Derek Thompson on X - "In 2019, there were about 150,000 people working in autism therapy. Six years later, there were 654,000—more than the number of people who work in mining and logging, or telecommunications, or at the US Postal Service."
Mental illness doesn't make you special - "Eloise is a champion of neurodivergence, an omnibus term that’s recently ballooned in popularity, which can include autism, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, or indeed any other psychiatric condition that’s hot right now. The term is designed for making sweeping pronouncements. Forget the fact that, say, autism and schizophrenia are so different that they have at times been described as opposite conditions. Forget the fact that saying you’re neurodivergent has as much medical meaning as saying you have a disorder of the body. The idea is that there’s a group of people whose brain chemistry differs, in some beautiful way, from some Platonic norm. And it’s an idea that’s taken on great symbolic power in contemporary liberal culture. There is, for example, a thriving ADHD community on TikTok and Tumblr: people who view their attentional difficulties not as an annoyance to be managed with medical treatment but as an adorable character trait that makes them sharper and more interesting than others around them. (They still demand extra time to take tests, naturally.) It’s also easy to come across social media users who declare how proud they are to be autistic; I’m glad they’re proud, but their repetitive insistence makes me wonder who exactly they’re trying to convince, us or them. Darker, there’s the world of “DID TikTok”. DID, dissociative identity disorder, is a profoundly controversial condition, once known as multiple personality disorder. Many serious experts question whether it exists at all; at the very least it’s incredibly rare. And yet thousands of adolescents have diagnosed themselves with the condition, and happily perform their various personalities for their social media followers, typically in ways that defy all established psychological understandings of the disorder. Against this backdrop, Eloise is a marketing department’s dream come true: hers is a story of the young, beautiful, dysfunctional — and successful. Eloise is the perfect 21st-century woman, from a certain internet-enabled philosophy of human affairs. She is an admirer of witchcraft and believes that women have a mythical connection to water. She does a lot of drugs and becomes bisexual. She uses Tumblr and travels the world, vacationing in Lisbon and the south of France, and moves to Los Angeles to be an actor, taking care to embed that period of her life in a self-defensive patina of irony. She lives an enviable life of obvious socioeconomic privilege, which she does not have time to recognise, as she’s too busy cataloging her psychiatric maladies. She crams them into every last anecdote: apparently nothing happens to her that she does not ultimately attribute to those maladies... The label of neurodivergence is so vague and capacious, pretty much anything can be pulled into its orbit and made “diverse”. There’s a meme that crops upon Tumblr, TikTok and Twitter that starts with “the neurodivergent urge to…” and is immediately followed by, well, just about anything a person does. Common examples include the neurodivergent urge not to reply to an email or to order food in rather than cooking what’s in the fridge... It is perhaps comforting to see every last detail of one’s life as the product of some uncontrollable force... As a pawn of the various interior forces that do combat in her brain, she is adamant that there is nothing wrong with her, that her suffering is all in service to some deeper way to live, and that she is proud of the very conditions she asks us to treat as a perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card for her behaviour. The implication is that the neurodivergent might just be better than other people. As with introverts, social media users have developed a discourse around neurodivergence that is nakedly self-celebratory, a bragger’s genre... Eloise writes that her life is “underpinned and ultimately made whole by obsession”. Can you imagine a sadder statement: an adult telling you that there is nothing to distinguish her or give her value but her psychiatric conditions, conditions she shares with millions of others? Diagnosis is the Holy Grail of the neurodivergence narrative. Eloise fixates on hers and its quasi-mystical powers. No reader could doubt that her problems are real, but she seems to have treated getting diagnoses like a consumer on Amazon. She states flat out, on several occasions, that she went shopping for an autism diagnosis, went to doctors with the express intent of wringing one out of them. There was a time when self-diagnosis was understood to be unhealthy, and perhaps embarrassing, but this is a brave new world we’re living in now. Once enough people insist on mental illnesses as upbeat and fashionable lifestyle brands, then any of us who oppose it are guilty of the most grave sin of all, the sin of perpetuating stigma. It’s stigma to call autism a disorder, despite the fact that it renders some completely nonverbal and unable to care for themselves; it’s stigma to suggest that someone with ADHD bears any responsibility at all for problems at school or work; it’s stigma to speak the plain fact that people with psychotic disorders sometimes commit acts of violence under the influence of their conditions. It’s stigma, in other words, to treat those of us with mental illnesses as anything else than wayward children. Stigma, that cartoon monster, has never been in the top 100 of my problems in 20 years of managing a psychotic disorder, but never mind; stigma is the ox to be gored in contemporary pop culture, and so we must fixate on it to the point that we sideline the health, safety and treatment of those with mental disorders. What I find tragic about those who buy into the neurodivergence narrative is that they become their illnesses. And yes, there are alternatives. Eloise and people like her seem never to consider one of the possible ways that they could have dealt with their myriad disorders: to suffer... in this culture, all must be monetised, all must be aspirational, anything can be marketed. Eloise lacks the self-awareness to ask whether there’s something exploitative and ugly about turning psychological illness into fodder for soap opera and motivational posters... This is what it’s actually like to have a mental illness: no desire to justify or celebrate or honor the disease, only the desire to be rid of it. But the modern conception of neurodivergence (and disability activism generally) wants to have it both ways. Sometimes, people would prefer for you to think of their conditions as debilitating hindrances for which they may demand special dispensation. And sometimes they would like them to be seen as positive personality quirks that make them unique. It is hard to witness the damage that has been done to this young woman, by a culture that insists she views her suffering as part of a beautiful journey. Today’s activists never seem to consider that there is something between terrible stigma and witless celebration, that we are not in fact bound to either ignore mental illness or treat it as an identity."
