They're not aborted to avoid accommodating, but to prevent suffering.
>This is already the norm for disabilities requiring e.g. braille or a wheelchair.
I have never seen anyone argue against cures for blindness or physical impairment. Every visually/physically impaired person I know would be elated if their condition could be cured, and would have no issues with prenatal screening for their disabilities, if it were possible.
The only disabled community I know of where a not insignificant fraction of people oppose curing their disability is the deaf community, and it is nonetheless an extremely controversial position to take.
I've always felt the defensiveness/unease from some in the deaf community is understandable, even if I think fitting kids with things like implants is a good idea. Being deaf, certainly up to the widespread use of the internet in the last couple of decades, meant that you were essentially cut off socially from mainstream society.
The vast majority of hearing people have no interest in learning sign-language unless they are related to a deaf person. You are, in a sense, a perenial foreigner in your own land, surrounded by people who you cannot communicate freely with and never will be able to (unlike a migrant who can learn the language). So you form communities with other deaf people with who you can communicate freely. Deaf culture has become something more distinct than simply a community of people with a shared experience within a wider culture, it's much more isolated.
Obviously hearing loss is on a spectrum, with varying levels of remediation available from aids and implants to lip-reading and speech training so the above is a generalisation. But especially for adults, things like implants are not a panacea, you don't suddenly hear perfectly. I have a friend who uses a combination of an implant and an aid, but talking with him still requires continuous extra thought and consideration to make sure he can follow me, and that I can understand his speech. A noisy pub or a free-flowing multi-person conversation with everyone butting in is still incredibly isolating for him.
The internet has changed a lot of this from what I've been told, with so much culture being online and in text, deaf people are able to interract with hearing people much more often and freely (and on equal terms) far more often, even if they have many of the same issues IRL that they have always had. But the seperation remains, and it's mostly a result of the hearing world's almost total lack of consideration or effort to accomodate (see the absense of a sign-language interpreter for UK government announcements as an example).
I think there's some overlap in spirit between the autistic community and the deaf community (in so far as you can cast this wide a net and call it "a community") in that the reason some deaf people argue against a cure is that it would eliminate deaf culture (e.g. sign languages). There's no real equivalent in the form of "autistic culture" but this is at least in part because most autistics who are able to have learned to "mask" (i.e. try to hide their autistic traits often to the point where they forget they're doing so). There's still a specific way of thinking and form of humor that's shared by many autistic people and which they fear would be lost if they were "cured".
Additionally the deaf community has every reason to be skeptical of a cure because many so-called cures come with massive caveats. For example Cochlear implants are often seen as a magical cure for deafness but there are many reports from formerly deaf people of experiencing intense discomfort if they gain any meaningful hearing from them at all. But due to the existence of these "cures" non-deaf people are more likely to treat deafness as a choice and affordances for deaf people as unimportant - similar to how according to some studies bicyclists are treated with less care by drivers when visibly wearing helmets.
> To my understanding, the argument made by autistic rights advocates is that people with the condition could usually live like anyone else, if society open-mindedly accommodated for them.
I wonder what's appropriate "accommodation" for a very low functioning kid whose idea of a good time is banging their head against the wall over and over again. A padded room, most likely? Many "autistic rights" advocates simply ignore and dehumanize these kids.
The problem is that the way autistics are treated by non-autistics often involves an expectation to simply not be autistic. This includes behavioral therapy that in any other context would be described as torture. The stated goal is to reduce perceptible "symptoms", not to address whatever the person themself might find limiting to their wellbeing.
Autistic kids generally don't bang their heads against walls for "a good time". It's a form of stimming and it's intensified by certain situations or interactions. The desirable approach would not be to prevent the kid from stimming (which can cause them massive additional stress and even trauma) but instead offer them a safer alternative that is less likely to cause them injury.
But allistics (non-autistics) tend to be annoyed by autistics stimming at all, so often it comes down to whether autistics are able to "mask" and suppress their more obvious traits (even if it causes persistent stress) or not.
> Many "autistic rights" advocates simply ignore and dehumanize these kids.
Autistic rights advocates don't argue against medication or treatment for autistic individuals who want that. We advocate against a universalist approach that assumes that autism is fundamentally something to be avoided regardless of how high/low functioning the individual is, and independent of whether the difficulties for an individual are stemming from something inherent to the condition or whether they're coming from a lack of accommodation.
Many autistic people view the way they look at the world as a fundamental part of who they are. It is offensive to them to be told that they shouldn't exist.
