Atmosphere – Rays (Part 3)

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When I say things like “I don’t believe in the diagnoses in the DSM,”

that does not mean I think people are faking it, or making their experiences up. […] Their experiences are absolutely, definitely real.

[…]

I agree that we need a language,

but I disagree that the DSM provides a good one. […]

Out of context, Sarah K Reece

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Diagnosis recognizes reality; it doesn’t create it.

The way medical diagnosis works can often make disabled people feel fake. (Any kind of disabled people, including people with mental illness or chronic illness). There’s a widespread culture misperception that real disabled people have a clear professional diagnosis, and that everyone else is just faking it for attention or something. It doesn’t actually work that way. Diagnosis is more complicated than that.

People with disabilities are disabled whether or not anyone has diagnosed their disability. […] But it doesn’t change the reality. Someone diagnosed today was already disabled yesterday. Many people are disabled for years or decades before they get access to accurate diagnosis. […]

In addition, some conditions aren’t currently diagnosable, because they have not yet been identified and named by doctors. If a condition was discovered for the first time today, someone had probably already had it yesterday. And last year. And back and back and back. […]

Ruti Regan

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Words, like the chisel of the carver, can create what never existed before rather than simply describe what already exists.

Martin Heidegger

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Was There an Autism Before the Name?

Were we here before the world called us ‘autistics’?

Was there an ‘us’ or a ‘we’ before we and the world called ourselves so?

How were we, autistic people, autistic, before we actually were autistic?

Adapted from writings by Dallyce Potess

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Atmosphere – Snowflakes (Part 4)

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The idea of development as a continuously increasing line is as ridiculous as the idea of the stock-market as a line always going up. Kids can go up and down at different times and in different amounts, and end up in a similar place.

Regression won’t ruin a child’s life forever, but may signal that the child might need less stress or extra help right now.

There isn’t one single right way to develop.

Emily Morson

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When you are neurotypical, people call the things you love ‘obsessions’ and they think it’s cute.  When you are Autistic, people medicalize your passions and call them ‘special interests’.  And when you talk about your special interests, you are ‘infodumping’.  I know plenty of neurotypical people who do this, who infodump about their favorite character on TV and why they love them.  But somehow, it’s a problem when I do it.  When I infodump, it’s a ‘symptom’ of my autism, not just me sharing something I love. […]

thecaffeinatedautistic

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I want you to know that your daughter has real, innate strengths and not just splinter skills or savant skills, as many people assume are the only kinds of talents that {disabled} people might have.

Partial quote, Emily Paige Ballou

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[…] Everybody has strengths and weaknesses; everybody fails to generalize many of the skills that they have.

Elizabeth Moon

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Atmosphere – Silhouette (Part 2)

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Each individual who has an autism spectrum diagnosis got that diagnosis based on deficits. That isn’t good or bad, but rather, simply the way diagnosing works […] based on the social and expected norms exhibited by the majority of people.

Judy Endow

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[T]he way information is presented influences our judgement and decision-making: the framing effect. How we ‘frame’ information has an impact on how we treat it, and thus on outcomes. So if your research project is based on the assumption that your subjects have a disorder or a deficit, that presumption will be reflected in both your process and your results.

What we see in research involving autistic subjects is that autism is frequently framed as ‘non-neurotypical’, i.e. autistics are measured against people who are non-autistic and thus end up being defined by what they aren’t.

For a comparison, imagine a linguistic study of a Swedish-speaking community by French academics where the conclusion is “they can’t speak French”.

If ethnocentrism is judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one’s own culture, then what we often see in these papers is a kind of neurocentrism, judging another neurology by the capabilities and standards of one’s own neurology.

In regard to these research biases, it’s revealing to look at how the same academics frame outcomes differently depending on whether their studies involve autistic subjects or not. […]

So, if you’re non-autistic and more rational, it’s because you’re good at regulating your emotions.

But if you’re autistic and more rational, it’s because you’re deficit in recognising your emotions.

Peter

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Our current biomedical approach to autism, which scans, studies, and reports on autistic people in terms of their differences, deficits, and disorders is actually making autistic people’s lives more difficult and their futures bleaker because we’re teaching people that autistic people are not like us.

Karla McLaren

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The underlying attitude [of some professionals] sometimes appears to be: “How dare you continue to attempt to think for yourself when I am here before you with my obviously superior knowledge, status, judgment, and insight?”

