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“Science” under capitalism is not just political. It’s literally fascist.
Sorry media campaign, I just checked and I did get vaccinated.
I’m Autistic, I swear! I have the vaccination card to prove it.
Context?
This article: https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-autistic-i-was-wrong Since it’s behind the paywall, a PDF copy should be available here.
It’s fucking funny that even propaganda is behind paywalls these days.
It’s literally all right there
Stop making everything political!
The national anthem of people who love the status quo!
Everything is political.
Someone: stop “making” everything political!!
The national anthem of people who love the status quo!
Of 40 years ago.
For now. They’d ideally prefer 400 years ago.
At least they think they would, and then it’s !leopardsatemyface@lemmy.world
Name and shame them
Oh, good. We’re doing this now… These people always have to be on the lookout for new groups they can punch down on just so they can feel big. They sneer at others for needing help, but they are the ones who well and truly need it themselves. Why do they feel this need to belittle others? Is it because they feel small in their own lives? Do they have some hatred that stems from past trauma that needs resolved? Who knows? But instead of working on themselves, whatever form that may take, they instead spend all their time and energy trying to tear down and destroy others. It’s a sad thing in the end, but the damage they do to others can not be forgiven or tolerated.
They sneer at others for needing help, but they are the ones who well and truly need it themselves
but that help seems unreachable to them; that’s the problem, they see others getting the help they need , don’t think can get, or feel ashamed of needing.
I disagree. You imply they admit to needing help. I think they’re all in denial. They have problems and want to blame everyone but themselves, and are unwilling to take any responsibility.
This is it. It’s a bunch of angry people who think “Life is supposed to be hard! Deal with it.”
They think their life experiences are comparable to everyone else, which creates a logical fallacy:
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Successful people don’t need help, but must obviously struggle just as much as I do.
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I don’t have it easy, yet don’t need help, so people who ask for it are just being lazy.
They internalize the “life is hard” mantra and assume it’s normal to be playing life on hard mode, not realizing some people have the difficulty slider set to very easy while others are on nightmare.
You have just described my father perfectly. He is precisely like this.
“I suffer from depression. Or, as my father puts it, no I don’t.”
-Tig Notaro
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When sociopathy is normalized and idolized, that’s exactly how it seems to be.
The free press
Look inside: paywall
They mean the government can’t tell them what to print. Unfortunately the government also doesn’t seem to tell them not to print lies either.
Unpopular opinion in these circles I’m sure, but:
The US (and the west in general, but especially the US) has a genuine problem with overmedicalization, driven in no small part by for-profit pharmaceutical companies having a financial incentive to sell medication and treatments to people. Part of fixing this problem involves admitting that it also affects autism, ADHD, OCD, etc. diagnoses, and that saying this is not erasure of people affected by those conditions.
Another unpopular opinion: making a medical condition part of your identity is generally not healthy, and if you’re upset about an “anti-autism diagnosis campaign”, there is a chance you have made a medical condition part of your identity.
I say this as someone with a childhood Asperger’s diagnosis who would no longer qualify for any kind of diagnosis.
Paradoxically, I think we have both overmedicalization and a lot of people going untreated who need it. We are still pretty bad at identifying issues early and our for-profit healthcare system blocks a lot of people from being treated who need it. Often having mental health challenges itself limits people’s ability to access treatment.
I also feel that making me self-diagnose with a disorder would be very useful for keeping me small and powerless. If the specific way my mind works doesn’t please late stage capitalism, late stage capitalism and its ‘helpful’ disgnoses can fuck right off while I go take a nap as nature intended.
Yeah particularly with ADHD I feel like many diagnoses are really “incompatible with wageslaving for 40 hours a week” rather than a condition that would, in a vacuum, affect the patient’s quality of life.
Of course many ADHD patients do have real issues with their quality of life even outside of societal obligations (read: work, studies) in the form of e.g. not getting chores done, but as a former “problem child” who nearly had this forced on him back in the day, I firmly believe that there’s a lot of pressure from the school system to get kids on meds just so they’ll sit pretty in class even though the real problem lies in the system.
I also feel that making me self-diagnose with a disorder would be very useful for keeping me small and powerless
That’s a valid way to feel, but for many people on the spectrum it’s the exact opposite. A diagnosis is an answer for why in NT spaces we often feel constantly misunderstood and out of place, and reassurance that we aren’t the only people like ourselves in the world. It’s also an amazing way to connect with others for tips on how to manage symptoms or other issues; if I wasn’t connected to other autistic people I never would have discovered there are tools to reduce my sensory problems, or found the ability to advocate for myself and what I need rather than shutting up and feeling inadequate for needing help.
