The most prominent spectrum these days is the gender spectrum, but the absolute absurdity of the idea of a gender spectrum pushed in medical fields should make us question the validity of a medical “spectrum,” particularly with Autism.
I genuinely think that Autism is rampantly over-diagnosed, and has created a paranoia within the population of whether they are “normal” based on very loose parameters.
If gender spectrum is seen as a joke, why do we still place the concept of the Autism spectrum on relatively a higher pedestal?
If you want to talk about over diagnosis, I think attention deficit disorder is still probably the winner. Along with being what was likely an immasculation campaign conducted against perfectly normal little boys.
That is also severely misdiagnosed. I had a psychiatrist try to tell me I had adult ADHD symptoms, when I know the reality is that I don’t exercise anywhere close to what I should be (and I could probably improve my diet more, but exercise is the main component I need to work on). The mental health industry is often filled with people incentivized to prescribe medication to clients, and the impact has and will continue to be devastating.
That and “depression”…
"but the drugs made me feel better!!"
proceeds to hang himself when the drugs run out
"This 8 year old boy doesn't present with the broken down will and lack of energy that a 40 year old does. We should drug him."
Lazy bitch ass teacher.
Peterson pointed out our school system was modeled after the Prussian model which was designed to make obedient soldiers. Not intelligent people. Not thinkers. I maintain the school system is what is wrong and if I ever had kids, I'd not concede to medicating them for some entitled teacher to have an easier workday.
Give kids back their fucking recess and the ability to talk and play at lunch.
Back in the day, psych students opened the DSM at parties and misdiagnose each other as a game. Flip to a random page and see who fit the bill.
I did that with some fellow high school students in the 90's and they all believed the diagnosis. It was my sign to transfer out of the school fast.
The reason why it's so ridiculous is that we never study giftedness. If we have 1 in 2000 autists, then we likely have 1:2000 gifted. We don't have a DSM of gifts, and most psych text books are lucky to have 2 paragraphs on the subject. So, when I mention I can remember stuff really well, and do math in my head, I am obviously autistic. Since I'm reading their body language to see they only have a small understanding of the subject and change the subject, I must be ADHD as well. There is no giftedness, only drool.
Most not so specials are because the parents think it will look good on the university application. Heck, I had many a friend claim to be gay or something to be special while at the gifted program.
I wondered how you made those big lists…
Part of my skill set
Murky and poorly defined "conditions" are something that absolutely should've been met with skepticism.
Like yes, obviously not every condition fits into a neat little box, but there are better ways to make those definitions flexible without making them overly broad.
The idea of a broad spectrum just seems so sinister, especially for a diagnosis of the mind. What could simply be normal quirks that are a product of how the person grew up turns into a question of whether the brain is defective.
It’s absurd for Autism to have such a vast range that a perfectly self-sufficient individual could share a classification with someone who is so mentally incapacitated that they are completely unable to live by themselves.
young diagnosis here. For many, the diagnosis only makes things worse. It causes reclusive tendencies to be coddled, outbursts to be forgiven, and creates an all around feedback loop that reinforces autism.
If the kid is not very deep in the spectrum, they honestly need to be told "fuck you, get ahold of yourself" or else they will never be independent.
t. symptoms nearly evaporated in highschool, where the special treatment stopped.
I had the misfortune to work with a man who had ass burgers or something similar to it for three fucking years.
This guy literally couldn't shut his fucking mouth. He always had to be making some sort of noise. It didn't matter if that noise involved words or not, he had to make it. He knew that people let him get away with things, and the managers were reluctant to do anything about it because they didn't want a lawsuit on their hands.
One day I watched this man, while making a salad on the line, get some dressing on his glove. He proceeded to lick the dressing off the glove and continue making it. The manager on duty saw it, yelled at him for doing it, and told him to redo it from scratch. If I, or someone else who wasn't a protected class like him, did something on that level, we would not be told to remake it. We would have been fired on the spot for the egregious health code violation (which was on camera btw), no questions asked.
I hated that man. He made work so much more miserable than it should have been. He was also the one that tattled to management about our deal with the Five Guys next door to trade cookies and stuff for burgers and fries. That man really believed he was above everyone. Unfortunately I was laid off before getting to see him fired. It took yelling at a female employee and making her cry in front of customers for him to finally get sacked. I just wish I had it on video.
You know. Ive had the same experience. I've never made the connection of avoiding eye contact to preserve a peaceful interaction, but that is absolutely the learned behavior. Interesting.
