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I was talking to a friend recently. I was telling them that I felt like maybe I was hallucinating my diagnosis because so many people around me also had been diagnosed.
She pointed out that we both like to be around people that understand. They don’t get mad when we interrupt each other because they are struggling with the same thing.
She was so right.
You could also both be hallucinating.
Collective delusion/hallucination is a real thing. Often reinforced when like minded individuals form a tight social group that serves to isolate them from anyone who might challenged the hallucination, and who seek to reinforce it in each other.
Human beings are prone to mass hysteria because we are social animals, and our ‘truth’ about the world is largely a construct of our agreement with our peers. Psychological illness and behaviors, like anorexia, paranoia, etc. are transmissible psychological conditions. They are ideas in your head that eventually become the truth of your reality as they are reinforced by the ideas and realities of the people around you, and part of the drive to do that is for people to have their ideals/realities validated by others.
Women who were interested in STEM were also called witches back then too.
Yes. Just read the story of Job to see how big of a bastard God is in The Bible
So, not trying to step on any mines here, and I get this is literally only a 2D representation of a phenomenon.
But what jumps out to me, is how “neurodivergence” is being defined kind of ahistorically. It supposes that neuro divergence is an essential, natural quality in humanity. That has real problems when we try to describe objective reality, especially the parts of us that aren’t tangible.
Did ancient people mostly have 2 arms and legs, 10 fingers and toes at birth? Yeah, by all accounts. Were ancient people as intelligent as modern people? That question gets a little funky, because who and what gets defined as intelligent, is really historically and geographically dependent. European kings sent away to the most far flung monasteries to bring in trusted advisors who spoke multiple languages and could write awesome cursive; at the same time Fibonacci was bringing algebra and the foundations of calculus home from Turkiye and publishing them in Italy as brain teasers. Now cursive is worthless except as a craft, maybe some marketing, and calculus became the intellectual basis for the industrial revolution.
So if “neuro divergence” can be defined historically like intelligence, which in some ways the graph itself supports this claim, then we can’t rely on an idea of human nature to make a point, especially since we are talking about scientific medical detection of a concrete divergence or disorder.
So like, what is divergence? What is being diverged from? The baseline has always been a vibe.
I’ve read studies that show better outcomes, increased happiness, better social integration measured among children and students with autism who spent time working on farms around animals. Structured, satisfying, hands on work, that used to make up most of the population. Now farmers is a micro minority, either owning land and charging people to work it, or working land for not enough money – hard, degrading, difficult, exceedingly dangerous work.
Other factors like screen time, social media, increase in dietary simple sugars, all show measurable changes in behaviors of people with ADHD, social anxiety, autism, bipolar, borderline disorders. Academics like Michel Foucault have studied how mental health treatment and psychiatry (additionally schools, and hospitals) are directly descended from the development of mass imprisonment and incarceration during the industrial revolutions in England, France, Germany, etc.,
Foucault also reviews sources that show more kind and forgiving attitudes in society toward people with severe social dysfunctions and intellectual disabilities. I wouldn’t go nearly as far as saying that people with disorders and divergences were better off – I believe that the medieval monastery was a “safe” place for a lot of people with what might now be described as neuro divergent, but also acknowledge the medieval church exploited poverty and mental illness for official and unofficial purposes.
But it does raise the question of how people, who may be intellectually “equal,” when raised under different conditions develop quite differently. And the way our current system functions, it uses value judgments and certifications, etc., to slot me into a specific place. But once in that place, i have to almost be a certain kind of person in order to succeed. The role isn’t suited to the person filling it, but to the needs of the organization. And usually the org needs to make money.
If there is greater social stigma towards disorder and divergence than there once was, that plays a major factor in whether people even want to be diagnosed. Lots of people have commented on self identification with neuro divergence as being a “tik tok trend” or some such. But a friend of mine, in an unofficial obit she wrote for someone older, made a point to say that previous generations looked at MH like it meant you were off to meet the business end of an ice pick.
For myself, learning I have ADHD and treating it has been holistically helpful. I’m open about it with people, we will see if it bites me in the ass.