Yes to all those. It helped me immensely to understand that I am wired different. But lately I have come to believe it’s dangerous to find these common traits in the context of a mental illness diagnosis. Neurodiverse? Hell yeah. Suffering from ‘Can’t work an 8 hour job’ disorder? No thanks. It’s not a disorder, it’s my body and mind protesting against bad conditions. We don’t have to set up society in such a way that a significant percentage of the population cannot keep up with life tasks. I demand change not as charitable accommodation for a problem I have.
My issue here is not the grouping of people under certain traits, but calling these traits a ‘syndrome’ or ‘disorder’ because a person with these traits is less valuable as human resource within the capitalist work logic. I’m not disordered, the system is.
This cuts both ways. As a person with extremely real AuDHD I actively hide that information from most people because so I don’t have to have this exact fucking conversation with every person I meet. “ADHD huh, you know that’s over diagnosed right?”
Thanks doctor, I’ll make sure I write that information down so I can use it later.
Sometimes it’s even worse, and people get actively hostile about it. “Yeah, I might have a PhD as well if I had an Adderall prescription.”
It’s just not helpful. Let the doctors do their thing. If we catch some false positives then so be it. You worry about you, and let other people worry about themselves.
Well no, what’s happening to you is also because of the general culture of overmedication. If there were less false positives, people wouldn’t distrust your diagnosis. If anything, I’d argue the current culture hurts the people who have serious issues more than the people who have been given a shoddy diagnosis in order to peddle drugs, but both sides are pretty rough.
If there were less false positives, people wouldn’t distrust your diagnosis
Did you come to this conclusion by talking to diagnosed people? Because even in the decades where it was massively under diagnosed, I don’t think there’s any time period I could point to and say ‘oh yeah, nobody questions autism diagnoses because they’re so rare!’ It just changes what they say: ‘oh, are you sure? That’s so rare, it’s probably something else!’
I have experienced both sides of this over the decades, and as far as I’m concerned I’d rather cast too wide a net than too small of one, because at least that way more people that need support get it. Being told you’re making it up sucks ass no matter which direction it’s coming from.
You hear people say the same thing about fake service dogs, but they only ever wind up harassing anyone with a service dog because they think it’s their responsibility to be a disability cop.
Also so often attempts to crack down on overdiagnosis winds up hurting those of us who definitely have it. I can’t function without stimulants, I’ve tried, there were car crashes and kitchen fires. Every wave of “it’s overdiagnosed” means now I’m stuck calling every pharmacy in town every month and struggling to find doctors willing to even consider treating adhd in my network.
If we catch some false positives then so be it.
I was one of those false positives as a kid. It led to me being not just unnecessarily medicated, but near criminally overmedicated. From age 7, I was put on ritalin because I couldn’t focus in class (due to a combination of the fact that I had already learned most of what they were teaching me and some serious undiagnosed PTSD). At the worst, I was put on:
- 150 mg of Adderall XR
- 75 mg of Zoloft
- 600 mg of Welbutrin
- some equally ridiculous amount of Stratera
- A revolving door of antipsychotics, because my unstable mood had to be caused by bipolar disorder and not, you know, the incredible amount of unnecessary medication I was being force-fed every day
In the end, it turned out that I didn’t have ADD, but actually had PTSD that presented as inattentiveness due to the constant flashbacks I was experiencing. A couple months’ worth of EMDR treatments (which were very much a known technique when I was being medicated) got me to a place where I was able to function enough to hold down a job and take care of myself, but it took me a decade after getting off of those medications for me to be able to recognize that.
My point in all of this is that false positives aren’t harmless, especially when it comes to minors. Yes, that doctor was giving me doses of medication that, today, would be considered criminal, but even being on a quarter of those doses caused significant damage to my long-term ability to function. Not to mention, I was treated as a lab rat the entire time. I was entered into trial runs of various medications against my will, and while some of them (such as clonidine) ended up being valid treatments, a significant part of me feels like the overmedication trend is just another excuse to treat children as science experiments.
