I’m curious how that could work. That peaks my interest because I’ve known people who have autism and seem great at socializing. I don’t have autism, but I’m very socially awkward, and if autistic people can do that I find it inspirational for my own socializing journey.
A podcaster on Radio Free Totebag casually said it, and idk if it was just as a passing joke, or if they were speaking factually. They mentioned a therapist not liking that they still say they’re autistic when it’s an old diagnosis.
I partially agree with you on this. I think you’re right that there are probably developmental routes that the human brain can take.
My point of disagreement basically stems from my objection to the social model of disability, which I think you are either consciously drawing upon as influence or which you’ve arrived at as a concept independently, and my counterargument to this is that a disability is still going to cause impairment to the person regardless of the social context; you can take a person with paraplegia out into the woods, far away from society but their legs still aren’t going to function properly.
Similarly, an autistic person might have very restricted eating habits (super common) and this is likely going to have health implications for the autistic person whether they’re living in New York or if they’re foraging for berries in the wilderness. A more personal example here is that I am diagnosed with catatonia due to autism and it’s a pretty settled matter - I am responsive to treatment and diagnostic probes that confirm that it’s catatonia to the exclusion of virtually any other condition. In this example, my particular flavour of autism is itself inherently disabling and although radical changes to how society functions and sets its expectations would improve my life, I’m still going to suffer from debilitating bouts of catatonia regardless.
Imo the same kinds of things can be said for ADHD and executive dysfunction, the overrepresentation in addiction stats, the associated ODD cluster of behaviours etc. although this topic is a huge discussion in itself.
(So there’s something of a neurodivergent civil war being waged in the discourse of late and I guess I’m tiptoeing around this as best I can in my comments because I don’t want to see a split occuring within the neurodivergent community here on Hexbear as I don’t believe that it’s either necessary or productive. But that means I’m constantly finding myself at odds talking about this stuff because I’m mediating tensions between the mainstream experience of autism from the outside looking in, the DSM and ICD diagnostic criteria - which are pretty lopsided and woeful in their own right, and my own understanding and personal experience of autism along with what I have learned from leaders in the autistic advocacy movement. Apologies in advance if I’m coming off as a bit evasive in what I have said above - all of this stuff is very fraught at the moment.)
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