I think face blindness might be a result of that, but also could be fundamental coincidence or even genetic. My dad can't do it either
spectrum theory is a psuedoscientific subversion technique.
it's like saying the number of fingers/toes a human has is on a spectrum. yes, there are anomalies where people don't have 10 fingers and 10 toes. but the genetic code dictates that the distribution is overwhelming... 99%+ of people naturally have 10 fingers and 10 toes.
sex is no different. 99%+ of people are male or female, and nothing in between. and even in most of the groups these activists label as "intersex", they're just not. for example, people with klinefelter are 100% male, despite activist groups claiming they're intersex. when you look at what these activist groups are labeling as intersex just to get to 0.01% of the population, it's ridiculous... practically anyone with imperfect genitals is mislabeled as intersex. apparently there's a condition where your penis-hole can be on the side or bottom of your penis, not the end of the tip... and these groups claim this makes a person intersex despite being 100% unmistakably male.
Why do you keep doing that with the capital I?
Random guess: it might help him differentiate lowercase "L" and capital "i" in the font he uses.
You can get a different font in here?
Maybe? If you're able to change text appearance in your browser/phone, I would think you could change it on any given site.
No. But that İ exists in every font, it is a letter of Turkish language.
Because many conditions either are on a curve, or have a varying effect. Bell curves and other curves are everywhere in nature.
Let's look at something that's easier to diagnose through more objective means though. Down syndrome. Some of them are basically just a bit slow, but can reasonably function. Others have the intelligence of children, others have that of toddlers. Now it's true that the extra chromosome isn't on a spectrum, it's pretty binary*, but its effects are on a very wide curve. We know of plenty of conditions like that.
Vision, hearing, flatulence, fertility... there are conditions that damage these to varying degrees and there are low ends of the normal curve for just natural reasons. We know of plenty of metrics and skills which can be affected on a curve.
Next we have an effect where in medicine we have cutoffs for normal functioning. 2SD is usually the cutoff, bur it can be messy. If your skills are below 2 standard deviations in anything it gets classed as something. Like your IQ. If it's lower than 70, you are mentally retarded. But what if you're just a slower kid from a family that all hover around 75 anyway, do they suddenly have a condition now cause they were below their family average by a mere 6? Classification gets messy.
If you've ever worked with autistic kids and adults, you know that there is indeed a range of effects it has on them, a variety of skills are affected on a curve, and a bunch of behaviors that manifest on a curve. A lot of them have problems with sensory input, easily overstimulated or whatever. Some will shut down, or be functional enough to remove themselves from it. Others go balistic and you won't get anything out of them for a week after it. Some have a bit of trouble with metaphorical and figurative language, and have to really work and spend extra time on things like idioms as a part of their special education. Others do not get it at all. Others aren't even at the point where that's an issue, completely averbal. Some have echolalia, and maybe 10% of what they say will be repetitions of something else. Others it's all they say. I'm not talking about the tumblr selfdiagnoses. I'm talking about the people who absolutely certainly do have it, it's just moderate. But If we accept that its effects can range from extremely severe up to moderate, it therefore stands to reason that its effects can also be less severe still, up to mild and marginal.
You are right to be skeptical of everything the med establishment says and does, and with adhd and autism in particular they have become movements and trends. I agree. But throw out all your biases, look at this purely logically:
If there is 'something' affecting these kids and its effects range from very severe up to moderate, why logical reason is there as to why it couldn't also manifest with mild or marginal systems, particularly if its forming its own curve. Yes, it can be hard to tease apart from the people who are just on the extreme low end for social skills. There's 2% of the population down there just cause that's where they fell on the curve and didn't develop those skills. That's true too. But the fact it might be hard to tease apart one from the other doesn't mean that they can't both be real things. Why is it impossible that if 1) there are easy to diagnose objectively diseases but also diseases (particularly of the mind) that you have to rely on looking at its effects to diagnose and 2) if there are diseases that have wider curves in how they can affect people. Then why is it that you don't expect there to be a group that are currently difficult to diagnose but for the effects it has on you, and which can have wide ranging effects including mild and marginal, overlapping with people who are just shit at something? Of all the possible conditions affecting humanity, there's gotta be at least a couple of conditions like that.
Be careful of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Fine to start with a position of skepticism of anything they say. But not everything the establishment says is a lie. They sprinkle some truths in there, or they focus on one thing to obscure another.
With Down syndrome, only a part of the extra chromosome might be present.
I'm autistic. So I'm going to try to address this from the inside. I'm also old as fuck at this point, so this isn't the zoomer perspective.
Please don't let the tumblrina and your dislike of the tiktok autism face-claimers cause you to treat autistics like shit or scoff at the autistic spectrum. Trust me, we don't like the tiktokers or the tumblrina any more than you do but they still became the face of the movement. It's just like gaming, and how every gaming company is standing up bluehairs and nose ring, gauged ear motherfuckers going on about how great diversity is.