I had somewhat similar but my autism and ADHD were overlooked until I was an adult. I was diagnosed with bipolar, schizo affective disorder and a scattering of others. I was put on;
Efexor 400mg - still can’t get off this though I am down to 225mg
Seroquel 1300mg - which is an insane dose. I was 40kg (teenager) when I started this medication, a year later I was 70kg. I am still struggling with my weight and down to 100mg. For context, they say 600-700mg is the standard for a severe schizophrenic adult. I was an underdeveloped teenager (as in underweight, “failure to thrive”, lack of nutrition etc) and I was not experiencing psychosis. I had years where I could barely get from the bedroom to the lounge room because I was that sedated.
Lithium - 1000mg.
And I would be here all night to list every medication. Seroquel was the worst - it has significantly reduced my quality of life and my life expectancy and contributed to developing other health conditions.
So the issue is ANY misdiagnosis. That’s the conversation to have. Mental illness and neurodivergent conditions are all extremely difficult to get right and that’s an important discussion to have. But when we start targeting one or two conditions; autism and ADHD, that’s not a discussion in good faith - it’s a discussion with an agenda.
I have cPTSD - which I have been told is from drumroll the medical system (as well as childhood trauma). Medical trauma is a true cruelty because sadly, you can’t avoid being re-traumatised because you can’t avoid the medical system… especially when you have chronic conditions and disabilities. You literally have to continue engaging with the system that has traumatized you. Repeatedly. Medical trauma is another important discussion.
Let me guess: early 2000s? I had a friend back then who was on a similarly asinine dose of Seroquel, and it also gave her significant weight problems. It’s only been recently that she’s been able to get to a healthy weight and find some peace. I’m also genuinely surprised that that much lithium didn’t flat out kill you.
I absolutely agree on targeting one or two specific conditions. Adderall was shoved down the throats of probably 10% of my middle school class, whether or not they needed it, because ADD went from a newly-discovered mental illness to a polite way for parents to say “my kid won’t shut the fuck up and sit still.” I don’t know if they were being given doses like mine, but my parents went to a very, uh, experimental psychiatrist because they were so out of ideas.
From one misdiagnosed kid to another, my heart weeps for you, and I hope that psychiatrist has lost his license to practice.
Yep my first diagnosis was 2004 and from that point I was on the conveyor belt, the lab rat, the guinea pig - exactly as you say. It’s really quite awful to think about teenagers who labelled themselves as guinea pigs. I’m a writer and it’s quite confronting to go over my teenage poetry and stories and realize how young I was and already describing myself as a science experiment, lab rat etc.
Seroquel is horrible. I am obviously biased, I am glad if it has helped anyone reading. Everyone I knew on it put on at minimum 20kgs. Imo, it’s one that deserves a huge expose and discussion like adderal (or equivalent, we actually don’t have adderal here!) has.
I think, in my experience, young males were labeled as ADHD and/ or just “bad” kids whereas young females were depressed/anxious/bipolar and a little later borderline personality disorder and/or just “bad” kids. (Can I ask if your experience fit this?)
So the misdiagnoses go wide sadly and whilst medication absolutely has its place I do think it’s often too quickly prescribed. I think it should be the last resort, not the first! The shitty thing is that it’s also seen as part of the process so, as far as I know, there’s very little recourse to take around misdiagnosis for these kinds of conditions. Did you get any “justice” yourself?
My heart aches for us all honestly, who were diagnosed so young with any medical condition wrongly that has had long term effects. We deserved better and it’s one of the reasons I advocate for the next generation to receive the support (not just diagnosis or medication) that will give them the best chance at a fulfilling life. I work in disability, sorry this is long, I’m passionate about these discussions! Take care of yourself!
That’s honestly horrifying, and I’m so sorry you were subject to that. I’m glad you’re doing better today though!
I don’t really see how it affects autism. I guess maybe ABA? I don’t know of any current treatments for it. If anyone’s making real money off of autism, it’s probably fidget toy and earplug manufacturers, and maybe some influencers. If there were serious money to be made then some big companies would likely be pushing back against a lot of the BS lately, but mostly it’s governments + news media (generally right wing) vs independent or small voices.
What’s the source on significant over diagnoses?
Also, how can sacountry workout universal healthcare have such excessive diagnoses when so many aren’t even getting the healthcare at all?
What’s the source on significant over diagnoses?
I don’t believe I said the words “significant over diagnoses”. However, for example for ADHD there was a pretty good article in the New York Times last year (scroll down, the page has a bunch of whitespace at the top): https://web.archive.org/web/20250414202754/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/magazine/adhd-medication-treatment-research.html
Also, how can sacountry workout universal healthcare have such excessive diagnoses when so many aren’t even getting the healthcare at all?