I just worry a bit about the framing of “people have always been this way.” While I agree it is true in a way; I think our society is extremely stressful and toxic.
And then to say that the baseline of neuro divergence is unchanged throughout time buys cover for people who are responsible for the environmental changes making people unwell, and getting richer because of it.
As a person who’s special interest is calligraphy, what do you mean by cursive? I had always thought that scripts were on a spectrum between gothic and cursive, with more strokes per letter or less strokes respectively. Though I mostly practice ornamental penmanship (fancy spencerian), so I don’t know much about the history of hands in Europe.
I guess I’m drawing a line between the late medieval period when there was accelerated social development of the EU, but not enough scribes and scholars, and so their work suddenly became very sought after in a new world made of contracts and written agreements. So I’m probably talking about arguably two different things. First when writing in a very formal manner was a literal sign of intelligence, because that kind of intellectual work became a necessary component of late pre-modern statecraft, and hence highly valued by the ruling classes of the time and place. The second connection is to cursive, which is a formalized writing that had real legal and business value just a few generations ago.
So I’m sure I am butchering the history of any actual scripts that were mentioned in this effort post. But as someone who has a pretty lively fascination with handwriting, font and text in general, I’d love any questions, clarifications, resources, criticisms and reprimands that are due!
Well I don’t think the vocabulary is particularly important here, since they likely didn’t use the words in the same way we do. Like some scripts like batard or English secretary hand were evolutions of the formal script that reduced pen strokes to be faster to write making them more cursive.
But I’m curious about the history of connected letter scripts like Italian round hand. But most of the books I’ve read about handwriting have been in the American tradition, and it helps they are easy to find on the Internet. Some cursory reading on the subject seems to point to it coming from Italy in the form of old Roman cursive. To my eyes old Roman cursive seems related but is too different for me to call a flowing connected letter script. This isn’t surprising though since it was used to write on wax tablets.
It seems like something we would recognize in the modern world as a connected letter cursive originated in the late 15th century Italy out of italic script. But I don’t speak Italian or Latin so I don’t know how to find any primary sources on this.
Italy is a fascinating region to study language, it was broken up into city states well into the 1800s, with some of those city states serving as the center of culture and intellectualism for all of Europe, at various times. So there was like these very advanced areas of Italy, and these very backwards parts, and the 1800s was all about getting people all speaking the same language, the Florentine dialect.
I bet if someone took on such a study it would be a very uninteresting read. Also Italians are friendly and speak good English I bet you could connect with someone who could help explore the topic more!
I can answer all your questions here. Interested in talking live some time?
We can’t know whether the prevalence rates have changed or by how much and its foolish to assume it’s only because of better awareness. The world we exist in has changed immensely and we are subject to the affects of those environmental changes.
further than that, our cultural expectations of what is ‘normal’ have shifted drastically over the past two generations.
i’d argue that what once in the ‘normal’, is no longer, hence leading to greater need and identification of various differences where none were previously seen. Sort of like how you think all birds are the same, until you become a bird watcher, then you see every birth as different by species, and if you are a scientist studying a particular population of birds, you would gain the ability to identify them by their individual personalities and characteristics.
but I, as a lay person, have no idea wtf the difference between a sparrow and a chickadee is, they are just all brown/black bird blobs of a similar size that try to steal my food when I eat outside. they are just ‘birds’ to me. but for someone with a PhD in ornithology, they are two completely different things.
To further that point, it’s guaranteed that what was normal, isn’t, anymore. Some things are, much isn’t. For example, few men, relatively, know how to hunt anymore or would be willing or able to kill an animal. Becoming able to do that has wide ranging impacts on who they are. This used to be normal. If we accept that the environment shapes us then when it changes, so do we, and with that, what is considered normal, shifts.
Yeah, normative skillsets and social roles and expectations are in constantly changing.
My BIL grew up hunting and farming but he can’t ever talk about it anymore because people view negatively in his current social environment of professional urban liberals, who think it is considered psychopathic to hunt/kill/dress animals. He used to hunt, trap, skin, and all that to make money as a teenager. What was totally normal for him, is considered borderline criminal behavior to the people around him now.
