[growingkittens]

I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum. Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.

Psychiatry is in its infancy. To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.

[Aurornis]

It's tradition to warn first-year psychiatry students about over-diagnosing themselves and everyone around them. There is a well known phenomenon where as soon as students start reading about conditions and symptoms they start seeing it in everyone at rates far too high to be accurate. Fortunately for them, their professors are there to warn them about this effect. They also realize how foolish it was to diagnose everyone with everything based on generic symptoms when they get into practice and see what these conditions look like in real patients.

Unfortunately, these psychiatry terms have spilled over into social media without the same warnings. This leads to extreme over-diagnosis by people who learn basic symptoms and start spotting them in everyone.

> I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum.

Unless you are only meeting people in an environment that is extraordinarily biased toward Autism Spectrum Disorder and you’re avoiding mingling with the general population, this simply isn’t possible.

> Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.

You are grossly over-diagnosing.

When you see a characteristic in half of all people it’s no longer in the realm of something considered a disorder. You are literally just describing the median point in human behaviors.

[growingkittens]

A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.

Autistic individuals have systemic changes in their mind and body which let them see life from a different perspective.

People with executive function disorder have issues with rapid thinking, focusing, and other things that can work in their favor often enough to be passed on.

[Aurornis]

> A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.

Speaking in cryptic aphorisms doesn't help anything.

Psychiatry isn't a field where everyone has a single perspective. There is a lot of debate within psychiatry and much research exploring different perspectives.

However, I don't think it's appropriate for a non-psychiatrist to start diagnosing half of the population with a disorder or 1 in 8 people they meet with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

An untrained perspective is not on the same level as the professionals and researchers.

[growingkittens]

This boils down to "I think you are wrong because you are not an authority figure."

[Aurornis]

I trust trained professionals with years of experience across thousands of patients to be better equipped to diagnose people with mental health conditions than someone online who diagnoses literally half of the people they meet with disorders, yes.

Repeating “psychiatry is in its infancy” over and over again does not elevate your opinion to the same level of trained professionals and academic research.

[mjburgess]

You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population. People connect with similar people, form relationships in similar envioronemnts, so your social group is vastly more specialised than it might seem.

Autism compounds this greatly because of the double empathy problem, so one should expect an autistic person to have mostly autistic friends and to be in environments where the rate of autism is far higher

[Aurornis]

> You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population.

I'm not assuming anything. I literally explained that the only way it's possible is for someone to avoid the general population and only socialize in environments with extreme bias.

The more important point is that diagnosing autism is not something you can do by simply meeting people in social situations. It's something that takes training and experience by professionals, not an untrained person who sizes people up as they meet them in a social capacity.

[growingkittens]

Again, psychiatry is in its infancy. Many professionals use outdated models or stereotypes in practice. Living as an autistic individual can make it easier to clock other autistic people, because it's rare to meet someone who functions or thinks the same way you do and sticks out like a sore thumb. For example, "thinking in pictures" is not a universal autistic trait, but it's a pretty well known one.

[Dylan16807]

Being easy to clock won't bring the ratio of something up to 1/8 or 1/4 or 1/2.

[LordDragonfang]

> To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.

Almost all of my social circle is somewhere on the spectrum, and quite a few are diagnosed.

So I can say with some authority that there are absolutely some people who use it as an excuse, which is made even more apparent than the people that aren't using it as one. TikTok and other high-information-low-veracity social media is only making this trend worse. It's not bigotry to acknowledge that.

(Most of said individuals ended up getting cut out of said social circle, after the people actually making an effort got tired of them constantly using their disability as an excuse not to even try to modify bad behavior)

That said, I'm not against diagnosis, or even self-diagnosis. Improved diagnosis is a good thing! But mostly because it makes it easier to understand how you can structure things to adapt to it. Or to quote a coworker's email signature:

> “Undiagnosed neurodivergence is like being handed a video game that has been set to hard mode, but having people tell you over and over "it's on easy, why do you keep dying? " Diagnosis is learning the game is on hard mode. It doesn't make it easier, but you can strategize.”

[sfink]

I agree completely with this comment, though most often I see it for ADHD. It's a level of nuance that people don't seem to be able to handle, though. People want to be on either the "just suck it up, losers" side or the "the duty of society is to make sure nothing is ever hard for anybody" side. It pisses me off to see people take advantage of the accommodations that are needed by some, and saddens me when people who legitimately need accommodation for some things end up depending on it for everything.

It would be nice if there were objective tests that said exactly where someone is, but those are both impossible and would be subverted even if they were possible.

[growingkittens]

There will always be humans who take advantage of a system. Why do you, like the parent commenter, think that is in question here? No one here is espousing the extreme position you put in quotes.

[sfink]

Because I am seeing how this is playing out in classrooms. Tons of kids are requesting accommodations. Some need those accommodations, some don't, and the ones who do often don't need all of the accommodations they're getting. Anyone who pushes back -- eg, a teacher calling out a BS requirement -- is demonized and seen as ableist. Among the kids, anyone who doesn't request an accommodation that they don't need but could get, is seen a foolish. And access to those accommodations produces a lot of kids who don't even try to improve their executive functioning to what it could be. And people know it, so a stigma is developing where people who need it have to prove that they're not taking advantage of the situation.

Parents are doing the best they can, but in the end they're still making decisions for other human beings who are not them, and those human beings are going through a time of life that is undeniably hard and requires growing to be able to do all kinds of things they couldn't formerly do. How can the kids know what is reasonable difficulty and what is excessive due to their neural makeup?

It's a tricky and nuanced situation, and so I really do see people falling into the opposing extreme camps. I agree that humans will take advantage of any system. That doesn't really have any bearing on how things are going, and whether people are seeing the nuance clearly or not. My personal experience is witnessing kids who are taking advantage of accommodations and failing to grow as a result, and how the system cannot distinguish which of those accommodations are appropriate and which aren't. It's also witnessing kids who need accommodation but won't ask for it, because they or their parents believe that muscling through is necessary, or that their problems aren't real. How are those not examples of extreme positions?

My point is that in order to get better at this, we need to be doing the hard work of figuring out what's real and what's not, or even how real it is, and what interventions do and don't work. Surely it's not controversial to say that giving a procrastinator twice as much time to finish their tests is not always the right thing? It can hurt as easily as it can help. And yet, it is the right thing for some people, for some situations. If it takes me 10 minutes to solve a quadratic that takes you 5, getting a failing grade is not going to help me learn, nor does it mean I'm incompetent at mathematics.

If you don't think people are saying "just suck it up", you're not looking very hard. Same if you don't think people are saying that we should offer any and all accommodations to anyone who requests.

[growingkittens]

There will always be humans who take advantage of a system, that is not in question.

Believing that "too many" autistic people are using it as an excuse - an entire category of people - is bigotry.

[spicyusername]

I never said autism was an excuse not to deal with life.

I did say that it is common for people to see themselves in the descriptions of many psychiatric disorders, because many of the symptoms are experiences that most people can relate to, in some form or another, and then use that as a vehicle to avoid enduring some of life's necessary suffering.