Of course, more severe, low-functioning individuals can and often do disagree with that assessment of themselves, and that's fine, and those individuals should be given the help they want. But let's be honest here, nobody in the "autism speaks" branch of activism talks about a cure for specifically low-functioning autism; they talk about a cure for autism in general, they talk about eliminating autism from everyone across the board. And if you view autism as an inherent part of your personality, it's pretty understandable why you might start to suspect that those people are hostile to you as a person.
It's valid for autistic people to object to the characterization of autism as a universally negative condition that they just "don't have as bad". It's also valid to object to neurotypicals drawing the line between autism as an identity and autism as a debilitating condition based purely on what behaviors are inconvenient to those neurotypicals, rather than what the internal experiences are for autistic people themselves. Autistic rights advocates argue that autism can (and often is) a real disability with real negative effects, but also that a lack of accommodation can exasperate some of the negative effects of autism, and that it's important for society to think more critically about when and why these negative effects happen and how to best alleviate them. Autism rights advocates argue that inconvenience or incompatibility with existing neurotypical workflows are not universally reasons to call someone broken, even though functioning in a modern society might require interventions or medication to help manage those incompatibilities even in high-functioning individuals.
But of course we should try to help people with debilitating autism, and of course we should allow people who want to suppress or eliminate parts of that condition to do so. It's just that it's really messy to act like autistic people are secretly normal people who have some kind of disease that's keeping them from being normal. That "disease" can't be easily separated from identity.
Anti-autism is like arguing that because some people have PTSD or trauma or depression, that we need a universal cure for emotions, and that anyone who suggests "sometimes even inconvenient emotions are a good thing" is ignoring the entire gambit of suffering that emotions can cause. It's ridiculous.
Braille and wheelchairs are the equivalent of a cure for autism, as I envision it. Why do these not count as "avoid[ing] our shared responsibility of accommodating for differences, by erasing the differences"?
> They're not aborted to avoid accommodating, but to prevent suffering
You don't think people who want to "cure" autism are also motivated by this?
It's worth reading a bit into disability rights theory IMO.
Many so-called disabilities only become disabilities when individuals are confronted with a lack of affordances. This isn't just about wheelchair ramps, even "able-bodied" people can be situationally disabled if the affordances they take for granted are taken away (a sighted person might be more "disabled" in a dark room than a blind person who knows how to solve problems without relying on sight).
Autism is used to describe a vast swathe of "conditions" so it's hard to generalize but most autistics don't "feel" disabled except when interfacing with allistics (non-autistics). There are also studies indicating that allistics tend to react negatively (or even hostile) to autistics by default when the opposite is not true (nor between autistics).
Organizations like Autism Speaks tend to pathologize autism as an "insufficiency" by focusing on how allistics tend to perceive "people with severe autism", e.g. mutism, "stereotypic behaviors", etc. But that's a very biased view even of the small subset of autistics it attempts to highlight. For example I find it hard to argue that "parallel play" is inferior to "cooperative play" except that autistics tend to enjoy whereas allistics tend to prefer the latter; or that "special interests" (say, trains) are a matter of concern while obsessing with socially accepted hobbies (like historic football matches) are somehow not.
All that said, my country has banned a lot of early stage screening due to ethical concerns and while screenings for trisomy 21 aren't illegal (despite having very unreliable results btw) they're socially frowned upon by many people and rarely result in abortions. So yes, in my cultural context the general consensus seems to be that that could be considered a form of eugenics.
I'm yet to be convinced that there are niche experts in any field that aren't on the spectrum. Or even people consistently engaging in systems thinking.
Yes, I'm half-joking. But it's funny how "special interests" are only seen as pathological if they can't be used to generate profit.
In Northern Ireland there was a debate on that, a down syndrome activist had campaigned against it which was readily taken up by parties that had opposed abortion in the first place. I'm not sure if it passed fully or just the first stage but there was a bill introduced a ban on non-fatal disabilities.
That's exactly what happened in Poland few months ago. Constitutional Court has outlawed all abortion based on fetal defects, no matter how severe, as a basic human rights issue. The only remaining allowed situations for abortions remaining in Poland are when the life of mother is in danger, or if the pregnancy is a result of rape - but there are forces working to get that second exemption removed as well and it's likely that it will go through our constitutional court.
It depends on how you see autism. If we develop a universal therapeutic cure for cancer, that would eliminate “people with cancer” but not by eliminating those people.
