Maybe ‘Autism’ is a social construct. And ‘neurotypical’ is not based in biological reality, but in expectations for middle-class professionals under a certain social order.
upper middle class professionals are the class by which everything else is measured, yes. conformity with their expectations and behaviors are considered ‘success’ and anything less than or different is ‘failure’.
But autism rates are higher among the middle and upper middle class… because they have the resources to diagnose and treat the difference. as a working-class person, i never ever heard of anything about autism or adhd or mental illness until I got to college in my working-class rural town, none of these ideas existed in day to day life or conversation. nobody had depression, anxiety, or any of that. and the freshman year college, all the sudden these terms became daily parts of my vocabulary. i never even really saw them on the internet for most of the 90s and 2000s.
none of these ideas existed in day to day life or conversation. nobody had depression, anxiety, or any of that.
I think the important distinction is that nobody knew they had depression, anxiety, etc… The whole point of this graph is that people had it and were simply undiagnosed. So the people who had those various neurodivergences were likely unsupported and struggled in their daily lives much more than they would have if they had proper support.
Look at the graph of left handedness over time:
When we stopped trying to beat the demons out of kids and forcing them to write with their non-dominant hand, they were suddenly able to exist openly. And that graph shows that as they were able to exist openly, the rates of left handedness steadily increased until it reached its natural levels. It doesn’t mean more kids were suddenly left handed. It means previous kids (now adults) had been forced to struggle more than their right handed peers, because they got beat if they used their dominant hand. And there were 100% adults at the time (mostly entrenched teachers who still wanted to enforce right handedness in writing classes) who would have been decrying the sudden increase in left handedness as unnatural, simply because it wasn’t being unnaturally suppressed anymore.
To be clear, I agree that many of the natural rates likely aren’t a flat line over time. Depression and anxiety diagnosis rates both seem to be particularly dependent on external/environmental factors. So as the world becomes more and more depressing, people are naturally diagnosed more. But it’s not really accurate to say “nobody had it” before, because it definitely existed. It’s simply that nobody was diagnosed before.
Lead was completely banned from gasoline in 1996. It’s first phase outs began 1975. It took 20 year to remove it. Was the ‘natural’ state of car use, leaded or unleaded gasoline use? Why didn’t we ban it outright completely in 1975 if it was so horrible?
Neither. It was just a social change based on the understanding of the negative effects of lead, which had not been previously known and became known and better understood over time.
There is no ‘natural’ state of things. There are just choices we make. Leaded gasoline persists in many parts of the world still. Just like many children are still being beaten into right handedness in other societies.
I seriously doubt anyone is ‘liberated’ by being able to be left handed or right handed anymore than are liberated by what car they buy. But they certainly do convince themselves, and are convinced by marketing, that that Jeep makes them cooler and more fun than that boring losers who don’t drive Jeeps! I have met a few Jeep lovers who tell me my Honda means I am clearly oppressed, and I should get a Jeep like they drive and be liberated by the massive repair bills they come with.
Are you actually trying to equate left handedness (which is a natural innate part of someone’s lived experience) to choosing a car? I used left handedness as an example because it’s a personality trait and the rates have been extremely stable over time, but the natural rate wasn’t really known until we stopped punishing kids for being left handed. Anyone can choose to drive a Jeep, but nobody can choose their hand dominance.
And if you think left handed kids aren’t more “liberated” than they used to be, you’re simply refusing to accept how much they previously had to struggle to learn to do everything with their non-dominant hand. The entire point of my previous comment is that those kids were needlessly forced to struggle much more than their peers, for something that they had no control over. Instead of properly supporting them, the system was focused on hammering down the nail that stuck out. Because the system prioritized conformity instead of support.
You’re toeing a very close line to some of the “being gay is a choice, and they could stop being oppressed if they just chose to be straight instead” talking points.
Yes. They self-identify with the brand and make it part of their identity. Or they inherent it from their families. My family is a Toyota family, for example. I broke ranks and got a Honda, an this was viewed as a ‘betrayal’, much in the same way left handedness was viewed as ‘wrong’.