These conditions are often diagnosed during childhood and youth, where most Americans are AFAIK covered by national programs as well as their parents’ insurance.
For adult diagnoses, there’s a selection bias towards people who have self-diagnosed and seek confirmation, which will logically lead to a diagnosis rate among patients that exceeds the true incidence of the condition in the general population (due to the selection bias), as well as a slightly or somewhat increased apparent incidence of the condition in the general population (due to people who self-diagnosed without actually qualifying for a diagnosis, but read enough about the condition to effectively lie their way to a diagnosis).
Lol it’s not healthy to have an anti autism diagnosis campaign to begin with. The issue is that EVERY diagnosis will have people who find out later they were misdiagnosed. So it is targeted to just be discussing one or two diagnoses.
Nobody’s diagnosing/seeking a diagnosis of autism to get meds. There are no meds specifically for autism. That doesn’t make sense
So weighted blanket companies are conspiring to get doctors to diagnose autism?
I don’t know about autism, but there is definitely some of that going on with ADHD for which medical treatment is much more common than for autism.
Autism patients do get prescription meds too, not for autism per se but for the various associated comorbidities (depression, anxiety, sleep meds, etc.). That’s all fine and good when there’s a genuine need for them; the problem is that big pharma has a business interest in making the barrier of prescription as low as possible.
Did you know water drinkers also get prescription meds too? Not for drinking water per se but for the various associated comorbidities with living…
I’m still confused how this is some indictment of autism diagnosis when it seems your issue has nothing to do with autism? Yet the campaign is specifically about autism. Not over-diagnosis of ADHD or depression or anxiety. Why does the one “mental disorder” that doesn’t actually have medical interventions seem to have some of the strongest negative reactions?
This exact same phenomenon applies to almost any mental disorder. And I use the term mental disorder loosely here, as I’m one of the people who doesn’t believe mild cases of autism are even worth diagnosing.
The reason it applies to autism too is that any diagnosis makes you a customer of the medical industry; the customer relationship doesn’t end when you receive a diagnosis, that’s when it starts. They may not be able to sell you autism medicine (yet), but they can sell you all sorts of other medicine and therapy.
So autism diagnosis are bad because they’re trying to hook you on the drug of getting diagnoses and eventually given people medications maybe decades after their diagnosis?
They can already hook you on xanax, sleeping pills, medical marijuana…
They may not be able to sell you autism medicine (yet)
Medical marijuana is prescribed to people with autism in my state, so I don’t give it much longer before they can.
Exactly. It’s targeted. All medical conditions have some level of misdiagnosis. Mental illness and developmental disabilities. But people love to just zero in one diagnosis for this discussion which means it’s targeted and there’s an agenda behind it.
Nobody is getting an autism diagnosis to back up their comorbidities of depression and anxiety to get medication. If anything, people having a diagnosis of depression and anxiety is going to be a reason autism gets overlooked. If you want medication, you aren’t going to go through an autism assessment (cost, time, stress, etc) and then be like “oh yeah you know how I’m autistic, don’t you think that means I am depressed too? Pills please!” If that’s your thing you’d just go for the depression.
Autism has zero benefit trying to obtain medication and actually is LESS likely to go straight for medication because if you’re autistic then the first thing to do is make sure you’re not overloading yourself and managing your sensory issues and such before even determining IF there’s a reason to try drugs. Autisms first line of defense is environmental factors, self care, learning how to manage your energy and capacity, accommodations. The last resort is medication. Ffs I wish people would have a clue what they’re talking about sometimes.
Individuals should not be making their own medical or psychological diagnoses. Correct.
Perfectly fine statement to make in a vacuum, but in the real world there are massive hurdles and downsides to getting diagnosed. I’ve interacted with more than one psych who has basically said that of those who have sought an adult diagnosis with him, they’re rarely wrong. Any image you have in your mind of hordes of neurotypical people making up that they’re autistic is based on prejudice, not reality.
There’s also not a single way to determine if someone is on the spectrum; a psych can run a test wrong or make wrong judgements, and a person doesn’t need a degree to know they have sensory meltdowns or can’t keep up socially to save their life. The idea that doctors are the only ones with insight into health (ESPECIALLY mental health) is something best left in the first half of the 20th century.
On one hand i clearly agree with you about the overmedicalization issue, on the other hand there also was an undermedicalization going on for centuries, especially in the autism/ADHD/etc fields. It’s a tough balance to get, cuz the rise of diagnoses may not indicate an overmedicalization, but rather a correction of the undermedicalization (though the risk of overmed. is real, clearly).
