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I'm with you... it won't kill them and it's not progressive. It's not caused by a pathogen. It's not a disease like polio or measles.

If a parent would rather have their child die, or no child at all, rather than an autistic child, they shouldn't have children at all.

Asperger's used to be a categorisation, but they got rid of it because 1. The guy who came up with it was a Nazi and used it as a means of segregating those he didn't intend to murder from those he did, and 2. the border between Autistic and Aspergers was pretty vague and whether you got the diagnosis was dependent on the culture of the clinic doing the diagnosing and not any objective criteria.

I dunno, it feels (obviously irrationally) a little bit insulting that there isn't a categorisation, because by lumping everyone who previously had Asperger's in with Autism, it doesn't matter how well you mask, as soon as you mention you're autistic, everyone thinks you're one wrong word away from having a meltdown. Nobody sees levels, they see Autism, and what was formerly known as Asperger's, where the latter are a bit weird, and the former are in need of serious care.

But you aren't allowed to call HitlerPig an asshole. Or HitlerPig either, but it's too late for me, I'm already on a bunch of lists.

Autist here:

Yeah, describing it as simply 'greater' or 'lesser' ability to control or maintain focus is... well, too simplistic.

I can, when it comes to task, hyperfocus on something like writing a piece of complex code / software, try to solve a real world engineering problem, do a comprehensive data analysis of some topic, write a chapter of a novel... I can hyperfocus on that for a solid day or week or month, and I have to actively remind myself to do things like eat and sleep regularly, because I know I tend to get obsessively focused on 'the task'.

Shifting to another task, another very different ... realm of thinking, or way of thinking, is often very jarring and exhausting.

But on the flip side, when socializing, people tend to say I am scatter brained, overwhelming, because I just flow all the way through my entire chain of concept associations to end up with a resulting... thing I am trying to say.

Sort of like how modern agentic AI has an 'explain its thinking process' mode.

Thats just the default for me, its all an explicit, conscious train of thought.

For me, summarizing that chain of thought into just a resultant 'thing to say' is the difficult part, that I get worse at the more mentally exhausted I am.

Also, I would say most, not all, but most autists... its not that we are inattentive to or ignorant of social cues.

Its that neurotypicals tend to process social cues mostly subconsciously, whereas autists tend to process social cues mostly consciously...

... and that most neurotypicals actually all have widely variable, inconsistent and imprecise standards by which they judge and perform social cues, but most of them are unaware of this, to the point that they are overly confident that everyone has the same rubric and understanding of social cues as they do, when this very obviously is not the case.

So, this confuses/overwhelms many/most autists, because they are presented with an inconsistent and variable ruleset, and then also told that this ruleset is consistent and invariable.

Neurotypicals will often get angry/rude/frustrated/overwhelmed when you try to break this down and explain this to them, presumably because they largely are not aware of / do not have this explicit, conscious thought process, and tend to interperet being asked to formulate it in consistent, precise detail just as a rude, unreasonable thing to ask for.

Basically, imo, NTs use a fuzzy, fast, less accurate, mostly unconscious heuristic to evaluate and perform social cues, and they tend to be very confident they are doing this correctly...

... whereas Autists tend to logically and consciously go through an entire evaluation system, which is more robust and thorough in that its basically a discrete series of probabilistic associations, but this is all much slower, much more 'computationally costly' to perform.

So, when an Autist is oversocialized, under too much pressure to perform socially, they can get overwhelmed and then either basically shutdown or freak out.

This also works, imo, to explain why Autists tend to take longer to initially learn socialization cues and concepts... because they are having to build a much more conscious, step by step evaluation model of all possible micro/macro expressions, tonal shifts, inflexions, vocab choices, all possibly relevant context, etc, and this can often be much more difficult to establish when Neurotypicals are nearly entirely unaware of or dismissive of their own inconsistencies and variability when it comes to those things.

This also works to explain why Autists are often seen as overly straightforward or blunt: They're just telling you the result of their attempt to evaluate a social interaction.

And this also explains why almost no NT person I've ever met can accurately assess my emotional state / social interaction disposition, yet they almost all are very confident they can do so correctly and precisely.

EDIT

And I will here comment on the meta-irony of all of this, that ... any scientist could just ask a 'high-functioning' autist to explain how this works, and they could... you know, trust what a person says about how their own thought processes work?

But nope, nope, still we are pathologized as if we are strange, alien, confused and confusing others, not valid sources of information as to how our own minds work, when our whole 'problem' is that we are way too aware of how our minds work.

Why do you think PTSD coincides with the later Autism diagnosis group more strongly than the early diagnosis group?

Because we have been saying shit like this our whole lives, and broadly, nobody cares and just makes up whatever explanation or understanding they prefer, which is almost always significantly innacurate/incomplete, so we tend to live lives of constantly being slandered and mocked, rarely being respected as human beings with full agency.

Yeah but we're not allowed to talk about how that 85% has been prescribed stuff that doesn't help them, very often has negative, deleterious, harmful mental and physical sideeffects, oh and also often cause dependency/addiction.

Because then when you look at it that way, that would mean basically all currently active, prescribing pscyhiatrists would be open to malpractice lawsuits, and/or drugmakers would be open to gigantic class action lawsuits.

You know, like with opioid pain killers?

But uh nope, nope, that can't be allowed to be considered, so .... just don't talk about it.

In most cases the diagnosis is observational. Blood tests and brain scans aren't used for this kind of thing, although that could change someday.

I feel like at minimum we should have it broken up by different favors, kinda like how Asperger's was a sub diagnosis under the umbrella of autism for awhile.

Having been born female, it’s amazing how I was diagnosed with everything from paranoid fucking schizophrenia to bipolar rather than acknowledge ASD/ADHD.

I remember cleaning out my locker once at the end of school and having a ton of crap just fall out on me. Absolutely no recognition of my lack of organizational/executive function skills because girls couldn’t possibly be ADHD/ASD.

I am circumcised bro