Yes, but what if the person who is waiting for the neurodivergent has an anxiety disorder? Whose neuroses get precedence, the anxious friend’s or the time-blind friend’s? There needs to be a hierarchy of fussy snowflake entitlements.
Of course, the question is purely academic because people whose primary mode of engagement with others is outrage at not being recognized as a victim of extreme suffering clearly don’t have anybody waiting for them anywhere.
…clearly don’t have anybody waiting for them anywhere.
But they do, unfortunately. Life’s so unfair.
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By nearly any set of standards, I qualify as neurodivergent, and I hate that word so much.
The autism activist contingent, for all their faults, has been working for decades to get some amount of acceptance and accommodation for things like motor issues, sensory problems, etc. and… the degree to which they’ve succeeded is exactly the degree to which, over the last couple of years “autism” has been hijacked by people who don’t have it, but who do have cluster B personality disorders.
They finally made it kind of OK to be autistic, and now all the BPDs and narcissists and everybody else with a pathological need to be a jerk and get attention for it– they all want in that boat too. It’s pretty alarming to watch, and I predict that within a couple of years, the “high-functioning” crowd will be lobbying for an entirely different label (i.e. this isn’t autism: it’s something else and here are the physical testing standards that define it and that can’t easily be faked by every LOOK AT ME!! I’M SO OPPRESSED! IF YOU DON’T TOLERATE MY ASSHOLERY THEN YOU’RE A BIGOT).
We’ll see. So far, we’ve been resisting that kind of objective clinical definition for many years, in order to keep “the spectrum” nebulous and undefined. It’s convenient because it actively prevents anybody being able to sort out the various (there are several) etiologies and come up with effective prevention and treatments. There’s a lot of money at stake in the autism industry now.
ethyl
This is exactly why I have moved completely away from both the label and any discussions of it in the past decade. It was originally very helpful to see that there was a name for everything I knew I was and that there were people who shared my way of being and with whom I could exchange some helpful strategies and pointers. That was a fairly brief moment, though, and it’s exactly as you say. People brought their serious personality flaws under the neurodivergent umbrella, and as a result, I don’t find any value in it for myself. I kind of miss the moment when it was possible to talk about it and find people with similar experiences, but unfortunately that moment is over and there is no likelihood this will come back.
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Yeah, that moment was nice, and it’s how I met my husband 😉
But if the ClusterB party is all getting on the “neurodivergent” train, it’s time for everybody else to leave, for their own safety. Those guys are cannibals, and actual autists are no match for them.
If that doesn’t get locked down immediately to a set of precise diagnoses based on measurable biological markers, then all the credibility, all the funding, all the strategic gains, will be swiftly and mercilessly pirated and squandered by the conscience-free psychopaths. Unfortunately, I think it’s part of the nature of the disorder(s) to be vulnerable to this sort of attack and unlikely any effective resistance will happen.
The saddest thing is, we’ve had the data to implement biologically-based diagnostic standards for many years now: you can actually *measure* things like gait, response times, primitive reflex retention, sensory thresholds, audio processing abnormalities, altered visual perception, gross motor coordination, etc. clinically. And yet: we still have a set of diagnostic standards defined by *behavior* because for some reason even though it’s pretty universally accepted that we are talking about a neurodevelopmental disorder… Psychology, rather than Neurology, still gets to write the diagnostic criteria.
I’m sure there are important monetary reasons for that. But it doesn’t make any sense from a patient care perspective.
ethyl
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–like seriously, as soon as this was pegged as “neuro” anything, that diagnosis should have been taken away from psychiatrists and psychologists and turned over to NEUROLOGISTS and related professions (the only useful related diagnosis I have was given by an audiologist).
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Completely in agreement. This is a neurological thing, but discussions of the neurological manifestations are non-existent.
A girl down the street from me is clearly autistic. She is functional. She has a job at a local grocery store. She can maintain a conversation, but in order to be functional, she needs to spend 5-6 hours a day running back and forth in front of the house, singing or loudly talking to herself. She told me she self-medicates with insane amounts of energy drinks. There’s clearly something that goes on neurologically that could be alleviated, at least, by an appropriate doctor.
How did this girl’s mother decide to address the issue? She labeled the child as queer and gender non-conforming and put up a gigantic rainbow flag. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the girl’s gender. But the mother wanted a prestigious label, and she got it. In the meantime, it doesn’t occur to anybody, and clearly not to the girl’s physician, that there is a physical cause of what she’s experiencing.
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I don’t understand why we do this though.
We don’t let psychologists diagnose or be the primary care providers for Parkinson’s or epilepsy. Nobody goes to a psychiatrist to treat spinal cord injuries or stroke.
ethyl
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We have 500+ psychology majors at my university. These are students who are unable to perform in any other discipline. Even the Dean of the program refers to it as fluff. All of these people who are invariably very diverse the academia meaning of the word need to be put into jobs.
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Ah, well, I had an inkling that it had something to do with the part where there are relatively few neurologists, and that it’s a high-IQ specialty, so you can’t just manufacture a bunch of new ones overnight.
You seem to have reached the same conclusion from the other end.
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Exactly. It’s much easier to create a glut of these semi-literate “counselors” with psych BAs who think everything is a result of an incorrectly attached identity label.
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methylethyl
Didn’t know about the industry, but my autistic niece is my favourite. Spent a summer with us when she was maybe 10, learned to cook, and inherited most of my wife’s cookbooks. Definitely not oppressed, tends to say exactly what she thinks ;-D
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In SA, there are huge protests against illegal immigrants. This a big problem because the victims of apartheid can easily be replaced by the rest of Africa who had it even worse.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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