Yeah, sexuality is a choice. Part of that choice is to conform with social expectations, regardless of if you are gay, bi, or whatever. You very much can change your sexuality. People do it all the time. It’s not some inherent immutable trait you are born with that persists forever. and people around you in our society get to agree or disagree with you. For example, I am straight, but plenty of women I have dated think I am gay because of my non-conformity with ‘straight’ male behaviors. Further, other points in my life, my lack of gayness was also used to mock, deride, and harass me because I was ‘too straight’. So which one is it, am I gay, or am I straight?
Was I needless forced to struggle in my life because my parents were poor ignorant people, vs if they had been well-off and educated? According to some folks I’ve met, I should have never been born because only ‘good’ people should have children. By your style of thought, indeed, I should not exist, because if I had not been born to my parents, I’d have never had to struggle!
The only way for any of us to not ‘needlessly struggle’ is indeed, for us to not to have been born. Do you have kids? I have nephews, they had pretty open-minded and liberal parents. They are now young adults. Do you know what their complaint is? That their parents didn’t oppress them enough, because if they had, they could have been so much more. They think their parents should have pushed them harder and beaten them into more social conformity so they could be more ‘successful’ in life and be popular and be cool, unlike being only average.
If we want to take a biological or evolutionary viewpoint it gets rather interesting. Autism would be fine and even beneficial, but in it’s most severe forms it would be very detrimental to survival and the passage of genes.
However, we will never know how that presented in the past. Our modern environment almost certainly influences the presentation and manifestation of what we classify as “mental illness”.
I would say any behavior, at least from a biological standpoint, that does not impact an individual’s ability to survive and reproduce would be “neurotypical”.
Of course human culture and socities make this very very difficult to interpret. Especially considering that our ability to survive in the modern day ia directly related to our ability to do labor. Labor that is well outside of the behaviors we evolved for.
No. It’s just that the brain has lot’s of fallback and adaption mechanisms, with the focus on keeping things on a survivable level of somewhat working. Which is why different issues can show a similiar picture, as long as they affect the same neurochemicals.
Neurodiverse brains are literally “tuned” differently.
Can you elaborate? I do not get it.
Maybe ‘Autism’ is a social construct. And ‘neurotypical’ is not based in biological reality, but in expectations for middle-class professionals under a certain social order.
upper middle class professionals are the class by which everything else is measured, yes. conformity with their expectations and behaviors are considered ‘success’ and anything less than or different is ‘failure’.
But autism rates are higher among the middle and upper middle class… because they have the resources to diagnose and treat the difference. as a working-class person, i never ever heard of anything about autism or adhd or mental illness until I got to college in my working-class rural town, none of these ideas existed in day to day life or conversation. nobody had depression, anxiety, or any of that. and the freshman year college, all the sudden these terms became daily parts of my vocabulary. i never even really saw them on the internet for most of the 90s and 2000s.
I think the important distinction is that nobody knew they had depression, anxiety, etc… The whole point of this graph is that people had it and were simply undiagnosed. So the people who had those various neurodivergences were likely unsupported and struggled in their daily lives much more than they would have if they had proper support.
Look at the graph of left handedness over time:
When we stopped trying to beat the demons out of kids and forcing them to write with their non-dominant hand, they were suddenly able to exist openly. And that graph shows that as they were able to exist openly, the rates of left handedness steadily increased until it reached its natural levels. It doesn’t mean more kids were suddenly left handed. It means previous kids (now adults) had been forced to struggle more than their right handed peers, because they got beat if they used their dominant hand. And there were 100% adults at the time (mostly entrenched teachers who still wanted to enforce right handedness in writing classes) who would have been decrying the sudden increase in left handedness as unnatural, simply because it wasn’t being unnaturally suppressed anymore.
To be clear, I agree that many of the natural rates likely aren’t a flat line over time. Depression and anxiety diagnosis rates both seem to be particularly dependent on external/environmental factors. So as the world becomes more and more depressing, people are naturally diagnosed more. But it’s not really accurate to say “nobody had it” before, because it definitely existed. It’s simply that nobody was diagnosed before.
You are being revisionist.