An Absurd Umbrella: Neurodiversity and the Autism Spectrum - "The problem is inherent in the absurdity of an “autism spectrum” that groups together highly disparate individuals and conditions. On one end of the spectrum are people who may be different from the norm, but who are perfectly capable of living full and dignified lives. For them, the notion of a cure is sinister, even dystopian. On the other end are people who are severely disabled by the condition, for whom a cure might be an immeasurable gift. Up until 2013, it was easier to differentiate between these two groups, since individuals who suffered some of the symptoms of autism, without the accompanying linguistic or intellectual impairments, were often diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. But Asperger’s was defined out of existence in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), and folded into high-functioning autism, to create a single, all-encompassing autism category, with only incremental distinctions between levels of function. Bringing back the diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, however, would provide at best only a partial solution: the autism spectrum would remain a nebulous concept with poorly defined boundaries. Rates of autism have skyrocketed in recent decades, from well below 1 in 1,000 children in the 1960s to 1 in 36 today. This is almost certainly partially attributable to a broadening of the diagnostic parameters. People who might have been considered merely somewhat abnormal in 1960 are liable to be classified as high-functioning autistic in 2024—a shift that has led to considerable confusion. The DSM-5 criteria for diagnosing autism leave much open to subjective interpretation. The disorder is defined primarily by deficits of social communication and interaction, and restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour. But relating to our fellow human beings is one of life’s central challenges, over which no one has ever achieved perfect mastery. Every human conflict—from the marital to the geopolitical—involves some breakdown in communication or interaction. As for repetitive patterns of behaviour: far from being pathological, these are often signs of self-discipline, as many people with productive morning routines can attest... It could be said that the autism spectrum begins when one’s deficits are so extreme that they hinder one’s ability to function in everyday life. Yet many people on the autism spectrum can function perfectly well; they just prefer not to act in conventional ways. The process of hiding one’s autistic traits and behaviours in order to seem neurotypical is referred to as “autistic masking.” Some describe this as acting human; the abovementioned singer Sia calls it “put(ting) my human suit on.” This seems less a manifestation of a disorder than a facet of the ordinary tension between individuality and conformity. If you know how to row a boat, but dislike doing it, then you do not have a deficit in rowing, only a preference. Autism, like most mental illnesses, is said to be a neurological condition, yet it is diagnosed based on psychological factors. The determination is made not by a brain scan or lab test, but by an assessment of a child’s behaviour by a mental health professional. Once a diagnosis has been applied, there is no way to disprove it, since even behaviours that go against the diagnosis can be dismissed as masking. All of this is treading far into the realm of unfalsifiability... We can see this dynamic with astrology: the twelve Zodiac signs are described in such a way as to give the illusion of specificity, with just enough vagueness and self-contradiction that it is impossible to conclusively prove the pseudoscience wrong. Likewise, lay diagnoses of autism have become commonplace in recent years; they are as easy to dispense, and as difficult to debunk, as calling someone a typical Scorpio or Aquarius once you know their star sign... The autism diagnosis also has the potential to be abused as a tool of authoritarian social control... Autism is defined here in relation to societal norms, and within the confines of autism treatment, conformity is viewed as an aspirational value, while nonconformity is addressed as a shortcoming. There is precedent for mental diagnoses being weaponised as tools of oppression. One example is the concept of sluggish schizophrenia, which was deployed in order to silence dissidents in the Soviet Union. After all, who but a lunatic would deny the self-evident glory of the USSR? Another notorious example is drapetomania, a disease proposed in 1851 by American physician Samuel Cartwright as the cause of slaves running away. Here, again, was an attempt to impose a moral paradigm via diagnosis: slavery, in Cartwright’s