Developing a pregnancy screening for “fetuses pre-disposed to cancer” may have an entirely different mechanism of reducing cancer and one that many people (myself included) would find far more troubling that the therapeutic cure above.
Why would you be troubled by this? Consider Li-Fraumeni syndrome (LFS), which is caused by germline loss of a specific tumor suppressor gene. People with LFS are basically guaranteed to develop cancer by age 60 (>90% chance), with a 50% risk of getting cancer by 40. There are many other similar hereditary genetic disorders, some of which are exceptionally awful and basically guarantee that one will develop childhood cancer (e.g. Turcot syndrome).
I see absolutely no downside to prenatal testing for such horrible diseases, all of which have a clear-cut genetic basis. Nobody has issues with prenatal screening for Tay-Sachs disease; why should genetically unambiguous severe predisposition to cancer be any different?
Concrete example: Many people (about 1 in 400*) have BRAC1 or BRAC2 genetic markers that leave them with higher likelihood to develop certain cancers. I don't see that as justification for eliminating those gene lines from the human genetic diversity.
We did prenatal testing. We didn't do it for no reason and there were test outcomes that would have led us to terminate the pregnancy. Elevated risk of breast cancer would not be among them.
* - Among Ashkenazi, the rate is about 10 times higher.
> What does "white washed form of eugenics" mean? Legitimately curious!
Having the underlying intention of eugenics, but not outright saying "my true goals are eugenics"
In his example, Autism Speaks - it is fairly well known amongst autistic people/those on a neurodivergent spectrum/those who truly love/accept their autistic children/autistic people in general, that the organization, at it's head and with a majority of those who identify as members of it, are really people who are frustrated/unhappy/mad and/or absolutely terrible at coping with the fact that they had an autistic child & otherwise wish they'd have never been born. Their goal is not to accept autistic people as who they are or try to push for the general public (or perhaps "their agenda being") to accept them as who they are, but to outright eliminate the existence of what we know as Autism as a whole, which can politely be called "curing"
A more simple yet slightly less correct by "proper definitions" idea of what this entails is "being an asshole, but really, truly, wanting people to not think/be able to go "hey you're an asshole""
It's sort of like the Susan G. Komen charity, and as hard to explain as to why they're actually really fucking bad organizations to the average person - most people over the age of, say 15-20(?) likely think of Susan G. Komen foundation when they think of Breast Cancer or vice versa. The fact of the matter is, which can be easily seen on "charity rating websites" that document the entirety of various charities financial reports (legally attainable to the public per US law I believe, or something close to that) among a few other things, that Susan G. Komen doesn't actually do much for Breast Cancer at all from a funding/research/finding a cure perspective, but is entirely a financial grift for those at the helm of it. There are many, many better Breast Cancer awareness charities to donate to, but the average person will just think Susan G. Komen, and unknowingly put their money right into the pocket of grifters. It's been a very well known thing... for many years now, and legally they've gotten away with it by maintaining that they're simply "an awareness organization" - and, one could go on to argue many things about whether or not that could be legitimate and the money they're funneling to themselves is "earned/not malicious" for far too long.
tl:dr Susan G. Komen people are a bunch of dicks, but you won't know that if you don't look into it, so most people will probably think badly of you if you say "Susan G. Komen are a bunch of dicks" , just as somebody may think badly of you if you say "Autism Speaks are a bunch of dicks"
Hope this helps, and hope I don't upset too many people with this.
> Their goal is not to accept autistic people as who they are or try to push for the general public (or perhaps "their agenda being") to accept them as who they are, but to outright eliminate the existence of what we know as Autism as a whole, which can politely be called "curing"
Yes. It's a mental disorder. You can try sweettalking what it is, but mild versions of autism are already insanely disruptive, both to the parents, but also to all other children and people that are forced to interact with them, for example in a classroom setting, where any autistic kid will take more than their fair share of the teacher's attention.
But god forbid if you have a child with low-functioning or severe autism. You might as well give up all plans you had for the foreseeable future.
> for example in a classroom setting, where any autistic kid will take more than their fair share of the teacher's attention.
Ah yes, the classroom environment, where children are not treated like people. Woe betide somebody objects to that!
“Mental disorder” – how is that defined? Saying “mental disorders are bad, autism is a mental disorder, therefore autism is bad” is the non-central fallacy, so obviously you must have a better argument (and I just can't see it). But remember: homosexuality used to be considered a “mental disorder”, as did women wanting the vote (I'm not joking!).
