"Autism Spectrum"

[patrick___]

Everybody these days seems to be on the so-called "Autism Spectrum". It drives me crazy to see how anyone who has ever felt socially-awkward seems to need to explain it by saying they might be a little autistic. I know people who are truly autistic, and it is nothing like the various celebrities who are getting labeled autistic these days. It

Comments

[syntheticjesso]

It's like the people who claim they are "sooooooo OCD" because they have an organized room. It completely minimizes the experiences of people who, say, wash their hands 100 times a day until their skin is raw, or have a panic attack if they don't check if the door is locked five times every night.

[patrick___]

So true. I've also heard that people with clinical depression have similar feelings when people throw around the word "depressed". It trivializes the actual medical issue people are dealing with.

I can't imagine how frustrated I'd be if I had a truly autistic child, and someone came up to me and said "Oh, don't worry, those kinds of kids all grow up to work at Microsoft". I actually heard somebody say something like that in complete seriousness, because that's the impression they were given by the popular media.

I wonder if the people who throw around the phrase "autism" have ever actually met a low function autistic person. The brother of one of my friends in school was very autistic to the point he had to be in a wheel chair and couldn't talk or even hardly eat on his own. I just don't see how the phrase "autism" can have any usefulness at all if the spectrum is so broad that Dan Akroyd and Bill Gates are labeled as having the same disorder this child had.

[patrick___]

Yeah, I feel like ADHD is kind of a similar thing. You can find those traits in a large portion of the population on some scale. Autism is so crazy, though, because you're talking such extreme differences between low-functioning and high-functioning people on this "spectrum

[patrick___]

That's really fascinating. I hadn't heard about all of that before. It makes sense, though.

I have a niece who was originally diagnosed as autistic, but later got re-diagnosed as having another neurological condition instead. I can't remember the exact technical description of it, but basically that she just processes everything a lot slower than most people. Not in a way that necessarily means lower-intelligence, but in sort of sensory way, I guess. I'm not sure they've totally decided for sure that's what it is, though. These things can be so confusing to figure out. They know she's definitely developmentally behind most children, and has several different quirks that seem like autism.

That's sad if the psychiatric profession ends up being that slow to advance with the harder sciences. If that's really the case they're going to have to be really careful keeping their profession from devolving into pure pseudoscience. (I think a case could be made that a large part of early psychology was as much pseudoscience as anything