And on the medical condition being part of an identity, i also get your point, but it’s also important to consider that making your differences part of your identity makes perfect sense, and for a lot of people their differences come from medical conditions. Conflating the two may be slightly unhealthy, but far less than repressing it as non-subject.
There’s a pendulum swinging towards the middle. Under diagnosis, and then ultra trendy diagnosis, huge self-diagnosis, general personality trend to align with. Now it’s going to swing back, likely towards biomarkers, as the DSM VI is trying to focus on. Can we see this on a scan? If so it exists. And then the DSM XII will be like “fuck that.” Mental health has always wobbled between extremes and somehow found the truth in the middle.
brb I’m going to accidentally an origin server
I originally found and read this article on my RSS feed, and it actually pissed me off by how badly written it is and how many times it pretty much says “noooo, you don’t need a diagnosis, you’re just acting weird!”
I wonder if they have something big in the works for autistic people like they do for trans people
They want to “find the cause of autism” so they want to build a list of autistic people. Building lists of minorities or marginalized people is never a good sign when a government is powersliding into authoritarianism.
It seems like nothing they wrote supports their conclusion. I mean look, if you have some challenges, and you find ways to handle them, that doesn’t mean you are (or aren’t) autistic… But somehow they worked hard to ignore this key point that undercuts everything they wrote.
“I do not struggle with X. I got a system.”
One of the most telltale signs of autism.
For me it was " I don’t struggle with understanding people’s emotions"
Then it was pointed out to me that I have spent years watching people and learning how they work.
Turns out people are my trains.
Or any mental illness. “I don’t have an anxiety disorder, I just have to work up the courage to go about my day and do this handful of specific things to ensure none of the things I’m worried about happen”
So… I am unquestionably ADHD. Like diagnosed in kindergarten, “doctor sees I’m neurodivergent the instant I start talking.”
Maybe AuADHD, still figuring that out.
…But, while I am no doctor, there were almost certainly some diagnoses just to get ADD meds or extra time for tests. It was quite rampant in my school.
What I’m saying is, the grain of truth they’re stretching here shouldn’t be forgotten. Misdiagnoses and “false diagnosis” for benefits is definitely a thing for ADD, and it might be one for autism at some point. And pushing back against shameless neurodivergence discrimination shouldn’t cross the threshold of pretending that doesn’t exist.
It’s the kind of thing that haunts you and gives you impostor syndrome for the rest of your life
You can get Gold ADHD now?
I’ve already ranked up to Diamond /j
I’ve been hard stuck plat for 40 seasons…
And here I am in bronze league, thinking there was no hope.
Don’t worry, at least you’re not cardboard
I’ll consider this discussion when people start discussing how often people are misdiagnosed and mis-medicated for mental illnesses and other illnesses. But whilst it’s just a narrow attack on one or two diagnoses (autism and ADHD) it’s not a discussion that’s being had in good faith. It’s one with an agenda.
IMHO, in a way, it’s the desperate, desperate, oh so desperate need of people who can’t deal with the uncertainty of Probability and Statistics and thus require everything to be a clearly defined something, no variance, no deviations.
It’s the same reason why some people simply can’t accept the Theory Of Evolution: the idea that “countless” (not literally, but figurativelly) random variances will yield incremental changes which over time add up to major change is just beyond them, so better have a single (or a handful) of fantastical all powerful beings of unexplained (and never questioned) provenance be the designers and agents of creation of all we see.
As I see it, shit like this is mainly stupid people compensating (in the Psychology sense of the word) for their own inability to comprehend the World as is and without mentally simplify it down to a handful of little labelled boxes.
Yeah I think we all have that little voice at some point that goes what it atoms aren’t real, what if things are exactly as they appear? What about germs? What about the “globe”? What about “other” ““people”” and— and then you think about it a bit and it unravels very very quickly, but it’s good to be able to throw your entire mental model into doubt sometimes.