I posit: “mental disorder” is just a word for people who diverge from what society considers typical (or, cynically, acceptable) variation in what people are like. Some of that variation is bad, I won't argue with that. Most of that variation is absolutely fine.
The way society is means that any atypical variation is bad, because society punishes it. If not for that punishment, much variation would be a non-issue.
> Ah yes, the classroom environment, where children are not treated like people. Woe betide somebody objects to that!
They don't object. They throw tantrums because they didn't get a 2 week advance warning of something happening.
> “Mental disorder” – how is that defined?
DSM-V: a syndrome characterized by *clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior* that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning.
Mental disorders are bad by definition. Psychologists don't put behaviours in their diagnostic manuals for nothing. Autism is in there for a reason. At its mild end it's a hurdle. At its severe end it's absolutely debilitating for the sufferer and their entire network.
> I posit: “mental disorder” is just a word for people who diverge from what society considers typical (or, cynically, acceptable) variation in what people are like. Some of that variation is bad, I won't argue with that. Most of that variation is absolutely fine.
I suggest you go read through the DSM. A major criterium for each mental illness is that the personis hampered in their function by it.
> They don't object. They throw tantrums because they didn't get a 2 week advance warning of something happening.
“Something happening”… or “adults deciding things while ignoring the needs and desires of the children”? Most of these situations follow a pattern, in my experience:
• Society decides what things may matter and what things may not.
• Adult unilaterally changes things that It Is Unreasonable To Care About.
• Child is not allowed to care about them.
• Child is not allowed to object.
• Child is not allowed to be distracted by the change from What The Child Must Pay Attention To.
• Child must pay attention, immediately, and cease this ridiculous behaviour.
• Child “has a tantrum” (a word that does not distinguish between “deliberate disruption as a protest / spiteful action”, “inability to contain frustration / anger” and “meltdown”).
> Mental disorders are bad by definition. Psychologists don't put behaviours in their diagnostic manuals for nothing.
I never claimed that they did, and you're not addressing what I've said.
> I suggest you go read through the DSM.
I suggest you have a little look at DSM II's “302” section.
> This category is for individuals whose sexual interests are directed primarily toward objects other than people of the opposite sex,
“hampered in their function” requires you to define “function”, and that's usually defined as “ability to fit into society's little box”. While we've made the box a bit bigger (when we don't have to put much effort into it), plenty of benign-of-themselves variations in what people are like are still outside that box, and still punished unnecessarily.
If cyanide was a regular ingredient in food, people with normal levels of mitochondrial rhodanese would be “hampered in their function” – they wouldn't be able to eat even a tenth of the cyanide-containing food a normal person could eat without straight-up dying! You or I would therefore have a disability that just doesn't exist in our society, without any change having occurred to us.
> “Something happening”… or “adults deciding things while ignoring the needs and desires of the children”? Most of these situations follow a pattern, in my experience:
See my comment towards the other reply. The school thing was an example. Please don't get stuck upon that. You seem to have beef with the entire school system. Fair, maybe, but besides the point.
> If cyanide was a regular ingredient in food, people with normal levels of mitochondrial rhodanese would be “hampered in their function” – they wouldn't be able to eat even a tenth of the cyanide-containing food a normal person could eat without straight-up dying! You or I would therefore have a disability that just doesn't exist in our society, without any change having occurred to us.
So you're argument is "it's not they who don't fit, it's society who doesn't fit them", which may be true, but it extremely unhelpful and a pipe dream. It's all well and good to say "society should change to include people who don't fit", but we've been a social species with complex social interactions for over 20 kiloyears. Asking to change that because of a very small percentage is both inpractical and quite self-centered.
The funny thing about "classroom environments" is that a good deal of what happens even down to the kindergarten level falls under the exact definition of psychological child abuse. Heck, even a lot of "traditional parenting" does too. I'd say any child is more likely to have some form of emotional trauma or another by the time they come of age than not.
As opposed to the juvenile delinquents, impoverished kids who don’t have access to tools for basic hygiene like running water or electricity (that was me at various points during my school years), and various other issues taking up “more than their fair share”?
What you’ve identified isn’t the autistic kids’ fault, it’s the miserly taxpayers’, incompetent admins’, and corrupt/spiteful politicians’, who don’t adequately fund or organize our public school systems.
> As opposed to the juvenile delinquents, impoverished kids who don’t have access to tools for basic hygiene like running water or electricity (that was me at various points during my school years), and various other issues taking up “more than their fair share”?
No, in addition to.
