Well the nature of autism being a "spectrum disorder" (per the DSM, the officialest psychology book) inherently means that there will be people who are 1%, 2%, 5%, 50% autistic. So boolean labels/diagnoses don't really apply very well in all cases.<p>I think that fact doesn't sit well with some people and that's worth exploring. Perhaps wanting bucket people to be "neurotypical" or "neurodivergent" (rather than on a normal distribution) may reflect an underlying desire to have an ingroup or outgrop, for example.<p>Interestingly Simon Baron-Cohen (Yes, Borat's Brother!) proposed the theory that a ton of intelligent people in professional fields and/or academia called "systemizers" carry a slight predisposition toward autism and mate with each other [1]. I haven't followed up how well his theories have held up in the last 5 years.<p>1 - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Baron-Cohen" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Baron-Cohen</a>
Note: The title set off all my alarm bells for some kind of ragebait piece, but the title is ironic - this is actually a painfully thoughtful 1-hour exploration of the topic from a philosophical/political angle.<p>I really liked the beginning but personally am firmly convinced that autism is a serious biological problem/phenomenon that can only be understood by hard-science. It's true that like other disorders (depression, anxiety) it manifests in a wide variety of symptoms, but for sake of illustration if you ate a bunch of lead (causing a strictly biological problem) it'd likely manifest in a whole host of different ways among different people (one might be withdrawn, another might be violent).<p>Frankly if we're seriously concerned about understanding whether autism is growing, we should develop software-administered questionnaires and take annual samples, you'd only need 2,000 people a year to have a very significant sample.
The amount of autistic people there are each year has changed every year autism has been diagnosed. Every year it has been observed that when you controlled for SES autism wasn't diagnosed more often in any racial group, but when you diagnosed in the real world you would see diagnosis being socioeconomically stratified (And consequently racially stratified). Psychiatrists also charge THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS for a diagnosis, and of course, the incentive is to not piss off the customer. Since things are so expensive, re-diagnosis is not very common, except when somebody gets told they AREN'T autistic. Psychiatrists regularly say batshit things about what they believe autism diagnosis means and it gets posted on the internet.<p>All of this has made me a self-diagnosis accelerationist because I don't actually like loose labels like autism conceptually.<p>TikTok Autism somewhat transcends normal self-diagnosis politics this because the medium is the message, and in the case of TikTok autism, autism often means wearing headphones and "stimming". There is a lot of performative autism which I have never seen millennial autistics do my entire life.
Similarly in the world of Attachment disorders<p>In the book:
Understanding attachment and attachment disorders: Theory, evidence and practice by Vivain Prior and Danya Glaser.<p>The authors point out the amount of incoherent, disingenuous and basically fake disagnosis around Attachment disorders making the rounds on the internet.<p>In 2006 there were 4,990.000 items on the famous search engine referring to the diagnosis of attachment disorders. Apparently the abundance of usage of the term "Attachment disorder dignosis" is not matched by the abundance of understanding as to what it actually means.<p>Children with "Attachment disorder diganosis" are described as; Liars, thieves, lacking in conscience, and having various other negative attributes.<p>There seems to be a licence to produce limitless items to characterise this apparent entity:<p>here is a small list:<p>1. avoids making eye contact, especially parents but look into your eyes when lying.
2. ask persistent nonsense questions and chatters incessantly.
3. Is fascinated with fire, blood, gore, weapons and evil.
4. engages in food related issues, hording, gorging, refusing to eat and eating strange things
5. Displays cruenty to animals.
6. dosplays no conscience, shows complete lack of remorse.<p>clearly none of this is true or suppported by any evidence that I have seen in 25 years as a psychotherapist.