Lead was completely banned from gasoline in 1996. It’s first phase outs began 1975. It took 20 year to remove it. Was the ‘natural’ state of car use, leaded or unleaded gasoline use? Why didn’t we ban it outright completely in 1975 if it was so horrible?
Neither. It was just a social change based on the understanding of the negative effects of lead, which had not been previously known and became known and better understood over time.
There is no ‘natural’ state of things. There are just choices we make. Leaded gasoline persists in many parts of the world still. Just like many children are still being beaten into right handedness in other societies.
I seriously doubt anyone is ‘liberated’ by being able to be left handed or right handed anymore than are liberated by what car they buy. But they certainly do convince themselves, and are convinced by marketing, that that Jeep makes them cooler and more fun than that boring losers who don’t drive Jeeps! I have met a few Jeep lovers who tell me my Honda means I am clearly oppressed, and I should get a Jeep like they drive and be liberated by the massive repair bills they come with.
Are you actually trying to equate left handedness (which is a natural innate part of someone’s lived experience) to choosing a car? I used left handedness as an example because it’s a personality trait and the rates have been extremely stable over time, but the natural rate wasn’t really known until we stopped punishing kids for being left handed. Anyone can choose to drive a Jeep, but nobody can choose their hand dominance.
And if you think left handed kids aren’t more “liberated” than they used to be, you’re simply refusing to accept how much they previously had to struggle to learn to do everything with their non-dominant hand. The entire point of my previous comment is that those kids were needlessly forced to struggle much more than their peers, for something that they had no control over. Instead of properly supporting them, the system was focused on hammering down the nail that stuck out. Because the system prioritized conformity instead of support.
You’re toeing a very close line to some of the “being gay is a choice, and they could stop being oppressed if they just chose to be straight instead” talking points.
Yes. They self-identify with the brand and make it part of their identity. Or they inherent it from their families. My family is a Toyota family, for example. I broke ranks and got a Honda, an this was viewed as a ‘betrayal’, much in the same way left handedness was viewed as ‘wrong’.
Yeah, sexuality is a choice. Part of that choice is to conform with social expectations, regardless of if you are gay, bi, or whatever. You very much can change your sexuality. People do it all the time. It’s not some inherent immutable trait you are born with that persists forever. and people around you in our society get to agree or disagree with you. For example, I am straight, but plenty of women I have dated think I am gay because of my non-conformity with ‘straight’ male behaviors. Further, other points in my life, my lack of gayness was also used to mock, deride, and harass me because I was ‘too straight’. So which one is it, am I gay, or am I straight?
Was I needless forced to struggle in my life because my parents were poor ignorant people, vs if they had been well-off and educated? According to some folks I’ve met, I should have never been born because only ‘good’ people should have children. By your style of thought, indeed, I should not exist, because if I had not been born to my parents, I’d have never had to struggle!
The only way for any of us to not ‘needlessly struggle’ is indeed, for us to not to have been born. Do you have kids? I have nephews, they had pretty open-minded and liberal parents. They are now young adults. Do you know what their complaint is? That their parents didn’t oppress them enough, because if they had, they could have been so much more. They think their parents should have pushed them harder and beaten them into more social conformity so they could be more ‘successful’ in life and be popular and be cool, unlike being only average.
If we want to take a biological or evolutionary viewpoint it gets rather interesting. Autism would be fine and even beneficial, but in it’s most severe forms it would be very detrimental to survival and the passage of genes.
However, we will never know how that presented in the past. Our modern environment almost certainly influences the presentation and manifestation of what we classify as “mental illness”.
I would say any behavior, at least from a biological standpoint, that does not impact an individual’s ability to survive and reproduce would be “neurotypical”.
Of course human culture and socities make this very very difficult to interpret. Especially considering that our ability to survive in the modern day ia directly related to our ability to do labor. Labor that is well outside of the behaviors we evolved for.
No. It’s just that the brain has lot’s of fallback and adaption mechanisms, with the focus on keeping things on a survivable level of somewhat working. Which is why different issues can show a similiar picture, as long as they affect the same neurochemicals.
Neurodiverse brains are literally “tuned” differently.
Concentration camp excuses… Which is already happening to trans people and autistics, especially both.