From DSM-2300:
https://www.fysh.org/~zefram/allism/allism_intro.txt
edit: "The underlying trait that makes people allistic is a dysfunction of the parts of the brain dealing with emotion. Allistic people lack the capacity to independently experience emotions. That is not to say they lack emotions: far from it, the allistic mind experiences emotions just like any other. The dysfunction is that the allistic person's emotional state is not determined by eir own thought processes but instead is borrowed from other people that are expressing emotion nearby. Emotional cues in tone of voice, posture, facial expression, and so on, cause the allistic person to automatically and unavoidably experience the same emotion being expressed."
Quick Google of "DSM-2300" yields some vibration monitors and carpets, and I'm only aware of DSM-1 through 5 when it comes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
I’ll admit that I just skimmed it but it seemed to read like a paper describing autism but with the script flipped such that it’s written from the perspective of someone with autism writing about their observations about people without autism. It appears the same upon closer reading; in the post script it calls itself a parody. (It also claims to invent the term “allism” for the purpose of the paper, which is good to know as someone who’s heard the term, presuming its innocence. I don’t think its use is intended to be particularly kind. Kind of a bummer: I like words and that’s a good one.)
> If you haven't already worked it out: allism is the condition of not being autistic. In current psychiatric practice, it is autism rather than allism that is considered pathological. This article, up to the postscript, has been a parody of conventional psychiatry; the parody would be a serious article in a fictional world where what what we in the real world call autism is considered normal.
Anyway, I seem to have confabulated this, but I got the idea of the paper being written in some hypothetical future where DSM-2300 would kinda make more sense, hence being part of the joke. After looking for it, I found that the page actually mentions DSM-IV specifically, so I really have no clue where 2300 came from. (I do notice that the digits add up to 5 but it’s not clear whether or not that was intentional, nor why it would be written as a set of digits which sum to 5.)
All that said, I think it’s actually worth a read but it is a bit inflammatory. Indeed, that seems to be the point.
As they always say, this is a very broad spectrum disorder and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it subdivided as our understanding improves.
Those who want to continue to live with autism will continue to have that option. But those like my son who struggle want options, too.
I wish there was a name that allowed us to distinguish the "old" autism of the 90s (non-verbal, severely disabled) with the new (apparently helpful?) kind of autism that other people frequently suggest me and many of my colleagues have.
I can't speak for whether this has been a net positive or net negative on the clinical side of things, but culturally, these sorts of conflicts seem to be happening with higher frequently since the merge.
What the...
It's not like I've had an easy life. At times, life has been pure torture. For example, I've barely been able to work at all for the past three years, because of being discriminated against in interviews, not because I was actually unable to work. The toll this took on my life and health has been incalculable.
From one angle, my autism is a superpower. From another, it's a curse. I'm able to solve intractable problems that other people can't. But since my way of solving these problems is impossible for neurotypicals to understand, and I can be kind of odd, I've been essentially unhireable. I've had to go into consulting because that's the only route open to me. And this is just one of many problems I've had fitting into society. It's exhausting to be "high functioning" in a society that doesn't accept what you are.
But yeah, I do agree that merging everything into one spectrum has made things unintentionally confusing.
It wasn't commonly diagnosed during any of these people's lives, so you're not going to find conclusive evidence.
None of them were diagnosed (obviously not Newton).
So you're only going to find people arguing over straws.
What are you arguing?
They have Autism until proven otherwise?
About 0.5% of people were diagnosed with Autism before 1990: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4113600/
If we're making assumptions, statistically, we'd probably want to assume the other way.
The estimates now are that autism affects about 1 in 35 people. That’s not a disorder. That’s human diversity. I realize that there are less lucky autistic people who are severely disabled. If this helps them, then good, but I don’t want to be cured. I want to be accepted. And the way our medical system works now, I don’t trust that any treatments will only be used to help those who most need it. Children who simply need acceptance and a little support will be drugged, because that will be the convenient option.