Yah, urban liberals can be exceptionally closed minded, in their own unique way.
And if you confront them about it. they tell you how ignorant and wrong you are, because they can’t possible be wrong because they are just so ‘open-minded’ if you can’t see how open minded and correct they are, clearly you are a close-minded fool.
Yep. Their moral arrogance makes them socially aggressive, especially in the face of uncomfortable, practical realities. They refuse to acknowledge that they are the modern day version of the very morality policing they vilify from previous generations. They don’t see it because they don’t hold the same values or beleifs that the past generations did, and it is the beliefs and values they disagreed with, not the system.
I look at them and see the a similarly oppressive, prejudice, abusive social control system. They see that the beleifs and values are different. It was never that the whole system was wrong, it was that the system didn’t support their beleifs and values. Now that it does, and they control it, they’re content to engage in similar oppression and prejudice of the groups they dislike.
It has always been about control, in service to self interest. It was not about building a better, more just and fair society. It’s part of why the left and right are so far apart today and how Trump is in the white house, again, abusing the power of the executive almost exclusively for personal gain.
Also the un-taboofication of it… see, the “left-handed epidemic”
Does this graph account for the huge lack of available diagnosis?
We’ve been on waiting lists for YEARS that only grow and grow to get a 2 hour appointment with someone who can diagnose us with ADHD.
It’ll never happen, I’m sure. The government would rather not put resources into diagnosis, so they can claim almost nobody has ADHD, and not provide any support or recognition for it.
Two psychiatrists have told me that I almost certainly have ADHD but “we don’t prescribe controlled substances” so they weren’t going to formally diagnose me. It seems the only place I can get a diagnosis as an adult is private specialty clinics. I’m poor and the two clinics in my area aren’t sliding scale (which I can’t afford for most clinics anyway) so I just get to sit here with a confirmation of what I’ve known for years and no way to get it treated, or at the very least, put down on paper
Good lord what country do you live in?
I’m sure we can guess
The United Dumpsterfires Of America?
I am fairly confident I will lose access to my ADHD medication under RFK and I am completely unconfident centrist corporate Democrats like Gavin Newsom will give a shit about actually addressing fixing it if one of them wins power after Trump. They will completely accept the narrative we are “overdiagnosing” ADHD put out by Republicans and keep helping Republicans move the goalposts until I am dead.
In the USA, got diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed meds. Start to finish took 3 weeks. I have good insurance and live in a civilized part of the country – the difference between states (and even parts of states) when it comes to healthcare is stark.
We had to move one of my elderly, infirm aunts to Michigan because the Texas healthcare system is a bad joke if you’re on public aid. She almost certainly would be dead if she stayed.
Yeah, I got diagnosed in about a month. And it only took that long because the psych accidentally double-booked appointment times and we had to reschedule. But that was with decent insurance. If I was self-pay or on public healthcare (which is basically non-existent in my state) then I’d still be waiting.
Texas is a death cult desperately trying to convince everyone it is just another shithole.
I’ve also heard that Canada has long waiting times to get diagnosed.
Also the definition was formalized. Grouping certain human traits and calling it by a common name wasn’t a thing before.
Yes, but also capitalist conditions which make it so that human beings can’t develop normally. For example: look at his clip of snub nose monkeys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yARtExKaIH8
A baby is born, and eveyone is in competition so they could take care of the new baby. If you look at antropological studies of hunter-gatherers, our natural state of affairs shares some crucial elements with this group. A large group of adults which live together and which help eachother with raising a child. This child, as a result, grows up in an environment in which it learns that adults are to be trusted and adults will help them. The current family structure leads to overworked parents which are not equipped for the task of raising a child, which structurally leads to much more conflicts and thus lack of trust (if not trauma).
If we’d organise our society in a way which would correspond to how our species evolved, we’d have a lot less mental health problems.
Just to be clear: this isn’t meant to minimize mental health issues or disparage medical treatments.
The people who say that can’t read graphs.
Why is the time arrow squiggly?
Probably because it’s made of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff
Jeremy Bearimy baby.
Because time is squiggly. You know how sometimes a day passes real quick and other times it’s a drag?