view, was rational, and so only an insane slave would flee captivity. The construction of “sluggish schizophrenia” was clever because it was based on a legitimate disorder, and there are genuine grey areas surrounding schizophrenia... Yet, unlike sluggish schizophrenia, high-functioning autism has been enthusiastically embraced by some—and not just by talented celebrities, either. The term has become oversaturated, used so frequently that it is now a repository of multiple meanings... Given the paradoxical cachet of being diagnosed with autism for some, all this smacks of social contagion. An anecdote from Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections suggests one possible benefit of claiming to be autistic. When Jung was 12 years old, he relates, he was shoved by another boy and hit his head on a stone. “At the moment I felt the blow,” Jung writes, “the thought flashed through my mind: ‘Now you won’t have to go to school anymore.’” For the next six months, Jung was afflicted with fainting fits whenever he tried to do any schoolwork. He was allowed to stay home and pursue his own private interests, which he thoroughly enjoyed, although he could not shake a nagging sense of guilt. One day, Jung heard his father lamenting, “What will become of the boy if he cannot earn his own living?” Frightened back to reality, Jung immediately got out a textbook and began to study. He suffered three fainting fits in the first hour, but he forced himself to keep going. After that, the fits went away and never came back. Jung had not been faking, but the power of the subconscious mind and the tendency to malinger run deep... One hundred years ago, someone of ordinary intelligence who could not complete school or hold down a job would not have been called mentally disabled. He would have been called lazy. His failure to provide for himself would have been taken as a shortcoming of character, not of neurology, and he would have been encouraged to power stoically through the discomfort, and gain greater self-mastery in the process, as Carl Jung did as a child. Taken to an extreme, such expectations can be callous, yet perhaps in our modern society, we have drifted too far in the other direction."
Possible autism breakthrough as 40 per cent of children with autism found to be lacking key nutrient - "almost 40 per cent of autistic children could be deficient in vitamin D and iron. The researchers, who assessed the dietary habits of over 240 children, also found more than 15 per cent with an iron deficiency had developed anemia—when the body lacks enough healthy red blood cells to carry adequate oxygen to tissues... But amongst the picky eaters, 'there was also no association between age and iron deficiency', the researchers from the National University Hospital, Singapore, said. 'These findings could be related to the common use of formula milk when younger, which is fortified with nutrients including iron, thereby protecting against nutritional deficiencies.'"
Research on children with autism using a prepared vitamin D3-loaded nanoemulsion has led to a reduction in the severity of autism and a rise in the social IQ, especially fine motor performance and language abilities of the children with ASD, without adverse effects : r/science - "Let's pump the brakes: They didn’t run a placebo group. Nano vs. standard D3 tells you about absorption, not whether D3 itself changes autism symptoms. Every parent got “environmental enrichment counseling.” That alone could explain the behavioral changes. Total confounder. Imagine testing whether vitamin D helps with a stomach ache but also giving everyone Pepto. Calling Vineland scores “social IQ” is just wrong. That’s not what the test measures. A drop in autism severity scores (CARS) might reflect better sleep, mood, or attention, not necessarily improvements in core social cognition. Effect sizes of 1.9? For a vitamin in autism? Come on. That screams artifact, bias, or both. And 145 kids started, only 80 finished. Huge attrition with vague reasons = major red flag. The only solid takeaway is the nanoemulsion raises blood D3 better than standard drops. Everything else is speculative at best. This should be treated as hypothesis-generating, not practice-changing.
Edit: And yeah, no correction for multiple comparisons. They ran a pile of t-tests and called every “p < .05” a win. That’s undergrad thesis project without an advisor level bad. Good grief. Can we get a Bonferroni up in here at least?"
Meme - Kirbs @lanaoyvey: "My 9 year old sister is non-verbal, which often makes her feel frustrated so she lashes out. She cannot use a toilet. She does not have friends. She has to be zipped into a giant bed every night and there are locks on every door to keep her safe. It does actually."