> What you’ve identified isn’t the autistic kids’ fault, it’s the miserly taxpayers’, incompetent admins’, and corrupt/spiteful politicians’, who don’t adequately fund or organize our public school systems.
It is though. Their unique blend of disability makes them inherrently unsuitable to any task that involves a group of other children. That's not to say we should blame them for it, but this is not something you can reasonably fix by throwing money at education.
I'd like to emphasize though that I meant the schooling issue as one of the many examples you could pick where autistic people are both at a disadvantage and are a detriment to the group. Please don't get stuck on this one example.
> Their unique blend of disability makes them inherrently unsuitable to any task that involves a group of other children.
Within the school system, which forces them to do so in the adults' way. Interesting that this “unsuitability to any task that involves a group of other children” tends to show up when the children aren't allowed to self-organise; in environments where children get to choose their own games, most autistic children are perfectly fine playing with their friends.
The problem comes when you try to force them to do things the way you want them to, and they find that difficult or don't want to. This is not the children's problem; this is adults on power trips.
You know the best teacher I ever had? The Reception and Year One teacher who distinguished between children and adults by whether they went to her school; who made me cross twice (justifiably cross, once); who would have children ask her to resolve disputes when they couldn't resolve them themselves; who gave the Year Sixes a budget and a catalogue and let them order the playground equipment; who talked to me about educational psychology and Game of Thrones when I was ten; whose class always (well, 99%) lined up at the end of playtime within 20 seconds, and patiently waited for an average of several minutes (I counted) for everyone else to line up; who was respected second only to the head teacher (who people were a bit scared of because he was the head teacher); who shouted perhaps four times I'm aware of, and never at her class because they were already paying attention to her; who never had any problems with “disruption” from the autistic kids (only from the biters, and the mute girl who kept hitting people).
Pretty sure she was autistic, too (if I remember one of our conversations right). Funny how that works out.
> I'd like to emphasize though that I meant the schooling issue as one of the many examples you could pick where autistic people are both at a disadvantage and are a detriment to the group.
I'm sorry, I'm not aware of any examples where autistic people are “a detriment to the group”. You'll have to provide them, I'm afraid.
It's really disheartening to read stuff like this as an autistic person.
So let's dispense with some of the mythology:
> Yes. It's a mental disorder.
More accurately it's a neurodevelopmental disorder. It's not like OCD or depression which can come on with age and be mediated with therapy, it's more like the albinism of the brain. I recall reading studies that point toward autism being characteristic of over-eager neuron connectivity but I don't know if that's actually accurate or not.
> You can try sweettalking what it is, but mild versions of autism are already insanely disruptive
There is no "mild", "severe" or "low functioning" autism, these labels are not descriptive. Autistic people have a spiky profile, they struggle/excel at different things in the categories of language, perception, executive function, motor control and sensory processing.
"Low functioning" is used to deny people agency, "high functioning" is used to deny people support. Neither of these terms tend to be used by autistic people because they aren't at all useful. If you're someone who struggles with sounds and you're in a busy office then people will rate your functioning lower than if you're in a quiet office, environment affects everyone's ability to function it's just more obvious in people who specifically struggle with that stimulus.
> both to the parents, but also to all other children and people that are forced to interact with them
What do you mean by "forced to interact with them"? I can guarantee you have interacted with autistic people throughout your life without knowing some of them are autistic, and without some of them knowing they're autistic too. The very fact that adults get diagnosed with autism kind of flies in the face of this idea you seem to have that we're all severely disabled people that good ol' normal people are "forced to interact with"
What you think of as severe autism is more likely autism in addition to another developmental disability. Autism is diagnosed by behavioural analysis but the conditions for failure arent specific, so any learning disability can potentially be shortcut diagnosed as autism and this is often the case for people who start out incapable of communication.
> What you think of as severe autism is more likely autism in addition to another developmental disability.
A reasonable guess, but if that was the case we would expect low functioning autism to be extremely uncommon compared to either "mild" autism or other developmental issues, since very few kids would happen to fall under both conditions.
Unfortunately, low functioning is more common than that, common enough in fact that some people think of it as the typical case of autism itself.
> A reasonable guess, but if that was the case we would expect low functioning autism to be extremely uncommon compared to either "mild" autism or other developmental issues, since very few kids would happen to fall under both conditions.