It isn’t but because time moves at the speed of light and we are viewing it from a slow as fuck perspective it appears wiggly to us because we couldn’t see it if it was straight, it would be too fast.
We walk by non-squiggly time arrows all the time in life we just don’t see them because they are too smooth for how quick they are.
Drank too much coffee.
I saw the big font item and thought this would be about colon cancer. Then I zoomed in.
I mean, yes, visibility and legitimacy is a major element in why neurodiversity is more widely recognized. However, STEM folks tend to reassert the authority of science as an institution of capitalism and settler-colonialism by not recognizing that these are not “illnesses” or pathological conditions naturally. Yes, they are behaviours that we have no reason to believe are divergent or new from typical human life, and their status as pathological is conditional on the specific social and material conditions that are facilitated by this system.
We are recognizing it more because it is covered more in scholarship, yes, but also because this system has created the conditions where we are even in the position to construct these behaviors as worthy of identifying to prove that they are real. If neurodiverse people didn’t have to justify their worthiness of human compassion and dignity just because they can’t conform to the expectations and demands of a system that only values human life for its productivity, then there’d be no distinction at all.
“However, STEM folks tend to reassert the authority of science as an institution of capitalism and settler-colonialism by not recognizing that these are not “illnesses” or pathological conditions naturally. Yes, they are behaviours that we have no reason to believe are divergent or new from typical human life, and their status as pathological is conditional on the specific social and material conditions that are facilitated by this system.”
There’s a lot in this that I agree with, but in the past, I have been quite irked by people who take a hard line version of this stance, who say that I’m being ableist by referring to myself as disabled. Whilst the majority of things that being autistic and ADHD cause me to struggle with that are better understood as a function of our environment, there are plenty of ways in which I would consider to be independent of societal structure.
For instance, I struggle with sensory hypersensitivity, such that a bright sunny day, or loud sounds cause me physical pain, and also cause me to become fatigued quickly if exposed to them for a while. This sucks, and I think it would even in a society that was structured radically differently
I’m not sure what you thought my comment was suggesting, but ableism is not related to whether or not you subscribe to the idea that disabilities exist, it refers to the systemic oppression of disabled people and construction of disability as devaluing. Races as they are constructed socially are inherently racist as their existence is entirely contingent on a way of life where groups of colonized people are subordinated, but it would not be racism for a racialized person to correctly identify that race exists because of the world they live in. Structuralism and social construction aren’t terms that we use to prove that a thing doesn’t exist, but how human action is an effective explanation for why that thing has come to be.
What makes something like AuDHD a disability is that people are systemically oppressed for possessing those traits, not that those traits only exist because we made them up. It’s true that you may have pain or discomfort from those traits even outside of this system, but it wouldn’t necessarily exist in terms of ability when society isn’t orgsnized around commodification and profit maximization (wage labour, and the forces that coerce people into productivity). There isn’t a “natural” rate of neurodiversity or ability as that language and all of our understandings of it are inextricably linked as well as realized through a system that is organised around those imperatives.
We know that human beings have not always valued people by the productivity of their bodies because we have archaeological evidence of early humans caring for others who would not have been able to survive on their own (as though any person would). Even more, there is genuinely no way to tell if these kinds of sensory issues have in fact taken on the form they have because of these conditions. Schizophrenia produces wildly different experiences from the same symptoms depending on cultural contexts, for example. Even if you had the same symptoms, how would you experience them differently if you were not forced to hear loud noises or sun exposure, or with no negative connotation attributed to that intolerance, or with many other members of your community experiencing similar symptoms with your value as human beings left completely intact?
Oh, and what social system of order and productivity do you think should take over that authority? communism? anarchism?
What is ‘typical human life’?
Am i better off being beaten into submission and diagnosed and drugged by a communist expansionist dictatorship than a capitalist state of settler colonialism?
My eyes rolled so hard that I could hear them.
I do not live under a communist or anarchist authority (as funny as it is to suggest there’d be an authoritarian anarchist system), and so I can only analyze the system I do live under. If you want to accept dehumanization for convenience and comfort, you can keep that to yourself. I do not, and therefore I criticize this system the way it deserves to be and do so to better understand how to build something better, whatever that may be.
