How much of this is because of intrinsic traits about autism and how much of this is because of how we treat autistic people? If we actually support neurodivergence, and celebrate it instead of trying to 'fix' it, we might do a lot to reduce those rates.

I don't really think it much matters, tbh, as both factors are out of my control, but it can feel extremely isolating at times. Positive intentions can only overcome so many differences in conversation and social expectations.

I think it does matter, because while it is out of your individual control, we can still work to push society to be more accepting and accommodating.

Sorry, I should have said "from my immediate perspective". Society certainly has a responsibility to autistic people that is mostly overlooked, although I am not complaining personally.

How does it work if we apply this logic to other groups who have been treated in such a way that historically led to worse average life outcomes, but which have recently had improvement due to society becoming more accepting of them? When does someone being treated differently indicate something off about the person compared to something off about society?

Taking another perspective here, is suicidaility an individual problem or a social one?

Alternately, we could amplify the gene in the entire population, so that allism becomes a disorder.

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."

What is DSM-2300?

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.

Yeah, I think that’s part of the joke. DSM-2300 would be 2300th iteration of that Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

Ah, didn't realize it was meant to be a joke (didn't read the wall of text in the link).

Actually, I think I was mistaken.

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.

This is amazing, thank you for sharing!

I mean, it's kind of both? It's inherently individual, but if loads of people are killing themselves it might be a symptom of societal dysfunction.