Diagnosis of autism requires running through a checklist as part of an interview, or a behavioural analysis if younger. If you're completely non-verbal and thus incapable of being interviewed you can still be shortcut diagnosed as autistic, which is actually my entire point, the behavioural checklist is not that stringent. A number of severe learning disabilities can pretty easily be swung into an autism diagnosis, making the spectrum seem more like 20 conditions we can't distinguish rather than 1 condition with vastly differing presentations.
> It's really disheartening to read stuff like this as an autistic person.
I'm sorry to hear that.
> neurodevelopmental disorder
Fair enough. I didn't delineate the two because we tend not to, because there's fairly little use. Schizoid cluster disorders are also considered personality disorders, in spite having a geneteic component, and all you can do is manage that, not cure it.
> There is no "mild", "severe" or "low functioning" autism, these labels are not descriptive. Autistic people have a spiky profile, they struggle/excel at different things in the categories of language, perception, executive function, motor control and sensory processing.
Psychology disagrees. It classifies autism on three levels, from 1 (high-functioning) where the person needs relatively little support, to level 3, where the person requires very substantial support.
> "Low functioning" is used to deny people agency, "high functioning" is used to deny people support. Neither of these terms tend to be used by autistic people because they aren't at all useful
I disagree. Categorisation is useful maybe not to the guy with autism, but it is to the system that has to provide support, in order to have rough estimates of how much and when.
> If you're someone who struggles with sounds and you're in a busy office then people will rate your functioning lower than if you're in a quiet office, environment affects everyone's ability to function it's just more obvious in people who specifically struggle with that stimulus.
At that point you're already talking about a high functioning autistic person. Labour force participation overall for people with autism is roughly half of that of those without.
> What do you mean by "forced to interact with them"? I can guarantee you have interacted with autistic people throughout your life without knowing some of them are autistic, and without some of them knowing they're autistic too.
Yes. That's high functioning autism. But I've also had people, in my class, at work and in hobby spaces, that were very much not like that. One example that springs to mind is a class grinding to a halt for an hour after an autistic kid started throwing with stuff because the teacher deviated from the regular schedule to have a group discussion about death because someone's mother had passed away.
> The very fact that adults get diagnosed with autism kind of flies in the face of this idea you seem to have that we're all severely disabled people that good ol' normal people are "forced to interact with"
I never said any of that; that's pure projection on your part and I'd rather you didn't.
> What you think of as severe autism is more likely autism in addition to another developmental disability. Autism is diagnosed by behavioural analysis but the conditions for failure arent specific, so any learning disability can potentially be shortcut diagnosed as autism and this is often the case for people who start out incapable of communication.
How do you make a difference between comorbidity and several disabilities melding into another? A third of autistic children also have a severe intellectual disability (IQ < 70). Another 25% is borderline that (above 70, below 85). About a third also has epilepsy, and people with autism are at least 4 times more likely to have schizophrenia.
And don't get me wrong. I don't say we should round all of these people up and take them behind the shed. My point is is that autism is not some way of being that's equal but different to 'neurotypical'. At best, you'll suffer some disadvantage that you'll have to overcome during your lifetime (and if you do: kudos to you).
So is psychopathy, sociopathy, and narcissism, something we find in the CEO's of companies who've done essentially unfixable damage to Earth's ecosystem and killed/severely damaged millions of people along the way with zero recourse.
Should we eradicate these mental disorders from the gene pool as well? I think many think we would be much better off as a species without them...
Not the GP, but they seem to be frustrated at the frankly inhumane characterization pushed by a non-trivial group of upper middle class privileged (aka white washed) parents whereby autism is considered a disease or generic defect than needs correcting (loosely “eugenics”). The between the lines implication is that these parents choose this worldview either a) because parenting an autistic child can be tough, and these people, in their privileged nature, expect it easy, or b) they are so privileged they’re Karen/Ken level blissfully oblivious (arguably braindead) about how their outlook might be interpreted by autistic people, because, you know, it’s a spectrum and most of us fall on it somewhere. Or it’s both. Really makes you wonder which cognitive profile is truly um.. retarded.
That's an absolutely wrong way to interpret the wording. The author was clearly saying: "this is eugenics but wrapped in an illusion of decency". That's what "white-washing" means. Your explanation doesn't seem to make sense and is shifting the intended meaning.
One could of course argue that most of medicine is "white-washed eugenics" and point to similar efforts by, say, deaf people to view cochlear implants as a bad thing but that's not the topic here.
That's bandying words. Mental disorder, illness and disease are used pretty interchangably. Furthermore, there's oodles of literature on ASD susceptibility genes.