Either way, it was truly boring to read this comment. If structuralist and postmodern theory from fifty years ago is shocking to you, I’m afraid you aren’t the right person to be discussing this with me.
Yes, you are so superior. Wow I am so dumb. I should just listen to you, you so smart.
It can’t be that postmodern theory from 50 years ago is total naval gazing shit from pompous bourgeois academics types… who have enough money and power to sit around all day bitching about how oppressed they are and how much smarter they are than everyone else… weird how they dehumanize anyone who doesn’t agree with their theorizing… just you do.
It can’t be that you yourself, are the very thing you hate so much? Perhaps you, are the system of oppression and misery you so loathe? because instead of being a productive memory of your society, you see yourself as too elevated and sophisticated to participate in it in a meaningful or productive way that would measurable improve it?
“Academic types … who have enough money and power…” Gee, that’d be the day. That prestige and wealth is largely denied to academics specifically because this sort of scholarship was so challenging to a capitalist system and so difficult to commodify.
I’m honestly not sure what the rest of this is meant to mean in this context, as it is mostly incoherent anti-intellectualism that could not come from academic experience in the slightest. Quite literally, scholars are punished for doing what you claim to think they do here. They want you to have four publications and several community outreach initiatives before you’re even done your Ph.D. in many fields now.
Also, it isn’t dehumanising to say you’re uninformed and wrong, humans do that all the time. To reduce that term to the meaning, “you were mean to me on the internet (I wasn’t),” is honestly gross and embarrassing. We use that term to explain cultures that systemically eradicate groups of people, you’re going to sit here and pretend you’ve experienced a fraction of that victimization in an internet comment thread? I’m not sure where you get off acting that entitled to deciding truth, but I wouldn’t even say something like that anonymously and be happy with myself that night.
I won’t be reading anything else you send.
Am I reading this meme right when I think it’s implying that folks are getting over-diagnosed with mental disorders? Because that’s some RFK jr shit. Shame on you.
EDIT: I did misread it, I fully agree with OP.
No.
Oh my bad. What does the meme mean then?
It’s the left-handed thing. The amount of neurodivergent people is the same but the amount of people being diagnosed is increasing because of an increased perception and understanding of neurodivergency.
Ah ok I did misinterpret it! Thanks for the correction.
until the existing subtypes become distinct diagnoses and the number drops because now they are considered two distinct things where previously there was one. or they roll it together with a broad spectrum type of disorder.
our psychological classification systems are always moving around and modifying this stuff every decade or so. Asperger’s is gone, for example.
Diagnosed rate never crosses actual so this is false
I don’t really understand what you’re saying, sorry.
For a chart to be expressing over diagnosis, the line representing diagnosis number would have to go higher than the line representing actual number.
The food supply is radically different to 50 years ago, let alone 100, 1000 and 10000 years ago. There is reason to believe brain structures are changed by diet.
I’m sure there were undiagnosed autistic people throughout history, but I reckon the glut of diagnoses now is due to food
Ed. Right. So the highly processed food and ubiquitous sugar couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it. I’m so glad that Lemmy people know so much that they can exclude this hypothesis so easily and without even commenting
Yeah the literature coming out on the metabolic brain connection, and improving metabolism resolving psychiatric disorders can’t be ignored.
Given we are in a metabolic health crisis that is only trending up, it’d reasonable to speculate it has had a impact on larger mental health trends since the metabolic health collapse started.
I.e. 96% of western adults have impaired metabolic health.
There were always undiagnosed autistic people throughout history. The world and the sciences we live with were discovered by high functioning people with neurological differences.
Science, religion, math, everything.
right, only autistic people ever contributed to science or math or anything of social worth?
this is where you guys go off the rails. You know who also disproportionately contributed to the arts and sciences? Jewish people.
you know the other factor that most ‘geniuses’ had in common? they were from wealthy families.
rich jewish autistic folks are clearly the trifecta of pure geniuses, right?
There wasn’t even a diagnosis throughout most of history.