I'm going to explain some things. The surge in autistic diagnosis. The reason why a spectrum is needed for helping autistic people survive. Why autism can be helpful in the gender critical bullshit fight.
Regarding the surge in autism diagnosis.
The impossible1 is going to love this; it is surging because of gynocentrism and a lack of expectations on mothers to put fetus and nursing babies first. Read all this with the following in mind; various pediatric associations reversed their stance on mothers getting drunk because they were concerned about appearing sexist in telling women what to do while pregnant. Fetal alcohol syndrome be damned. Stay through to the end of this section for the real culprit of increased autism and ADHD. Might just save you from having an autistic NEET like me to raise.
Remember thalidomide? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal
The mother's medical needs > a baby's safety. That's the attitude in modern society. The standard for pregnancy for literal decades of American medicine was that you didn't give a mother anything if you could avoid giving them medicine. As it almost always impacts the fetus in some way. Or even if the mom was still nursing. As feminism came along, the first wave, this attitude eroded. Despite the warning on almost all medicine remaining in place, for liability reasons, doctors lost this ethic.
Thalidomide is also relevant here because it shows just how overtly a simple medicine can impact a fetus.
Now. Before Tylenol, the only option you really had for any kind of pain relief as a woman during pregnancy was an injection directly into the motherfucking spine. Tylenol came along and it offered women a "safe" medicine they could load up on during pregnancy. Tylenol being a medicine where we have theories about why it works on blocking pain, but nothing we've concretely proven.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/02/limited-evidence-of-a-link-between-acetaminophen-and-autism-or-adhd/
You can note, they pretty much admit in the conclusion that the link to autism and ADHD is valid, but they're chicken shits, and they use terms like "pregnant persons" and how they should "consider carefully" on using OTC pain killers. These concerns are valid enough that multiple national and international lawsuits have been launched against people for Tylenol use and Tylenol recommendation... this includes the american military facing a big lawsuit for megadosing pregnant spouses of soldiers and creating a gigantic wave of mental illness among their children. As for why, it was cheaper for the military to megadose moms rather than offer epidurals or let their husbands have leave to tend to the moms.
My mom was one of these moms. I'm an airforce brat. Those lawsuits have survived the initial motions for dismissal. That means that the legal system sees enough evidence to let the trials proceed.
As an afterthought: there is also a rush to diagnose autistic females because the psych community feels really bad and really guilty. They don't want the undiagnosed autistic females to get caught by the trans community and gaslit into double mastectomies. They're trying to make up for a decade of 10-to-1 gender diagnosis rates.
Why the spectrum is needed to help autistics survive.
Most autistic people as a whole are pretty useless. Not counting ADHD here. 85% of all autistics, verbal and nonverbal, and aspergers, are not employed. The 15% that are, 75% of them are employed because of government employment programs such as the government subsidizing a company if it hires autistic people.
This means how much help we need, be it a half-way house or group home, be it a wage subsidy, or a job coach, is highly individual. In order not to waste resources, we needed to be seen and treated as individuals. The government treats most conditions as a one-sized-fits-all go or no-go system of fully disabled or not disabled. The SSDI/SSI programs for example use a "bingo chart" of sorts, and enough things = you don't die homeless.
This takes us to aspergers. The majority of communicative autistic people fall into the aspergers category. This is a category invented by a German doctor in a schindler's list situation. The Nazi were gassing people if they had disabilities that require assistance. To save some small segment of autistic people, those who could talk and reason enough for the doctor to feel sympathy for, they had to convince the Nazi that these people could be useful.
Hence, Asperger invented this new class of autism that was "Bad social fit for life, but still capable of specialized tasks. Therefor, useful. Do not kill."
This was a half-truth. Yes, we could hold basic conversations but we always seemed like the aliens in a skin suit. We set off that creepy uncanny valley alarm. We don't keep jobs very long and instability plagues our life unless we are either a.) self made and our own boss. b.) in a job where performance matters more than if the office ladies like you and feel comfortable around you.
The modern medical community took the diagnosis, wholesale, and said "If you have aspergers, you are functional enough not to require any government support." They never stopped to realize that the no support line was added to the original diagnosis for the literal purpose of preventing our extermination.
We need support, a job coach at the very least, to be part of society... but if the original diagnosis included that, the Nazi would have just killed people like us.
They eliminated Aspergers as a modern diagnosis to shed the "no support" blanket statement. As part of the autistic spectrum, we are now able to be evaluated individually and have our support needs assessed.
Why autism is useful in fighting gender critical bullshit.