I wonder if some people aren’t able to build a satisfying mental model for some reason. I don’t think it’s just a matter of intelligence either, but something more emotional.
i think cycles of abuse play a factor. just like who makes life the hardest for trans people are people saying shit like “DON’T YOU THINK IF I COULD JUST LIVE MY LIFE AS A MAN I WOULD” or who often is the hardest on lesbians are married women saying shit like “well when i was younger i thought maybe i was attracted to your aunt susan but then my parents sat down with me and had the talk i’m having with you. you’re just cofused. you’ll come around in time. but until you come around you’re not leaving this house”
i think some of these awful ablist people got bullied in middle school for liking pill bugs, collecting baseball cards, or reading tolkein and now “they got through it” so they think other “weird” kids should, too. meanwhile us neurodivergent people think maybe we should try seeing if the world must truly run on blood
I think that’s a big part of it. My father disowned me when I came out as a trans woman and from everything I know about him he didn’t have the easiest relationship with gender. He was bullied for being small and weak as a kid because he was a very late bloomer and never really internalized that he was a large man. Like he also fits the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, but I do think his relationship with the punishment for failure to sufficiently perform masculinity played a role. Hell when he tried to convince me not to transition he argued from the position that gender is entirely learned, which is absolutely not the official catholic position he thought it was, but is however consistent with what I’d expect from someone who had the background I described.
Hmm kind of sour grapes mixed with “I turned out fine” and then universalising that to a global proscription
Isn‘t autism and many other psychological conditions under and over diagnosed at the same time? A friend of mine got her diagnosis at the age of 31 (under diagnosed) and her doctor talked with her about social media bringing more people to her, which think they have autism, but don‘t (over diagnosing).
I don‘t want to talk anyone out of their diagnosis or give them doubts. As long as there are tests there will always be false negatives and positives and so if you test more it will influence the outcome.
PS: The article is probably bullshit.
Yeah, and there does seem to be an increasing number of people who self-diagnose medical conditions such as autism, and then use them as excuses for their own shitty behavior.
Or sometimes that of others. I had a relative try to excuse Elon’s bullshit as autism. No, aunt Grace, autism does not make people throw out Nazi salutes.
Often it’s the same people who dismiss legitimate challenges other people face due to medical conditions yet have one of their own (self-diagnosed) they use to excuse shitty behavior.
What you’re describing isn’t really an over-diagnosis thing though, it’s more that visibility has increased and the stigma has been reduced, so more people go to a professional to have it investigated.
Over-diagnosis would be people who actually get diagnosed with autism but end up not having it.
I think the criteria and diagnosis evolving as the science gets better also has an impact. The idea that only young boys have autism was the prevalent one not that long ago, but we know better now so now more people are being diagnosed with it since we understand it better.
Well, there’s two things to consider.
One is just how many folks “self diagnose”. Rather than a stigma being reduced, it’s often held up as a trait of superiority to the “normies”, so some folks will assert it. There’s a fine line to walk between unfair stigma versus unjustified glorification. The internet is full of this.
Two is that ultimately, there’s room for being subjective even among professionals. See the parents of a kid that my kid was friends with. They lamented they got told by 5 psychologists that their kid was not autistic before they finally found one that “correctly” saw the kid’s autism. They were so excited to have proof that their kid was one of those autistic folks that are super smart…
One is just how many folks “self diagnose”.
I’m not sure this would count towards any statistics of over-diagnosis though, as a self-diagnosis isn’t a diagnosis.
Two is that ultimately, there’s room for being subjective even among professionals.
This is true. Ultimately it’s humans judging humans and there will be errors in the process.
I disagree, I think the anecdote of an adult over 30 years of age being diagnosed is a fair example of under-diagnosis. And since your comment was more on the over-diagnosis side, I think it’s fair to point out. That the visibility and lowered stigma contribute to the over-diagnosing. It can’t be helped. Medical professionals are subject to the same biases of visibility that the rest of us are, even if they should know better.
Also some patients are certainly self-diagnosing based on freely available information, be it valid or not, and sharing their diagnosis as if it was a real one. When others encounter these claims, their instinct typically isn’t to argue or accuse someone of being a fake autist so they update their own mental models with a “this is what autism looks like” and the trend continues.
Oh trust me a LOT of peoples instinct is to accuse autistic people of being “fakers”. It’s something autistic people without an intellectual disability deal with regularly from general public and the government (various ones, I’m not even in the US) aren’t helping at the moment.
Ah, I misinterpreted you then, that’s my bad. :)
I’m trans and wasn’t diagnosed as a kid because i had high masking autism (“girl autism”) instead of the “boy autism” they were looking for.
It is exactly what I am describing. In any test you will have false positives. Then the broader you test the more false positives you get. This was also a thing during Corona in Germany. At the start of the pandemic only people with symptoms should get tested, because with low case number and even a very good test and test procedure you can easily get more false positives than true positives. This is true for every test where true positives are rare. The math is pretty simple here.