aapdofficial: "Autism Doesn't Need To Be Cured"
Clearly, we must prioritise the voices of people who want to feel special and might not actually have autism
NDIS costs blow out as autism diagnoses surge to $10 billion annually, overwhelming the system - "The cost of National Disability Insurance Scheme payments to participants with autism has blown out to more than $10 billion annually after a record 62,500 children and adults diagnosed with the disorder piled into the scheme last year. As Treasurer Jim Chalmers called for fiscal restraint ahead of the May 12 budget, an analysis of the latest NDIS data suggests a surge in Australians being diagnosed with autism and other neurodivergent disorders, adding to the already overwhelmed system. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has vowed to wind back the ballooning growth of the NDIS, which is now more expensive than Medicare and is threatening to overtake defence, by moving children with autism off generous funding packages and onto a state-backed Thriving Kids scheme by 2027... Autism is behind the vast bulk of new people joining the $50 billion NDIS, putting pressure on Labor to broaden alternative programs like the Thriving Kids scheme to include older children and adults with the condition. “The bar to get a diagnosis of autism is incredibly low,” said Mike Freelander, a Labor MP and paediatrician who headed a parliamentary committee that investigated Thriving Kids. “We are diagnosing people who have a bit of anxiety and are maybe a bit quirky with autism. We have made the bar far too low... Freelander said participants with other neurodivergent and mental health conditions, including anxiety, depression and bipolar disorders – which add billions a year in spending – should be assisted by other programs, so the NDIS could be used by the people it was originally designed to help. “The NDIS was introduced for people with severe disabilities, and we have reached the point now where we have to return to the origin of the NDIS and the reasons for its introduction,” Freelander said. “It can’t be cutting back on support for people with severe disabilities for people who really do not have much wrong with them at all. It is distressing to me to think we are putting the whole thing at risk because of this.” The NDIS added around 68,000 new participants to the scheme in the calendar year 2025, an analysis of the latest government data by The Australian Financial Review shows. Over that same calendar year, the number of participants categorised with an autism diagnosis rose by 62,500. During the year, the scheme approved just shy of 40,000 new applicants who listed autism as their primary disability. Calculations by the Financial Review suggest around 20,000 existing NDIS participants who were not previously categorised as autistic were added to the autism category, meaning the true number of people with autism on the scheme may be much larger than previously reported. The disability agency acknowledged in its latest quarterly report released last week that there had been a surge in the number of adults with autism trying to get on the scheme... NDIS payments for autism cost the taxpayer $10.3 billion in 2025, which is a fifth of total costs. It has grown from $8.9 billion a year earlier and is nearly double the $5.9 billion that autism cost the NDIS in 2022. There are now 324,206 people with autism on the scheme, making up around 43 per cent of all NDIS participants. That is an increase from 41 per cent in the previous September quarter and 36 per cent two years earlier... After autism, intellectual disability is the second-highest category of participants on the scheme at 13 per cent, followed by people with developmental delays at 9 per cent and psychosocial disability at 9 per cent”
Clearly, we need even more "awareness" about autism
Clearly, they should just spend even more money
How can anyone know if Margaret Thatcher was autistic? - "There’s a running joke in journalism that any headline posing a question can almost always be answered with “no”. “Is your bubble bath killing you?” No. “Was the Queen Mother a secret Nazi?” No. “Is this the final proof Margaret Thatcher was AUTISTIC?”... Of course, none of us could say with 100 per cent certainty that Thatcher wasn’t on the spectrum. Which is part of the joy of spectrum speculation – our new national pastime. And, God knows, we don’t just reserve it for famous figures. In May, one leading British psychologist estimated that “a majority” of Britons now consider themselves to be “neurodivergent”. Indeed, says Francesca Happé, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London, it has reached a point where we are making clinical judgments about “something we would [once] have called a personality type – or a bit of eccentricity”. But here’s the thing: once you’ve attached this fashionable, faddy label to someone, once you’ve made Maggie “relevant” to a certain sector of society (or, perhaps more likely, a certain generation) who are fixated by these surface markers indicating “difference”, what then? Read the comments responding to Thatcher’s “autism outing” online, and there’s a generalised, slightly smug sigh of: “Well, that explains it!” Only it doesn’t. None of these labels – whether they’re to do with how your brain works, how you identify, who you sleep with or what you do and don’t eat – actually tell us much about the person at all. They don’t explain what motivates that individual, what their disappointments are, their secret sadnesses. All they do is make the diagnoser feel superior. There’s a knock-on effect, too. Not only do casual diagnoses fail to provide any deeper insight into someone’s character, but, because labels are now all we care about, they deter us from looking any further. Which is as depressing when you force autism labels on to friends and colleagues as it is when you do so with historical figures. Because you can picture the Gen-Z scene all too clearly, can’t you? Someone mentions Thatcher at school, at university or on TV, and instead of it prompting thoughts and opinions on her achievements, whatever those opinons may be, it just becomes: “Maggie Thatcher? She was autistic, wasn’t she?”"
