Post 9900 - Is it Hip to Have Asperger's?

The next marked post will be 10,000, which should occur sometime in September. I started off by just noting the number on whatever post happened to be next in line, but as I have gone on, I have found myself positioning them so that those that fall on an exact hundred are a little bit more special, or perhaps representative of the blog s a whole in some way.  I am undecided which I shall do for that landmark. Maybe ABBA will be in the news then or something.

But 9900 has been steered just a touch.  It would have been somewhere 9899-9902, and it is about the different ways of looking at what it means to be "on the spectrum," "an Aspie," "have autism or HFA." There has been a good deal of that here over the last half-dozen years especially, and it is messy. So I thought I would give some space to people who are pushing back on the "everyone is claiming they have autism these days" attitude. I have sympathy in both directions, and will put in my own thoughts as well, which many of you might guess at pretty well.

Jesse Singal: Why Disability Advocates are Trying to Shut Down a Policy That Benefits Disabled People.

 Lutz, a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who has previously written a book about her experiences raising a son (now an adult) with severe autism, goes on to lay out a fascinating history of this concept in the first half of Chasing the Intact Mind. She focuses heavily on memoirs written by parents of children with autism, showing how at every stage in the modern history of our understanding of this condition, such parents have pined for — and in some cases gone to herculean and frequently pseudoscientific lengths to free — the “intact mind” supposedly lurking behind their severely disabled child’s troubled exterior.

Facilitated communication was the most dramatic but tragic attempt to find the "intact" mind in children who seemed beyond reach. There are Temple Grandins in the world, yes. And there are deeply gifted children who seem very strange - I knew many and know some now.

Freddie deBoer The Gentrification of Disability.

 She was really not a fan of the autism awareness community of the time. This was well before the “neurodiversity” movement and all of its habits. It was all about awareness, raising awareness, 5ks for awareness, bumper stickers for awareness. That was precisely what angered her the most. She said to me once, “What does awareness do for my kid? How does it help me?” Words to that effect. It was a good question, one I couldn’t answer. Today I don’t hear about awareness so much, but there’s still plenty of the basic disease of awareness thinking - the notion that what people who deal with a particular disability need is a vague positivity, that what every disabled person requires is the laurel of strangers condescendingly wishing them the best.

Yes, much of autism advocacy (and LGBT, etc advocacy), especially self-advocacy in the present era is the old Self-Esteem movement smuggled in with mustache glasses. If only I could feel better about myself (And I'm looking to YOU for that), I would thrive. Of course we would all do better if we were in encouraging environments, but I don't think there's evidence it makes that much difference. I have always had a sneaking suspicion that the attitude comes from professionals who don't have much to offer in the way of practical help, trying to convince themselves and the world that they can be really, really valuable just by standing around and listening, being pals.

I do not recommend the Blocked and Reported podcast "Keep Autism Weird." I was 22 min in, more than 1/3 of the way through, and they had not gotten on topic yet.  The rest might have been valuable, but I didn't wait around to find out.

There are lots of videos and short essays by people explaining how their aspieness (or ADHD, or OCD) limits them.  The best ones talk about how they have learned to work around this and make themselves useful, by coming in early when it is quiet, by working in spurts, by making very clear requests for accommodation. A lot of the worst ones have gone viral because of others making fun of them and their poor work attitudes.

Here is Peter Wharmby

My own view is that there is often an advantage to having a slight amount of something. Comedians are often depressed or anxious; leaders with mania sometimes do better; accountants and surgeons with OCD will do naturally what others might find difficult. The oddity, even disability, is useful in a particular context.  It is usually not quite the same as those conditions where there is an advantage to having one copy of a gene, but two copies will kill you, but the analogy is pretty good.

Whenever there is a decent excuse for your inability to quite reach your potential - racism, misunderstanding, language barrier, lookism, religious prejudice - a flood of people will come in and try to hide behind it. And that is also a spectrum, as people have various strengths of claim to the defence.

Distantly Related  How Ancient Neanderthal Genes May Influence Autism.  This doesn't quite answer James's query that about higher African incidence of autism (at least by diagnosis in North America) conflicting with the lack of Neanderthal ancestry, but I suppose it helps a bit.  I suspect that autism is overdiagnosed in African-Americans because of depressed IQ scores. Just a guess.