Aspergers boys are about as different from drooling retard non-communicative autistics as girl autistics are from boys. They have the same social rejection issues in the end and the transgender community is sweeping up autistic girls and convincing them that they're trans. I've seen estimates that FtMs are something like 6 to 18 times more likely to be autistic.
The autism "spectrum" has to exist because of how differently the mental illness/disorder presents itself in men and women. Without it, so few girls resemble the male default, and thus, would never be diagnosed. Which means, we'd never catch out the predatory people in education.
This is creating a gigantic fuckton of trans regret and detransition. This is also exposing the education and medical sectors as predatory and negligent.
https://www.themainewire.com/2023/03/horrifying-huge-proportion-of-children-pursuing-gender-transitions-are-actually-autistic-experts-believe/
Since women are more able to fight back against this stuff without being ostracized from society, this is far more useful than we give it credit for.
The entire medical field should be treated with complete skepticism.
Autism is frequently misdiagnosed by terminally online people self-diagnosing themselves. Professionally though, I believe most of the cases are legit. We are seeing testosterone hit all-time lows and RFK Jr. credibly question vaccine regimens and we think autism isn't rising rapidly?
Most autism is also done professionally as a "we aren't leaving until there is a diagnosis" condition, and its the easiest to do with its more broad definitions.
Whether its a mom looking for an excuse for being a bad parent, or a teacher failing to control her class looking to push the blame back onto the kid, its a situation where the docs often can't win.
Anything can be a spectrum, depending on how retarded and meaningless you want to make something!
Gender is the perfect example. If there are eight billion genders...congrats, there's no point in even paying any attention to them, much less making it your core identity point.
So, it's not that there aren't "spectrums," it's just that treating something with very clear borders as a spectrum causes confusion, loss of meaning, and makes it so you can't apply basic knowledge. Conflating sex and gender, and then exploding gender, means you lose major effectiveness on treating sex-differentiated diseases or conditions, for example.
I think this can be said about a lot of conditions; mental, physical, chemical, etc.
A lot of it comes down to greed and institutional capture, too. The pharmaceutical and healthcare industries - and the corrupt politicians in on the grift - are making purely astonishing and incomprehensible levels of money off everything from what they're claiming is autism, to what they're claiming is cancer. Not to mention depression, ADD/ADHD, etc. Or all the diet-related and easily curable "diseases" causes by, among other things, corrupt government food pyramids.
It's ridiculous, and it's totally - pardon the pun - sickening.
Almost a million people die a year in the US just from heart-related diseases, most of them curable or avoidable. Another half a million die from cancer, and TPTB have done everything they can to stop a "cure." Another quarter to a half a million people die from medical errors. Then you have strokes, respiratory, Alzheimer's, diabetes, and the like.
Many of those could have much better treatment or avoidance, if the government hadn't gone out of their way to protect pharma/healthcare. They're killing millions of people every year.
The Autism "spectrum" was removed in the DSM5 a decade ago because even they knew it was bunk. Its still called "autism spectrum disorder" but it now has actual direct criteria like anything else. Like, Aspergers doesn't even exist anymore. Most of those people were just told to get over themselves.
The problem is nobody actually knows anything about autism anymore, and almost all people with "autism" as self diagnosed so they haven't even read a DSM to begin with and just looked up a WebMD or Wikipedia list of symptoms to justify themselves.
The problem is that nobody actually knows what they are talking about, so they haven't updated their narratives and lexicon from 2011 when it was at its peak.
The spectrum wasn't removed. They removed Asperger's as separate from Autism and instead incorporated it into the autism spectrum, so the spectrum was made even broader.
No, Asperger's was literally folding into ASD. ASD was given the same diagnosistic criteria as any other mental illness, with specific requirements and maladaptive traits. Many of those who barely met the prior very weak needs for Asperger's no longer met the minimum for Autism (which is why they didn't just have autism before) and were stripped of it.
The only semi-unique thing it has is having levels 1-3 for it, which is only semi unique because of the naming, and that's why it kept the legacy name of "spectrum." But that is important because the difference between a functional human who is still in need of supervision, and a massive autist who can barely go 2 minutes without killing themselves, is large despite having the same root.
Because that's the important key. You now have to be level 1, 2, or 3 to have autism. Anyone who can't tell you their level and just relies on "spectrum" is lying.
I like it :
Lies about covid vaccines => any sane person should question all the vaccines now.
Lies about covid science => any sane person should question all their agenda driven science (climate hysterics etc)
Scientists sit on committees and select their friends to talk at conferences.
Scientists serve as editors or reviewers with the authority to anonymously reject papers they don’t like.
This system can enable scientists to suppress inconvenient research & truths.