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by sakjur
605 days ago
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It seems to me that we’ve always had many people both on the spectrum and with ADHD, but our modern society has such stiff norms that the people who are the most involved with society sees these otherwise often fairly benign variations as diseases to be medicated away. Schools herd children through something so rigid that a lot of people are told they’re problematic, lazy, stupid, or insufficient in one of millions of ways. And then that continues into adulthood with work and, in a context familiar to many around this site, frameworks for how work should be done. People talk about estimates, and working in bursts or worrying about something your professionalism tells you is important but your boss tells you to ignore become a problem to fix. Finding a level in the hierarchy and a pace that works well for you and being content there is lacking ambition and being lazy. I guess when a society is sick, its members are diagnosed. |
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Autism on the other hand is a modern condition, but I don't think there's really much dispute there's SOMETHING there because you see things like savants who are just inexplicable.
However, the rate at which we're diagnosing people today is totally unprecedented. The DSM and ICD-11 are also more like medical dictionaries than rigorously scientific reflections of underlying biological reality. They describe what Autism and ADHD are, but the categorisation is largely based on convention, clinical convenience, and a desire to fit a certain nosology rather than actual science. I've been looking into the alternative frameworks like RDOC and HITOP.
Anyways we're diagnosing people a lot more often nowadays, increasing the patient population, but still acting like research done on a much smaller patient population still holes up. Adaptive Behaviour Analysis therapy for instance is still insured in the United States based on research from the 90s when the average autistic child was very different than an average 2024 autistic child (not to say there hasn't been more research since than), and generally I see money and entrenched laws and bureaucratic guidelines and incentives as creating a sort of system which has no evidence of helping anybody which coincidentally results in a lot more money changing hands and more people getting government money.
Anyways I think the current system we have where we pretend that it's useful to say that Elon Musk and some guy who smashes his head into the wall until it bleeds to self-stimulate have the same disability strains credulity.