Out of context, Lundy Bancroft

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[W]ithin psychiatric theory, it does not matter whether a psychological difference is considered ‘hyper’ or ‘hypo’: either way, it is taken to be a matter of pathologically falling outside the norm.

‘Too much’ may be different to ‘too little’, but it is still considered just as inherently bad.

Robert Chapman

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how do we measure Schizophrenia, Autism, ADD/ADHD, other than in juxtaposition to normal[?]

how does one quantify normal?

Jenna, Elijah, Tamarjay, Derrick

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Atmosphere – Silhouette (Part 1)

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Having an {autism}-like syndrome does not give you {autism} […] Having a big belly does not make you pregnant.

Partial quote, David Schnarch

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If the DSM-IV criteria are taken too literally, anybody in the world could qualify for Asperger’s or PDD-NOS.

Catherine Lord

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To claim that something is over-diagnosed implies that there is one true, proper rate of diagnosis.  And that ain’t so. […] For a complex, multi-faceted neurological condition such as autism, these issues are compounded much, much more.

Even for many physical conditions, doctors wrangle over how to define the boundaries of a diagnosis.

Lynne Soraya

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[The loss of the autism diagnosis] probably reveals more about the weaknesses of a definition of autism based entirely in deficits rather than in core processing differences.

chavisory

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[…] I feel like this list [written by autisticality] is too vague and open, perhaps to the point that it’s not useful. (Barnum–Forer effect)

I’m sure nearly everyone meets at least a few of these traits, and in these criteria, there is no threshold given (e.g. a number of criteria you would meet in order to be ‘maybe autistic’ or ‘autistic’) to divide between ‘autistic’ and ‘non-autistic’ people.

Differentiating between ‘autistic’ and ‘not autistic’ is difficult however you divide it, but without a line, and using these criteria, it seems like everyone would fit into being autistic.

prayingground

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[T]here is an overlap between people who end up with a diagnosis on the autism spectrum and the general population

[Here are the results of] a questionnaire that measures autistic traits in the population: on the left of the graph you see the familiar bell-shaped curve, or normal distribution, in the general population […] so it’s not that you have autism or you don’t, but that almost everyone in the population has some autistic traits and find themselves distributed somewhere on a spectrum.

On the graph you see the solid line where people have a diagnosis […] but there is that middle bracket of overlap – there isn’t a clear cut point where you can say that somebody who has a diagnosis of autism is clearly different from somebody who doesn’t so [it] reinforces the idea of individual differences in the population.

[…] although people with a diagnosis of more autistic traits there’s a substantial overlap and that actually it’s not your score on a diagnostic test that determines that you need a diagnosis, it’s actually your environment.

[T]here are people who score at exactly the same point in that grey zone in the middle and that some will have a diagnosis and some won’t and what determines that is whether you find yourself in an environment in which you can thrive and fulfil your potential – we can call it an autism-friendly environment – or if you find yourself in an environment in which the challenges are too great, and you begin to suffer and end up going to a clinic and seeking a diagnosis.

So it’s not your psychological make-up but the fit between you as an individual and your environment that determines if you end up with a diagnosis opening up the possibility that we can adapt the environment to make it easier or more difficult for people who potentially have autism to fit in.

Some will suffer in certain environments whereas others will manage because of environmental adaptations or simply a good fit between them and their environment.

Simon Baron-Cohen

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“Everyone’s a bit autistic, that’s why it’s called a spectrum.”

This is not what ‘autistic spectrum’ is meant to mean.

In fact only autistic people are on the autistic spectrum. If you’re ‘on the spectrum’ then you are autistic (or ‘have autism’, whichever is your preference), it is a spectrum of the people who are autistic.

Not autistic? Not on the spectrum.

Nat

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[A]utism is a collection of related neurological conditions that are so hard to pick apart that psychologists have stopped trying.

All autistic people are affected in one way or another in most or all of these boxes – a rainbow of traits. If you only check one or two boxes, then they don’t call it autism – they call it something else. […]

But if you have all of the above and more, they call it autism.

[…] in order for a person to be considered autistic, they must have difficulty in multiple categories.

C.L. Lynch

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[I]t becomes a scramble to create weighted lists and say, “anyone who scores under 50 points is faking,” rather than trying to figure out why so many people are hurting in such similar ways, and being hurt in such similar ways, and then stopping those things from happening.

Out of context, intersex-ionality

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