Time for even more "awareness" about "mental health" and "neurodiversity"
Christina Buttons on X - "I thought I was autistic. I was wrong. I was 30 in 2019 when stories of women discovering they were autistic all along began appearing everywhere. They popularized a newer understanding of autism, with its own “female presentation.” It was framed as a scientific correction to a historical wrong against women, the kind of narrative the press finds irresistible. Like so many women, I felt immense relief when I was formally diagnosed. It offered an explanation for the mental health crises of my youth and the daily realities of my adult life. Then I spent a year in the online autism community. What I saw there, especially the way activists treated parents of severely impaired children, turned me into a critic of neurodiversity. But it was becoming a journalist in 2022, after discovering detransitioners’ stories, that forced me to question narratives about identity and diagnosis, including my own. Journalism also required the social skills autism says I should have lacked. From there, the rest unraveled: many traits I had come to associate with autism are not uncommon in the general population, but through the “female autism” framework, they looked like a meaningful pattern. I don’t think my story is unique. The same incentives that kept my diagnosis intact may also help explain why so many women are entering the autism category in adulthood."
There is no autism spectrum, says expert who pioneered concept - "Autism should not be considered a “spectrum”, according to one of the architects of the theory. Dame Uta Frith, a pioneer of research that underpins our understanding of autism, said the spectrum was now so “accommodating” it was “completely meaningless”. The 84-year-old said while the factual definition of autism remained, the interpretation of the condition had changed over time, becoming “more inclusive”. “The basic definition of autism that I’ve given you – that it’s lifelong and neurodevelopmental, and that there are communication difficulties and restricted behaviour – has remained the same,” Dame Uta told the Tes magazine. “It is generally accepted. But the interpretation of that definition is a different matter, because we have made it more inclusive.” Dame Uta, an emeritus professor in cognitive development at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said the “spectrum” concept came about because “nothing is a neat category, and we wanted to include the not-so-typical cases”, and so widened the criteria. “But that’s very difficult, because what’s notable about being part of a huge spectrum that we all belong to? We’re all neurodiverse; we can accept this because all our brains are different. But it makes a medical diagnosis completely meaningless,” she said. Dame Uta said they had adopted a spectrum approach because the “categorical approach” had meant lots of people did not fit within the precise definition. She warned, however, that “because of various cultural factors, the spectrum has gone on being more and more accommodating, and I think now it has come to its collapse”. “This is something that I don’t think has been quite recognised, because people still hang on to the idea that there is something that unites all the people who are diagnosed as autistic. I don’t believe that any more,” she said. Dame Uta added that it seemed now that there were “two big subgroups” which included those diagnosed early in childhood, typically under five, and those diagnosed later in life, who she suggested could be called “hypersensitive”. The latter, she said, was “made up of a lot of adolescents, and among them, a lot of young women” who are “without intellectual impairment, who are perfectly able to communicate verbally and non-verbally, but who might feel highly anxious in social situations”. This group of primarily young women and teenagers, Dame Uta said, was growing at a “frightening rate”, but that the first group was “only moderately increasing”. “In autistic children with intellectual disability, there has not been any real increase; that group seems quite stable,” she said. “I think the people in the second group really do have problems. I would definitely not say they are ‘making it up’. But I would say that these are problems that can perhaps be treated much better than under the label of ‘autism’. I would fight for that label to be limited to the first group,” she added. Dame Uta also said the condition “existed from birth” and would still call it a “disorder” despite some objecting to this. The professor said many people were “self-diagnosing” and putting pressure on doctors to diagnose them, while also criticising the current testing methods, which rely on a patient’s “subjective experience, rather than on objective clinical observation”. Not enough attention, Dame Uta said, was being paid to the telltale signs of autism, such as conversation feeling stilted or abrupt, or whether the person can “read between the lines in a conversation” and get irony and humour. The German-British developmental psychologist also criticised the misconception that people can “mask” their symptoms, which she had “no scientific basis” despite people, including researchers and clinicians, becoming “enamoured with this idea”. “I expect we could say we are all masking, all the time, trying to adapt to our society’s norms. So, from this point of view, I’m very critical of this idea,” she said, adding that she rejected the notion that girls and women were being underdiagnosed. Dame Uta, whose research transformed our understanding of dyslexia as well as autism, said she had been “quite swept up by the autism-spectrum idea” but that it was “only in the past 10 years or so that I have felt things have gone too far, and very slowly I have come to say, ‘no, this is not right’.” Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, announced a review in December into the rising demand for mental health, ADHD and autism services."
How ignorant. Why is she encouraging "stigma" against autistic people?! Why doesn't she know that underdiagnosis is a huge problem?!
