I only got to know fun with people in various subcultures, and the more off people around me were, by looks or by spirits, the less I needed to worry about fitting in and learned to simply enjoy myself.
Until I realized what the actual problem was. Most people tend to make life hard for themselves by needing to fit in and pretending and aspiring. It's okay. Let go and drop your misery and do whatever the hell you happen to think is best.
If you want to build a UFO and take over the world, please go do it. Autism is a terrible name for whatever slight - or not so slight - imbalance of mental traits, and seeing the shit that regular people mutter you're probably better than that anyway - because you wouldn't believe what an autist's mental hygiene is like.
I would like to point out that autism is an actual specified condition. Being socially different or feeling inept about social situations does not put you on the autistic spectrum.
In some ways it’s incredibly insulting to imply that any discomfort in social settings is a sign of autism. Not least because is implies that autistic people can’t be capable, extroverted and able in social settings, which they absolutely can be.
It would be nice if the article provided more detail on the actual condition, the tests for it, and how it differs from the common 'i am a human' anxiety. Virtually everyone, men included, has experienced the same things that the article describes as being experienced by women with autism.
I think there is a risk with these sorts of articles that many people will make a lot of unwarranted assumptions about other peoples' abilities and behaviors.
Regarding subgroups, I found that they were just as unaccepting, they just have different standards for who/what is in/out.
I think your comment about autism is mistaking the cart for the horse. This happens because people are on the spectrum, not people are autistic because sometimes they don't fit in.
Lastly, I'd just like to mention that I didn't mean to only talk about school or work or situations like that, where there is always going to be some amount of difficulty fitting in. I could also tell that people very close to me, like my parents, thought something was off about me. They later copped to that when I was an adult, as well as their relief that I turned out to live a pretty normal life.
Isn't this how everyone learns social skills? Maybe for you (and me) this just occurs a little later in life than most.
Every conversation I have I run every input someone says through a decision tree to determine what the appropriate response is. I do this in my conscious mind. I didn't realize this wasn't normal until much later in life.
Unless you're displaying a caricature of "happy" or "sad" emotional expressions I have no idea what your emotional state is. I'm completely blind to it. I have to consciously analyze the shape of your mouth, where your eyebrows are, compare it to the context, etc. to try to determine your emotional state.
Not only am I blind to other peoples' nonverbal communication I don't express my own naturally. Every emotion I express through non-verbal means is largely "acting" on my part. I have to consciously make my expressions match my emotional state.
My anecdote may not match exactly what another person's with autism, but that's the kind of difference that's meant by doing things "automatically."
Yeah, but it doesn't require the same amount of effort from everyone, and neurotypical children will eventually get it. It takes an order of magnitude more effort for children with ASD and in the most extreme cases, they simply can't.
It's like red/green colorblindness - some afflicted eventually manage to tell the difference between the same shade of grey, but for normal sighted people, the number inside the circle of colored dots is blatant and obvious, and requires no studying of the picture.
There are children with ASD that are highly-functioning and if they manage to get good grades, it's possible for them to escape notice. However, there are those for whom social situations simply don't make sense, and no amount of effort, self awareness, or peer feedback can enlighten them.
Especially things like smiling or crying to get something (depending on circumstances) etc - they do it before they have logic and before they have ability to plan. Two years old has tendency to do stuff adults around find cute and react to, but it is not conscious plan. Autistic kid won't or will to lesser extend.
It's kinda shitty to imply that someone is lying or delusional because their lived experience doesn't match with yours. There's plenty of literature on how autistic people learn socialization and how it differs from neurotypicals.
http://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/skodol2003.pdf [2003]
Cluster B is the over all group which has Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, and Anti Social (aka Psychopaths) personality disorders.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/10/the_diagnosis_of_bor...
That article is interesting, in that it seems that the professionals have issues separating out the conditions.
At least 2 of the cases in linked article were more likely Narcissists, that borderlines.
I've dealt with borderlines, Narcissists and Histrionics, in a professional setting over the years, and they are pretty easy for me to spot now.
Why are you going so hard on what is essentially the messenger? I don't have beef with you. I don't even have a horse in this race. I just googled a question for someone else. Maybe consider emailing the authors, since you have some serious disagreements with the paper.
Any time a question is asked about 'why are men and women different in regards to x', you'll have people lining up (like yourself and other commenters in this thread) to say it's gender bias. When the answer is often just because men and women have differences, which is exactly what the evidence points to in this case.
By your own admission, with 5 seconds of googling, and 0 knowledge on the topic, you submitted a comment attributing this to gender bias. If you don’t want your comments to be scrutinized by others, then perhaps don’t post them on public forums...
Discussion is the point of the comment section, and the limit of the discussion you’re willing to participate in is “I posted a random study from Google along with some of my own commentary, that I’m not prepared to defend in any manner whatsoever”.
Not that I think there's no scientific process in evaluation, but if the only subjects with major expression are primarily one gender, it seems like it would create a kind of confirmation bias?
Ironically, I have gotten so good at this that I sometimes get annoyed when a person I am talking to acts “weird”.
I feel “lucky” in that I’m not too far off from normal, whatever that is, on the spectrum. But I still find it exhausting and depressing, like they do. I have also had the feeling that certain friendships and relationships are fake because I act differently to who I am when around those people. I don’t feel that anyone at work really knows me. I don’t think it is worth trying to be yourself at work, even disregarding the spectrum stuff.
The bit about the difficulties with diagnosing autism in women is also interesting. There are many similar situations in regard to mental health, for example women are diagnosed as borderline much more often.